Introduction
People always ask me how the NPCs can use intrigue on the player since the player doesn’t have procedurally generated goals. Well the answer is as simple as it is counterintuitive. You have to tell the game your plans. Now I’ve written several long posts that include discussion on the pledge/oath/promise system but that is just the public side. There’s also the private side. By selection goals and ambitions you define the purpose of your character. Now the game will suggest the goals a player character would have if they were an NPC based on their consciousness. So Ideology, Personality, and Interests and Desires. But you can override these.
Dissonance And Dreams
As the player you are just as restricted by the Dissonance system as the NPCs are. If you engage in actions in conflict with your general Consciousness you’ll gain various penalties. A much more limited character system in a tangentially adjacent game, genre wise, contains a “stress” system. You’ll gain some negative traits and harm your health in that system.
Dissonance in Axioms is impacted by a much wider variety of factors. Basically every action you take impacts how aligned you are with your consciousness, as it does for NPCs, but you are also impact by actions you *don’t* take. Extroverted characters will need to engage in social interactions to maintain mental health and introverted characters will have to recover alone or with only close connections to achiece the same. Martial characters must at least compete if not war or they will become angry, depressed, or lethargic.
Dissonance can impact a character in a wide variety of ways. It can lower dynamic intelligence or charisma, it can build up to health problems or mental illnesses which will then have an ongoing distinct effect, and it can degrade Attention recovery among other effects.
You may expend various resource to let go of old dreams or embrace new ones so that you don’t experience continuous negative effects and you can mildly alter personality and ideology as well.
Additionally players may engage in one of the other game modes rather than simply dropping into an existing character so that they can define their own Consciousness more directly, although these modes will have their own consequences. Axioms has a few unique frameworks for creating a custom character with flavorful lore behind them. Unlike in simpler games where the social simulation is only a facade you would cause significant problems by inserting a custom character into the world with no scaffolding because Axioms is a living world sim while other sims, not to name any names, are dry and dead and not dynamic.
Playing A Role
Many people argue that creativity flourishes in restriction and they decry the freedom and wide possibility space of sandboxes and simulation games. Well Axioms creates beneficial restrictions in a unique way. While in other games you need to manage various abstract numbers that cause internal and external conflict if you lose control Axioms requires you to manage more grounded and realistic factors like attention/schedule/energy and filling your role, personal factors rather than impersonal ones. Of course you’ll also have to manage *other* people as well as yourself.
Axioms strictly speaking is neither an crpg nor a 4x nor a grand strategy game. It is a game that lets you experience inhabiting various iconic roles which you previously could only observe over the should of a novel character. There is no loyalty to ancient genre strictures but simply an attempt to convey the experience of being a princess/noble’s daughter in a golden cage or a chosen hero or a great general surrounded by corrupt schemers. Of course you could also be the corrupt schemer or perhaps the iron-fisted conservative patriarch that our aforementioned princess is under the thrall of. Perhaps you want to be a tropey evil tyrant. No judgement friend.
Axioms attempts to accurately portray the pressures and strictures of each of these roles effectively, providing golden verisimilitude. You will choose your own shackles. Special starts allow you to have more freedom in what your limitations are. Yet within a single character you cannot exert the freedom of an immortal sociopath as you would in a grand strategy game where you play “the spirit of a nation” or an all powerful hivemind as you do in a 4X game. Well unless you research and master the many mind control methods of Axioms I guess.
I talked earlier in the Characters post a few weeks ago about how each entity in the game should be an individual. The interchangeable and forgettable characters of other games are ideally excised. Of course no developer is perfect but I put a lot of effort into the attempt.
Reaching If Not Grasping
Indeed what you attempt to achieve is meaningful even if you fail. NPCs will have a variety of goal based on their role and status and Consciousness. Nobles might attempt to reclaim ancestral lands. Barbarians might wish to claim the riches of the great river agricultural cities. Philosopher kings might reach for just political organization or administrative reforms. It is possible to be Philip II Of Macedon or Peter The Great advancing their core societal structure just as it is possible to conquer half the known world like Caeser or Alexander.
Merchants might wish to throw opulent parties for the other magnates or open new trade routes to faraway lands. Mages might wish to gather hoards of esoteric and arcane knowledge. A general might have an ambition to win some number of battles or campaigns or travel triumphant into the great capital of their realm basking in the adoration of their countrymen. And yes, the Social Occasion system supports a wide variety of such events including Roman style Triumphs. There are also of course more personal goals like marrying for love or avenging dead family members.
As a player you’ll select goals for your character, whether from the suggested list based on what an NPC would want or in a more free form way. Of course this will impact your dissonance level where appropriate. If you select false ambitions to fool the NPCs who engage in intrigue on you you’ll pay a price as you fail to achieve these goals. Additionally you will not receive the rewards of achieving your true goals.
All developers should know that you cannot force players to play your game your way and players will often optimize the fun out of any system. That is why I prefer soft guidance rather than hamfisted fiat. While most systems will have effort invested in encouraging gameplay fidelity Axioms particularly is only intended as a single player game. And that isn’t even getting into mods which I intend to be as open as possible. I myself will often mod supernations in strategy games or use cheat commands to smooth over minor annoyances.
Two Can Keep A Secret If One Is Dead
It is also important to note that Axioms has an incredibly robust system of DIP, [D]iplomacy | [I]ntrigue | [P]olitics, and so you will necessarily need to tell friends or allies of circumstance your plans so you can coordinate with them. So hostile or even neutral NPCs will be able to gain information on your plans that way, even if you try to obfuscate your own Goals/Plans data. I say this not to threaten you into compliance but just to make the situation clear and even potentially enable more varied strategies subterfuge. Although in this case I consider such methods legitimate.
Why not lie to ostensible “allies” to help sell a feint or fakeout? You can even tell an NPC you are plotting against with allies about the plan. Doublecrosses are fun. Not sure how supported a triplecross would be. Have to test it. And you can tell different allies different things. One of those NPCs could then confirm the “truth” depending on who you end up actually betraying, when a third party has dug up a Secret related to some scheme. Oh me and Sad King Billy were only pretending to be enemies to fool evil overlord Saurus and now that we’ve won don’t be mad at him.
Essentially I would recommend that kind of lie over lying on your personal Goals/Plans page.
Conclusion
Axioms has solid scaffolding for sheperding the player into providing the NPCs with fair and truthful information regarding Plans/Goals to enable the Intrigue game systems to function reciprocally but I don’t see the point in trying to force the hand of the player. The Goal/Plan suggestions will be relatively deterministic and help guide the player if they don’t want to shoulder the full burder of defining their experience with a given character.
You can’t really *win* Axioms because it doesn’t really support simple map painting and the worlds you play in are procedural, although the vanilla version of the game will release with several pre-generated worlds since world generation is intense even for topline PCs. *Some* of these worlds might have suggested characters hardwired in but my plan is to create a system that can determine dynamically that this character is well optimized for an intrigue campaign and this one for a military slugfest and so forth. So ideally even a world generated solely by an end user would have meaningful suggestions.
A character might have a goal that defines “victory” as creating a truly unified empire, as opposed to a giant morass of conflict and unrest which will breakdown as soon as it gets an incompetent or unpopular ruler. Note the writing in previous posts about how there’s no “default” “map painter” map mode. So success could be seeing the control/unity mapmode being bright green for your kingdom or empire, which indicates incredibly strong or maximum stability/cohesion.