Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

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!

It's that time again, another first Saturday, so another update!




In perhaps the most exciting news for May, the official Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex soundtrack is finished! Not only is it finished, but you can listen to it in its entirety on the composer's YouTube channel! This soundtrack is composed of over 35 minutes of lute music and is based on authentic medieval compositions. Give it a listen, and check out the video description for more context on the pieces!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]




In DGR, there are many simulated people. Hundreds are alive at any one time. These are your vassals and their families, various important non-nobles, and a few others. However if you never get to meet them, does it even matter that they're simulated? This is a problem that I struggled with. There are many dealings with vassals during war and when touring the realm in the itinerant court phase. Outside of this, there just were not enough times to meet these people. I set about changing that.



There is a high degree of randomness as to who is visiting your capital at any specific time. However once I put the finishing touches on it, the itinerant court events will be retrofitted to use this also. You'll never be able to meet with any person at any time, but you will generally always be able to meet with a given vassal at the very least yearly.

This turned out to be a bit of a challenging system to create, as in the first attempt I found myself looking at a combinatorial explosion. The direction of these discussions follows the personality of the person with whom you meet. There are a great many types of personality in DGR, you see.



After some experimentation, I found a workable solution. There are some limitations on both code and prose, but I now find myself with only around 120 events to write. That's still a lot of content — I've seen some choice-based narrative games that list having that many events as a game feature — but it's not totally out of line with the other sections of the game. This isn't quite done yet, but I'm well on the way. In even better news, this system will be the seed for another system I hope to talk about next month.




Saves were one of the first features I added many years ago. I recently added a few features to the save system, including autosaves, but the core machinery was practically ancient. I used a fairly naive approach because it was simplest, and, as we all know, premature optimization is the root of all evil.

I generate a fair few saves files while testing, and even more autosaves. I own only very weak hardware, but I actually started experiencing lag when loading the in-game save file browser menu for my autosaves! That was not acceptable.

Long story short, early game save files used to be ~1.4MB. They're now ~87kb. Also the number of saves for which previews can be generated without causing lag is now at least in the upper hundreds, but probably a bit higher.




Finishing writing these meetings! After that, some more options for the player to take of a less administrative and more personal nature.