Characters in CK3 live way too long

[Krajzen]

This is yet another problem introduced by the awesome in theory and surprisingly terrible in practice idea of RPG - like customizable skill trees available for every character. Their very nature in this kind of game means they are either insignificant or turn humans into superhumans who break historical immersion and difficulty.

I mean, you have to put something in those trees right? So maxed tree devoted to health should make your character super resilient or it feels pointless, maxed intrigue tree should make you intrigue god capable of outsmarting all but very lucky and equally intrigue - tree - based characters...

...the problem is, skill trees are usually applied to video games in which
player character has separate ontological status and plays by different rules than NPCs (show me many RPG heavy games in which all npcs work in the same way as player character), and the world is built around that asymmetry regarding difficulty, scaling and so on.
RPG developers know that obviously if all npcs in the game started on the same level and played by the same rules as human character then human would out - optimize all of them very quickly. So human starts on lvl 1 and enemies walk in huge groups and bosses have like lvl 50 and have spexial arenas and attacks etc etc - entire game is build to provide the challenge to intentionally asymmetric human charater.

What happens when you put all charavters in the game on the same level and give them all the same heavily customizable powerful skill trees and other ways to have power? Human led dynasty and character obviously uses all those tools incomparably better than all AIs and you become physical God very quickly, stronger than any other AI entity in the world in your essence if not yet in territorial resources.

This is why giving this format of a game too much tools to player disposal was a curse in disguise, along much less random chance of everything everywhere. In this system of great human control, human can predictably and objecticely trash any opposition very quickly.

 

[WARenie]

This is yet another problem introduced by the awesome in theory and surprisingly terrible in practice idea of RPG - like customizable skill trees available for every character. Their very nature in this kind of game means they are either insignificant or turn humans into superhumans who break historical immersion and difficulty.

Lifestyle trees are not simply a feature from roleplaying videogames. It's a feature from RPGs in which learning skills is a weakest role playing part. There are cool rpg learning skills systems like gothic's where you need to find a teacher and persuade him, so you could learn a skill from him, there are "learn by doing" systems, where to be a great warrior, you need to engage in a lot of battles. But lifestyle trees look like they are inspired by something from MMO games where you grind EXP and unlock perks unrelated to your character's personality by clicking on them in a menu available from everywhere. But here you don't even need to grind, you press button and it automatically gives you enough EXP to fill entire trees and become great scholar, theologian and medic.

 

[AvengedK1ng]

Long lived rulers definitely make the game much easier and lower the difficulty. For me, one key difference between my first campaigns, where I could barely keep a kingdom together, and later ones was ensuring my ruler’s longevity. (That, and realizing I could move my rally point.)

I’ve always felt like ruler longevity, though, was part of a larger issue where stress is too easy to manage. Hunting and feasting relieve a lot of stress, and the activities get better at relieving stress the more you do it

Plus physicians are just too effective. Conservative treatment almost always works and never has a fatal outcome, no matter how inept the physician, and then the physician gets better. Flagellant relieves a ton of stress and the wound is always lost if you have even a novice physician. I also feel like small pox outbreaks used to be deadlier; I’ve come back to the game recently and now a handful of courtiers get it and most seem to recover. (Maybe I’m just more disciplined about keeping a physician.).

If it were up to me, all physicians would be more like what happens when you have a lunatic physician, except maybe less obvious, there would be constant stress happening (like when a ruler is imprisoned), some stressful events would result in 5 times ((10 times, whatever — several orders of magnitude greater) the stress (murdered child, dead soulmate, etc.), and stress relief from traits picked up from stress-related events (flagellant, drunkard) would have much more severe negative consequences (like if your stressed out drunkard ruler has a feast to relieve his stress, he sobers up from his weeks long drinking binge to discover half the kingdom is independent — which would then cause him stress).

Once the amount of stress a ruler was dealing with increased, I suspect longevity would decrease proportionately.

(flagellant) Wounded being instantly healed most the time is the worst example of the player being artifically kept alive i can think of, there should be a chance for infection or stroke (infirm) rather than always instant heal

Don't hire a court physician if you want a more realistic mortality experience.

Except the ai will hire court physicians

 

[Tiax]

I think the main issue is not how long people live but how predictable their deaths are.

100% agree. The mean death age is probably fine. It's the variance that's the problem. The health system is technically random - each month you have a small chance of losing a bit of health. But when you make a random system depend on lots and lots of little random checks, your variance narrows and you end up with something that feels pretty deterministic.

