Social Simulation Stuff: Friendly Rivals And Nefarious Antagonists

Putting The Enemy In Frenemy

One of the things I really wanted to do with Axioms in the social simulation was allow the experience of a character in a speculative fiction novel. I know I mention this a lot. A key part of any fantasy novel, and any other derivative media formats, is a friendly rival and an antagonistic rival. This isn’t super well portrayed in anything but maybe visual novels. RPGs, strategy, etc. rarely have this. I guess the infamous “nemesis” system is vaguely related? In any case in Axioms just as you can love or respect someone for something “trivial” you can hate them or be jealous of them as well.

Rivalry Causes

Everyone knows about golden children and black sheep and the various other real life sibling rivalry formats. You also have unique twin related issues on top of sisters competing and brothers competing. Axioms represents, but doesn’t focus particularly, on romantic rivalries as well. I’m planning on attempting to do functional Interest based rivalries. So two characters both desire to be a famous mage or duelist or something and if they come into contact enough they recognize each other as competitive. Perhaps characters who are friends first will develop “friendly” rather than “antagonistic” rivalries.

What Do Rivalries Do

So a rival is basically a reverse friend, except for friendly rivals which are rivals that don’t get lethal. Like less detailed games rivalry is at the core an extra negative modifier. Conspiracies against rivals are more attractive, an NPC will help another character do something that hurts their rival while asking for less in return. This is a common fantasy novel trope. It somewhat happened in real history but not always as seriously.

When a rival is deciding what to do they’ll prioritize goals to upstage the other character. Oh he wants to be a general? I’ll lead my house army and win a sweet victory to steal his thunder. Okay we need to make a contract for armor, I’ll try and steal a supplier from a rival even if otherwise I’d pick a different one. They typically won’t do something they hate to upstage their rival.

Rivalry Actions

Rivalry can impact characters in two major ways. One is to forgo pleasure or hobbies in order to outwork a rival. The other is to directly negatively impact a rival. Trying to prank or embarrass them in front of a love interest or a parental figure. Harming their connections to mentors or allies. Stuff like that. Friendly rivals are more likely to engage in the former. Friendly rivals are also friends so typically outside of their specific reason for rivalry they will normally support each other. Friendly rivalries are actually a good way for non-friendly rivals to exert their power. Especially friendly rivals with romantic interests.

Characters can sabotage one character in relevant rivalry related activities. Then the other character feels they can’t keep up and the romantic potential ebbs. For example a girl who wants to be a famous sword duellist. Sabotage the male rival and he might become bitter and angry about being shown up by the girl, depending on his personality. Sabotage the girl and she gets upset because of insecurity over prevailing ideas that women can’t fight with swords seeming to become true about her.

Of course you want to know the personality of your targets well because maybe one or the other tries extra hard to help the sabotaged person brining them closer together. Foolish, narcissistic, or socially maladroit characters might not be able to use this information even if they have it, projecting how they’d react on their rival. Of course the player has an advantage here since aside from some Dissonance penalties they can somewhat ignore their game defined “personality”.

Notably the Dissonance spectrum allows for some flexibility. A character can go against “the/their grain” to support a friend or love interest up until the Dissonance hits them too hard and they get whiplash becoming negative and upset, seemingly out of nowhere from the perspective of the person they were previously helping.

This is a key way in which having a detailed situation with many facets of overall character allows surprising and interesting things to happen in Axioms that aren’t possible in more simplistic affection meter systems. Or systems like crusader kings with one extremely primary relationship value.

Intrigue And Interaction

The various espionage/intrigue systems and the imperfect information on both characters, populations, provinces, and so forth provide a unique layer to character interactions in Axioms. A once trusted friend/ally/lover can be turned on the other character through a variety of means, although it isn’t easy. Spite and revenge can open the path to having a valuable mole/traitor helping your intelligence network to succeed on various missions.

Revealing the right secrets directly to a character, striking at the general reputation of a character, creating a situation where a character has to divert attention to a non social crises, or simply conveniently interact with a rival of their close friend/lover can allow cracks to form.

Imagine that instead of being an actual general leading armies in a war game you are a metaphorical general on a social battlefield. Instead of slowly building up to an envelopment or encirclement you are peeling off layers and protections to isolate a social enemy.

Delay this army, break off that supply line, dry up a source of recruitment, deal economic damage. All viable tactics in a war game, 4x, or grand strategy title. Now you can implement abstractly similar methods in a social conflict. And best of all the military and social and economic and religious and political conflicts all occur together, connected, in the same overall world.

Conclusion

Raph Koster, and perhaps many others in other contexts, once argued that one player’s inconvenience is another player’s primary gameplay. I agree with this. So I know that when you blend genres like Axioms does you can put off potential players who greatly prefer one aspect of history/fantasy simulation. Yet because no one has ever created a varied and blended game similar to Axioms those of us who have looked for such gameplay have been starved instead. My hope is that enough people will see the possibility of a more holistic war/politics/economics/magic simulation to make my efforts worthit.