Make HP more meaningful

[Buffalkill]

Summary: What do you learn about a character from their HP numbers? The most notoriously dishonorable characters have high honour, and the worst pariahs have high prestige. Notwithstanding certain thresholds, like 10 honour to be appointed lord, 20 to run for election, etc. it has no practical use.

Details:
Option 1.  Instead of losing HP, create a separate index for negative HP. Currently you can lose honour for acts such as abandoning your unit, looting, and probably some others. Instead of, or in addition to losing a point of honour, they should gain a point of dishonour. Likewise for prestige, they gain a point of humility.


Option 2. Alternatively, show current HP relative to the highest HP ever achieved by the character. If a char has 100 honour and his highest level was 150, then you know that he’s prone to dishonorable acts. Similarly, 45 prestige out of 90 shows, well, how the mighty have fallen. This has the added advantage that it allows for redemption, meaning it will show if a char loses HP, but he can work to gain it back and erase the memory of his dishonour and humiliation.

Benefits: It makes HP meaningful and practically useful. As a member of the nobility, your reputation should precede you. When a new noble with high negatives joins your realm, it’s the equivalent of meeting someone with a bad reputation. The current HP system only showcases the good, not the bad.

Possible Downside: Makes it harder for scoundrels to move to a new realm with a clean slate.

[Eirikr]

Clarification: Would you change all actions that currently reduce your honor or prestige to fall into the negative scale? Judges, at least, use H/P as a kind of resource for their actions. Rulers, too, if you include exiles.

[Buffalkill]

Clarification: Would you change all actions that currently reduce your honor or prestige to fall into the negative scale? Judges, at least, use H/P as a kind of resource for their actions. Rulers, too, if you include exiles.

Can you give me an example?

[Zakilevo]

Option 1.  Instead of losing HP, create a separate index for negative HP. Currently you can lose honour for acts such as abandoning your unit, looting, and probably some others. Instead of, or in addition to losing a point of honour, they should gain a point of dishonour. Likewise for prestige, they gain a point of humility.

I think what you want isn't exactly that. There was a discussion a year or two ago on reworking the honour and prestige system. I think someone suggested infamy or something which will accumulate whenever 'bad deeds' were performed.

Option 2. Alternatively, show current HP relative to the highest HP ever achieved by the character. If a char has 100 honour and his highest level was 150, then you know that he’s prone to dishonorable acts. Similarly, 45 prestige out of 90 shows, well, how the mighty have fallen. This has the added advantage that it allows for redemption, meaning it will show if a char loses HP, but he can work to gain it back and erase the memory of his dishonour and humiliation.

I don't really see much point of this one. It doesn't seem to add much to the game.

P.S: I know you are suggesting a lot of ideas. I once did the same and let me give you an advice. If you want your feature to be added to the game, your features need to have a significant impact in the game. It is not that dev team doesn't want your ideas - well sometimes they don't - it is that there is only one person working on it pretty much and his time is limited. He needs to dedicate his time on other important matters that will have bigger impacts in the game.

[vonGenf]

Can you give me an example?

For example, Judges lose H/P points when they torture or steal gold from prisoners. They must keep a certain base amount of H/P if they want to keep running in the elections, so this keeps a check on how much they can do that in places where they are elected. It also affects their unit size.

I'm a fan of the infamy idea. H/P currently is too linear in time. It basically just tells you the character is old. An separate infamy score would tell you more.

[Indirik]

One big glaring hole in your system: It only accounts for negative game-mechanics actions. i.e. abandoning your unit, or perhaps murderous looting rampages. It completely leaves out any kind of accounting for actions which a character may take that have no game mechanics basis. i.e. betraying a non-mechanics oath, or starting war by using murderous settings to cause your realm to switch sides in a key battle, appointing the worst enemy of your religion as it's new leader, or any of innumerable actions where the game mechanics can't measure the effects, or have nothing to do with the actions taken.

I do like the idea of expansion of the HP system. Tom once came up with a pie-chart based system. He defined four characteristics for each character, and the actions that you took in-game each contributed to those four characteristics. I forget the four attributes (you may be able to find it on the wiki somewhere...) but they were things like honor, infamy, mercy, and something else. Now, the kicker was that they were displayed as a pie chart, and not absolute values. So it didn't matter what your total numbers were, just the fraction they accounted for of your total make-up. If Infamy was your biggest, then you would have a big black wedge, whether it was 5 out of 10, or 300 out of 500.

[Eirikr]

For example, Judges lose H/P points when they torture or steal gold from prisoners. They must keep a certain base amount of H/P if they want to keep running in the elections, so this keeps a check on how much they can do that in places where they are elected. It also affects their unit size.

I'm a fan of the infamy idea. H/P currently is too linear in time. It basically just tells you the character is old. An separate infamy score would tell you more.

Thanks.

I was heading where Indirik went; some actions could obviously impact that number, others cause problems because they're used for other things already. It'd just involve more tweaks.

[Buffalkill]

One big glaring hole in your system: It only accounts for negative game-mechanics actions. i.e. abandoning your unit, or perhaps murderous looting rampages. It completely leaves out any kind of accounting for actions which a character may take that have no game mechanics basis. i.e. betraying a non-mechanics oath, or starting war by using murderous settings to cause your realm to switch sides in a key battle, appointing the worst enemy of your religion as it's new leader, or any of innumerable actions where the game mechanics can't measure the effects, or have nothing to do with the actions taken.

I totally agree. I've been trying to think of a way to ascribe values to exactly those "soft" acts like oath-breaking and other such behaviour that the system doesn't capture, since those are the things that reputations are really made of. All the ideas I've come up with involve input from other players. Personally I would love something like that because it's more human and closer to real life, but my gut tells me that the BM community doesn't trust each other to be fair. I would love to be told I'm wrong about that.

[Buffalkill]

Clarification: Would you change all actions that currently reduce your honor or prestige to fall into the negative scale? Judges, at least, use H/P as a kind of resource for their actions. Rulers, too, if you include exiles.

For example, Judges lose H/P points when they torture or steal gold from prisoners. They must keep a certain base amount of H/P if they want to keep running in the elections, so this keeps a check on how much they can do that in places where they are elected. It also affects their unit size.

I'm a fan of the infamy idea. H/P currently is too linear in time. It basically just tells you the character is old. An separate infamy score would tell you more.

I'd be interested in hearing what other people think. I've never had a judge character.

[Dishman]

I like that Honor/Prestige work as a kind of 'battle reputation'. It makes a good mark for how many men you can command and what things you can do. Infamy score would be nice, so long as it doesn't turn into a popularity contest.

Honestly, the reputation measures on test islands would be great to have access to. It marks several things that would be 'infamous', as well as other 'general estimates' that nobles could find  out about each other.