PI Christmas Preview: New Character Traits
This is a preview of the new system of Personal Character Traits in PI.
The problem with the Vanilla traits is that they work extremly generical: leave a character in a town with a tavern for enough turns and he will become a heavy drinker, have him building a market and he will become a good trader, and so on. In the end all characters will have more or less the same set of traits, with a tendency to amass negative traits when being governors for longer.
Roleplayers won't like this, so here's the new approach:
This new system doesn't change traits that much, some effects have been altered, some traits are no longer in use, a handfull are new. What it changes are the triggers affecting the traits. As base rule we can say that traits are now depending on each other.
To achieve this we have defined a couple of "Basic Traits" such as Intelligent, Ignorance, Bloodthirsty, Haemophobic, NaturalMilitarySkill and so on. These are assigned when a character enters the game and do not change during the campaign.
They lead to a couple of "Personality Traits" for example Gregarious, Introvert, Austere, Aesthetic, Liar, Upright and so on. These are depending on the Basic Traits, other traits, each other, but also on the situation the character is in. Usually the first level ("a tendency") of each Personality Trait is acquired depending on other traits, while subsequent levels ("a habit", "a problem") would be acquired during certain situations.
For example, someone who is Introvert has a tendency (=level 1) to become Austere. When he has acquired that first level he would be able to acquire further levels in situation where "frugal living" is required, such as on campaign.
But these traits are no one-way-streets. In most occasions they appear as pairs of anit-traits dragging the character in opposite directions. In our example, the anti-trait for Austere is Aesthetic. One of the traits that can lead to Aesthetic would be Haemophobic. So when our character is Introvert and Haemophobic he has a chance to acquire either trait, or none when both nullify each other. And when he has the first level Aesthetic he can acquire even additional levels, for example by throwing games, that way develop in a complete different direction.
The combination of the Basic Traits, the Personality Traits and some more make the "Profile" of a character. The profile in return defines the reaction of the character towards certain "Sitautions". A "Situation" would be what you demmand the character to do, such as being governor in a high-level market town, making a night attack on the enemy camp, slaughtering women and children in a conquered town.
None of these situations is per se good or bad for the development of the character. It all depends on his Profile. Let's take the example GoodTrader BadTrader from the beginning of this post to see how this system of profiles and situations work:
The situation is that the character is sitting in a town with trading (NB: this trait also fires for non-governor characters because we can assume that any character sitting in a town is doing his business). The larger the market is the more trading is going on in this town, what also means the more occasions to do good or bad deals. Just imagine the one is a peasants' market in a backwater village, while the other is the merchant quarters of Carthage.
This means the higher the level of the local market the more levels the character can acquire in GoodTrader BadTrader, the faster he will acquire these levels, but also the more demanding it will be to acquire the trait GoodTrader (+10% trade in a village is something different to +10% trade in Carthage).
Which way he will be going is depending by a couple of the above Profile Traits, most importantly by his intelligence: while in a town with a level 1 market it would be sufficient to not be a complete idiot to acquire the first level of GoodTrader (and only the first one would be available here) after some time, a town with level 5 market would offer all three levels of GoodTrader in a quick time, but the character would need a very high intelligence, or some other related traits such as ExpensiveTastes. Everyone else would rather quickly acquire levels in BadTrader.
This means you cannot raise good traders by having them building advanced levels of markets. Indeed, higher markets might even make them BadTrader. It also means that a character can be a GoodTrader in the small town, but develop to a BadTrader in a large city.
Another set of traits are the "Vices". These include ContentGeneral, DiscontentGeneral, but also "bad hobbies" like drinking and gambling. Whenever you bring a character into a Situation absolutly not matching his profile he has a good chance on becoming discontent (content when you have him doing something he likes). Discontent generals in return might start drinking and develop the like "hobbies". As long as this not has become a addiction it can go away when the general becomes content again.
Something that never goes away is the "Battle Trauma". Assuming that not everyone is happy wading in the blood of his enemies, leave alone his kinsmen, characters that are not Bloodthirsty, and in particular those that are Haemophobic, have a good chance of acquiring some nasty traits when you send them into the worst bloodbaths around.
You would also notice that everyone who is married can have traits like WifeIsNoble, WifeIsBitch and the like. The wifes can play an important role, not only when sons come of age but also in politics and the development of personality traits.
Finally there is a new set of "Faction Leader Traits"; this means a couple of traits are resevered to faction leaders. These are the traits that define the Authority ranking of the faction leader, for example GoodDiplomacy, BadDiplomacy, HarshRuler, KindRuler. All other traits don't give or take Authority because the Authority ranking of non-FL family memebers define who will become heir. This in return is triggered by the respective faction-specific traits.
And something more:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
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Originally Posted by KEA
