Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

This post has some updates and some bad news. The updates are up first and the bad news is at the end. Times being what they are, please feel free to skip that last section if you're not up for it. Anyway, on we go!




Like the tournament, the feast looms large in the popular imagination of the medieval period. Indeed, it is a favorite of modern reenactments, and for good reason. However Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex takes great pains to get the history right as possible.

Feasts are real things that happened, clearly. However they were not typically raucous parties. When they were, it was usually a sign that something was out of order. More commonly, they were tightly choreographed affairs. There had to be a reason for the event, for starters, and of course nothing of this sort might happen during Lent, those 40 days of holy fasting.



Rank and precedence were of the utmost importance in those days. This applied even (or perhaps especially!) to seating arrangements at feasts. When you appointed a chamberlain to head-up the royal household, you did find someone with talent, right?



As public affairs, feasts were also an ideal time and place for giving gifts, that all may see your largess. Not only monetary gifts, but also land grants were commonly made on these occasions: perhaps that vacant episcopal see that you've been taking revenues from, much to the chagrin of the Church?



There are other things that happen as well. Naturally food is the focal point. Spending more lavishly does allow more options. Gifting leftovers from the high table to others, even to the poor, is historically attested after all. Feasts provide opportunity to take counsel with those present as well. Moreover the feast provides a nice backdrop to more unpredictable events. I don't want to spoil it all in screenshots though.




I added a bit more love to the tournaments hosted in your own kingdom, as opposed to fighting in a foreign contest. As in the tournaments in France, the domestic ones now also conclude with a small feast. This can result in rivalries or friendships continuing from the tourney ground into later affairs.



Or perhaps an annoying noble from a neighboring realm might provoke an international incident. This could be both a good and a bad thing, depending on how much you want a war.



Much else can also happen as your tournaments conclude!




Bus factor is a measure, common in the software world, of the number of people who, if hit by a bus, would imperil a project. A wonderful thing about indie dev is games that no large or even medium company would touch are possible. A terrible thing about indie dev is low bus factor. I've worked with some wonderful contractors for art and music, but those were short term arrangements. The daily work on prose, code, and everything else is done by me alone. Thus, the bus factor for DGR is one.

Well, gentle reader, I've been hit by a metaphorical bus.

In late August I developed a heart condition. In late September I sought treatment for said heart condition. Long story short, the clinic insisted on a hospital visit and my life has been a waking nightmare ever since. And it is not yet over. I briefly had a negative net worth until I phoned some people and negotiated the numbers on these bills. Bills plural, you see, because apparently everything is charged separately by a different party. The money I was planning on investing into the company for advertising purposes has been devoured by the insatiable rapacity of the medical-industrial complex. No prizes for guessing the country in which the above transpired.

I'm not writing all this because I'm fishing for sympathy or because I am going to hit you with a GoFundMe link. It's just… things will be slow for a bit. I'm probably going to have to do more activities that generate short term money and less work on the game. I've also got some more bureaucratic hoops to jump though. And then there's, you know, the cardiac problem that has been stealing time from me over the last few months.

DGR will release. I've sacrificed too much for it not to. I'm just not in a position to make any definitive statements about when, as I genuinely don't know what the next few months hold in store.


More updates, and less bad news, on the the first Saturday of next month!

It is once again time for a monthly update.




The biggest new feature this time is the tournament. Somewhere between hunting and battle in terms of danger, fighting in these mock battles is a great way to develop martial skills.



Medieval tournaments loom large in the popular imagination. However a lot of what it is imagined is, well, imagined. Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex is set in the 12th century. In this era, jousts were merely the appetizer to the melee, blunted tournament weapons (‘armes courtoises’) were still over a century away from coming into use, and the primary motivation for most knights was to defeat opponents so that they could take their horses, equipment, and/or ransom them! Oh, and three different popes banned the tournament, though, especially in France, these prohibitions were largely ignored. Research for ‘hard historical fiction’ occasionally turns up interesting details.



At the start of the 12th century, the active tourney circuit was primarily confined to France. Thus if our king wants to participate, some travel is necessary. A king traveling with a small retinue to fight in a tournament is of course a risky proposition, so subterfuge is possible. History provides a number of royal princes who did this after all. But there is always a risk of discovery.



At the conclusion of the festivities, there is usually a feast. Depending on what happened during the melee, this can go a number of directions.



While tournaments in England were not widespread until later centuries, there is also the option to host your own. If you'd rather not risk life and limb, this is a good way to build relationships within your realm. And perhaps beyond!






I'm pretty happy with the tournaments. There are over 60 distinct scenes, some of which are "fat" and should probably have been split into five. The hosted tournaments need a few finishing touches though. After that a few more smaller event chains on the theme of personal activities.

All that and hopefully more next time!

Another first Saturday has come and with it another monthly update.




Hunting was quite important for medieval nobles. It was a well-loved and noble pastime and the source of the wild meat which nobles preferred to eat. Relevant to Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex, English kings reserved huge stretches of the countryside as royal forests specifically to support their hunts. More than that though it was a social ritual and a way to practice combat and horsemanship with a managed, though still extant, amount of risk. The primary profession of nobility in DGR's time period was, after all, war.