Just adjusting the mean death age to be 55 instead of 65 or whatever wouldn't really change anything, and I think a lot of the arguments about that question in this thread are teetering on missing the point.

 

[MatthewP]

100% agree. The mean death age is probably fine. It's the variance that's the problem. The health system is technically random - each month you have a small chance of losing a bit of health. But when you make a random system depend on lots and lots of little random checks, your variance narrows and you end up with something that feels pretty deterministic.

Just adjusting the mean death age to be 55 instead of 65 or whatever wouldn't really change anything, and I think a lot of the arguments about that question in this thread are teetering on missing the point.

While I agree just changing the mean age is not a solution, I don’t think it’s irrelevant or should be kept as is. 65 is fine for the mean “nothing went wrong” death age. It’s both realistic and fine for gameplay. The problem is that not enough goes wrong. The reasons for this have been discussed extensively, and IMO the solution is simple: just make the existing dangers (battle wounds, diseases, etc.) actually dangerous.

But this would cause the mean age to decline, even if the nothing goes wrong mean age is still 65. I think this is desirable (and historical), and it would not be a good choice to, say, slow base health decline for every character to keep the mean age at 65 as life in general becomes more dangerous.

 

[noblehunter]

I think a useful approach is to consider character death in terms of circumstance and game play effect. Here, it just considers player characters.

Sudden deaths, with little or no warning, add challenge and make succession management important. These would be essentially random and would happen to keep the player from being too comfortable in whatever plans they've made.

Foreseeable deaths, like "old age" or terminal disease, where the player has time before the death to adapt their plans, invokes the succession game play loop. These are about giving the player a milestone and an opportunity to succeed or fail at a principle part of the game.

High risk deaths such as stress or combat, the player has done something the game discourages and they've paid the price. This limits the utility of high risk and high reward plays and introduce a feedback mechanism to keep snowballing from happening. You might be able to maximize gains by pushing your character to the limit but there are consequences.

Failure state death, such as murder or particularly egregious defeats in combat, the player has failed at either relationship management or combat and character death is the consequence. If it's significant enough, it might lead quickly to gave over. It should communicate to the player what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future.

I think this is more useful than trying to determine appropriate lifespans or causes of death. I think it's clear the game has too many foreseeable deaths which makes the world too orderly. It may be that the game also needs to make high risk deaths either more common or increase the associated reward (because there's no point in running the risk of dying for the pay off).

 

[WeeLittleSpoon]

The mean death age is probably fine. It's the variance that's the problem.

Yes, I just want interesting stuff to happen. Events giving opinion bonuses, or prestige, or health bonuses, or whatever else that just moves numbers up or down aren't very fun to me by themselves. Flavour can go a long way in making these things more interesting, but I don't like how much of the game's events feel like soulless accounting adjustments that take place in a windowless cubicle. What I said earlier about the mean age was not phrased well, but I don't care about people dying of old age slightly earlier. I want a more chaotic game that allows more interesting things to happen because of its instability.

I've played tabletop RPGs most of my life, and as the guy who always got saddled with GMing, I get how difficult in can be to walk that line of making adverse and interesting things happen without making them arbitrarily difficult or illogical, and already there are some events in this game which do things that could be described as 'interesting', but which I find too arbitrary to be enjoyable. The devs have my sympathy, but bonuses and modifiers do not a good roleplaying game make.

 

[Axe Grinder]

Don't get me wrong I know living to your 70s and 80s wasn't unheard of back in the middle ages, but it's way too common in CK3, for instance average lifespan was 31 in medieval England, I know child mortality contributed to that statistic but I'll get to that later.

Every single time my character lives past 65 with no problems, even hitting their 70s, this is some 19-20th century numbers, if you don't die in battle or duel or whatever you'll rarely die of natural causes, even drunkards live just as long but they live significantly less IRL even in today's time due to liver and organ failures I mean what the hell

Diseases are way too rare in this game, you mean there are no heart attacks, strokes or other life threatening medical emergencies in their 40s? Especially in a time with no first aid medication and 0 understanding of medicine. Also child mortality is a myth in CK3, if you have 10 children 10 of them will survive about 90% of the time, wasn't child mortality very common back in the day?

