Character Histories?

[Pirisinian]

Not sure how feasible this is, but I can't count the times I've seen interesting characters appear out of nowhere and I have nothing to piece together how they got there apart from many disparate title histories. It would be cool to be able to follow how a particular character progressed through their life, acquired certain titles, maybe other stuff they did in the meantime etc. It would certainly make it a lot easier to establish how characters got where they were and provide a richer image of their past. This is a character-driven game, after all.

Now obviously recording it for every character would probably be a huge strain on performance. If possible it would be nice to select a character and have their story reconstructed retroactively by looking at the game's history, but tbh that also doesn't seem very feasible. At the very least it would be cool to have the characters marked as special interest have the things that happen to them be actively recorded. Kind of like a chronicle but without all the extra stuff about 10 foot women and famous battles against tiny peasant armies or whatever.

 

[Rags17]

I recommended this elsewhere in its own thread IIRC. Since every character invariably ends up with dozens or scores of hidden character flags and modifiers the idea was to simply give each one a flavor text that can be compiled as as "mini_chronicle" to describe them. For example, the character might have the "bullied_as_child" flag so the text would be "Wilhelm was bullied as a child, which left him somewhat bitter towards the world."

The problem with this idea is that there is little time sensitive info (when did my character pick up the "immune_to_measles" flag ?), but I reckon that can sort of be dummied in - using the first example above, if the character was Kind and bullied then the text might read "...and this gave him a better understanding of human nature", whereas if he was Wroth it might read "... and this bullying gave him an unquenchable thirst to never be humiliated again.".

Literally HUNDREDS of hours of flavor text coding but I reckon it could be very worth it - best of all it could be implemented in stages as the most common and or significant flags and modifiers were given their flavor text first, with the rest added over time.