I've finished the majority of the work of the groups system, and it's now possible to follow other characters around and participate in their actions. Today we'll be seeing a few new gameplay mechanics that will work together to create an interesting "diplomacy" system. These are features that will be implemented in the next few weeks to complete version 0.2.

Merit, favor and infamy

Merit represents a Candidate's perceived capacity to lead the Passion Temple. There may be a lot of actions and events that allow you to gain merit through the game, and being one of the Candidates with highest merit may give you extra responsability during certain parts of the story.

Favor is how indebted one character is to another. Asking a character for help will increase your owed favor to them, and refusing help to a character you owe favor to will damage your relationship, while providing it will lower the owed favor. If a character asks for help to a subordinate character (see relationship types below), there will be no favor exchange.

Infamy is a similar mechanic to that of grand strategy games. Given a free for all scenario, where any participant may attack another one for gains, aggressive behavior will impose an infamy penalty, which will lower the disposition other participants have to cooperate with the aggressor. This creates a dynamic where being overly aggressive may turn several characters against you at once, which is important because otherwise it could be easy to create a snowball effect where one character holding dominance over another easily takes over the rest. This should be a possible scenario, but a very difficult one to accomplish.

Challenge and assault

Challenge and assault will be the main ways to trigger battle scenes.

Challenging a character incurs in a small infamy penalty. The challenger stablishes a level of stakes, and the challenged character either accepts or refuses the challenge. Refusing the challenge immediately gives merit from the challenged character to the challenger. If the challenge is accepted, the victor takes merit from the loser, and may impose extra penalties depending on the levels of the stakes.

Assaulting does not require the target to accept the battle, but the assaulter gets a much higher infamy penalty, and the merit exchange is worse for the assaulter. The winner may impose extra penalties on the loser at higher infamy cost, and the stakes are high by default.

You should assault when you have a clear advantage and the result of the battle is important for your schemes, and challenge the rest of the time.

Relationship types

Relationship types are putting last names to the relationships two characters have, imposing extra conditions and changes to their dynamic. These will have time limits and may be created through story events, socializing, challenges or assaults.

Relationship types may be egalitarian (the effects are the same for both characters) or hierarchical (there's a leading character and a subordinate character, and there are different effects for them).

The three first relationship types to be included in the game will be companionship, tutorship and servitude - and servitude specifically will be included first due to winning the poll among the patrons. This is its description in the design document:

Servitude - Hierarchical relationship
Description: The servant has lost their freedom in favor of the master
Effects:
- Constant domination/submission gain
- Constant merit gain for the master, constant merit loss for the servant
- Asking the servant to follow is free for the master
- Asking the servant to help on assault is free for the master
- Asking the servant to have sex is free for the master
- Can't assault each other
- The servant may challenge the master to regain their freedom. Rejecting this challenge imposes a large merit loss. If the servant loses this challenge, they'll suffer a large submission gain
- The master may not challenge the servant

And that's all for diplomacy design today! Before you leave, you can take a look at the v0.1.5 changelog at the link below. Have some screenshots with the last player portrait as well!

Version 0.1.5 changelog