Of course, just as in modern times, there were certain "hunting seasons." This isn't because of the dictates of law naturally, since the player character is quite literally the king. Rather some seasons are better for taking good quality game, and maintaining a good stock of animals does require some prudent management. They are slightly out of era, but a number of hunting manuals exist on this topic: the Livre de chasse for example.



However DGR is ultimately a game of choice. It also uses personality traits to enforce roleplaying. Depending on what sort of king you are, you may insist on only hunting the best possible quarry no matter what. (Though you can still act against your personality by spending a limited resource).



Though hunting is recreation, it isn't all fun and games. Sometimes things go badly.



Indeed, sometimes they go very badly.






Resource narrative (formerly quality-based narrative) is a term invented at Failbetter (and continued at Weather Factory) to describe a sort of narrative design in which storylets are arranged by the interplay of resource states rather than a mechanism like branching. Alexis Kennedy has written a bit more about RN.

I touched on this in the monthly update linked above, but DGR consciously makes extensive use of this sort of narrative. Every random event in fact is gated by qualities. Some are large, like the phase: it wouldn't do to see an itinerant court event when you're at war and raiding the countryside. Others are more specific: having a personality trait at a certain threshold, having encountered a certain event previously, or, relevant to this post, having recently hunted too many hart out of season.



Options especially use this pattern. Let's say you had a strange encounter while hunting: the animal you were hunting randomly died during the hunt!



It may not be a great idea to go ahead and eat the meat. In this state however, you notice two less-than-safe choices (as indicated by the color). What if our king had studied medicine in the royal library (or elsewhere)?



Mechanically, this new, safer choice is provided if the player has at least 3 in the medicine trait. This is a "resource" in an RN sense. There are a number of ways to gain this resource. It is also fungible, such that gaining it one place is identical to gaining it elsewhere.

Oh, by the way, there are a number of other ways to get a safer option on that event…




Tournaments! Some of the hunting events got a little involved, so this is not yet begun. However this is intended to complement hunting in developing martial skills outside of war. More on that next time.

It's the first Saturday of the month, so it's time to dive into recent developments.




The biggest feature built last month was the royal library.



Building up a royal library is a long-term project which the king can complete. Your predecessor, William II, was in our timeline known as a competent soldier and ruthless king, but one who paid scant attention to scholarship and even religion. In DGR's timeline, one can imagine the effects on the royal library due to his much longer rule! This gives us the ability to build it up almost from nothing.



Mechanically, the library allows our king to study and learn. During the early part of the game, stats and skills are quite malleable. However during the bulk of the game it is much harder to change. Harder doesn't mean impossible though. There are many events that present situations which can influence the king's personality depending on choices made. On the other hand, singular events that teach expert skills are less plausible. This is the main function of the library: to allow an avenue to increase skills in a way that makes sense.



Building the library is also a way to spend excess money. Books, being unique, hand-crafted items, were quite expensive in those days. Wars tend to absorb most of the surplus money to be sure, but I absolutely want to support more peaceful avenues.






I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do an interview with the Austrian medieval webportal Mittelalter Digital. You can read that here (Es gibt auch eine deutsche Übersetzung hier). Thanks again to Vlad for setting this up!

You might notice a few details in those screenshots which haven't been shown elsewhere.




In a similar fashion to the library — though definitely not as long-running a project — hunting and tournaments! Where the library can teach things like medieval medicine and other scholarship, hunting and tournaments can teach horsemanship and personal combat skills. There are other benefits (and other risks!) besides this of course, but hunting is well-underway now. Details to come next month!

Once again it is the first Saturday of the month, so let's look back on what has happened during the previous month.




Last time I wrote about vassal interactions, specifically a system of private meetings. Work continued on this. The bad news is that I vastly underestimated the amount of work needed and didn't factor in losing a bit of time to illness. The good news is that I finished the final one of those 120-ish events last night!



Mechanically speaking, these give the player a chance to influence vassals or else be influenced by them. Sometimes meetings go very well and result in additional boons: improved relations, gaining willpower, or even securing a promise of support in a future war. Having a few vassals pledged to assist you beyond the requisite 40 days of military service per year does certainly help after all.



When meeting with people with whom you have poor relations, or with whom the meeting goes badly, sometimes the results are less desirable.






Long ago I wrote about continuations events. For those not around in those days, these are events that unfold over time. After being started they are continued later — sometimes much later. Rest assured that these are still being added. These vassal interactions gave a few opportunities for fun continuations events in fact. Part of the reason I've been a bit quiet about these it is hard to talk about specifics and not spoil things. Though Dei Gratia Rex is more about emergent stories than fixed ones, there are still some surprises.




What might a particularly pious person talk about in these meetings? It occurred to me that at some point the topic of saints to whom they had a particular devotion might be such a topic. The only problem was that people in DGR didn't have these special devotions! They do now.



It was a relatively easy thing to implement, and I'll probably do more with it if time allows. An interesting thing about it is that people choose these patrons based on their personality and lifestyle. Someone whose business is war might have a devotion to St. Maurice, while a scholar may instead opt for the Venerable Bede. Someone who only gives lip service to the Church probably doesn't even bother to choose anyone at all. The logic is a little more in depth than that, but that's the general idea.



There are a few extra tweaks needed on meetings. Next up is a much smaller series of meetings with the burgesses. Also I still need to add an entry point for these meetings during the itinerant court (though naturally with different attendees). After that, new content!