CK3 really needs to add more ways your character can die of natural causes, more diseases, higher chances of contracting them, more penalty to health from diseases, higher drunkard health penalty, pandemic/plague system (like CK2), aggressive "Sickly" trait for children, reduced lifespan, instead of mostly seeing my character live to 65 let's make it 55, we already have a skill tree that lets you live long so why does everyone else in this universe live too long anyway?

While this is completely correct, the longevity of life of those who have wealth vs those who lived hard lives where much better off and had higher chances. That being said, Anglo-Saxons in the middle ages had an average life span of about 40 years.

IF CK3 where to impalement a higher death rate at a younger age, you would need to act faster in building your dynasty. In fact, you would almost need to "speed run" and be contently 3-4 steps ahead of death with planning etc. A mod would be awesome or an option to play it this way, but as a game-play mechanic, I can see why they would choose to not be that historically accurate in regards to mortality.

 

[void0x00]

Isn't the effect of wealth already reflected by the health bonus of court food?

 

[Fou Lu]

Too many live to long yes, I hope Paradox add the feature back that you can fight in battles and also get assigned as knight by your liege.
Thats one thing Im missing the most, feels like cheating to me sometimes and is one of the biggest flaws of the game.

 

[Antimonum]

Instead of artificially reducing life span of the social strata, that was most cared for (regarding quality of life and food), the best solution is to make diseases more difficult to manage and infected wounds more common (with the only way to save an infected wound being amputation). And rulers with amputated limbs should have a significant loss of dread next to the prowess loss and maybe prestige loss especially if they have to be carried everywhere by a stretcher, especially if the ruler is paraplegic due to Horse riding accident. Also in order to simulate the fact that some of the rulers in History died as a result of a disease during a campaign (sometimes heart attacks during commanding of sieges because of the stress associated with leading a difficult siege), you should have more disease events if you are leading armies and you should be more prone to infectious diseases while on a military campaign. And in order to stop the player (and AI) from hiding in his castle during war, there should be some moral/advantage buff in battle or siege if your ruler is around (since he is expected to be at least in the vicinity if not directly leading). And so military campaigning would help to reach some early deaths, if that is what the community wants.

In my opinion though... Succession is annoying enough right now, when you can reach 70 and would be much worse to have to deal with it every 2 to 10 years if you would have a shorter life . If we want historical life span, we should get historical succession for it. Right now every one is on confederate partition, which is not true historically at all for the vast amount of countries on the map. As always the AI will suffer the most from that kind of life span change, since a competent player could always deal with succession.

 

[Tiax]

In my opinion though... Succession is annoying enough right now, when you can reach 70 and would be much worse to have to deal with it every 2 to 10 years if you would have a shorter life . If we want historical life span, we should get historical succession for it. Right now every one is on confederate partition, which is not true historically at all for the vast amount of countries on the map. As always the AI will suffer the most from that kind of life span change, since a competent player could always deal with succession.

Agree with this. I think the reason we want more variance in lifespan is to induce more interesting succession scenarios. But that requires succession to actually be interesting, which is often not the case currently. It's definitely a multi-faceted problem.

 

[Mastigos]

The more I play CK3, the more I begin to see the extremes and experience the patterns. And I gotta say - like I said earlier in this thread - I don't really agree with the central proposition.

Before I go on, full disclosure: I use the mod "better battles" which can trigger battle events. They're not common, intentionally so: the creator of the mod wants the battle events to feel special, not rudimentary or commonplace.

So here are just some of the deaths that I've experienced in the past month of so.

1) I get into a battlefield duel with the enemy commander. This is an "instant duel" in the sense that you pick one option, instead of working through the duel in steps. Anyway, I have a 73% chance to kill him, a 26% chance to tie (by wounding each other) and a 1% chance to die. I die.

2) Leading my army, I attack a force 1/10th my size. My "brave" Emperor hacks his way through the enemy forces that he finds himself alone and surrounded by a large group of assailants. I have a ~75% chance to live and gain a level of blademaster, and a ~25% chance to die. I die.
2b) I immediately pick up his heir, win the war, and the first thing I do is hold court. The second guy in line is a crazy asshole who wants to duel to me to the death. I have ~ 62 prowess to his ~21.
Now let me preface that I have quite an extensive grasp on dueling. I am mostly self-taught, with a little study and a little theorycrafting thrown into the mix. For credentials, I once played a wrathful king who white peaced out of a noble uprising, then dueled 32 nobles in a row in order to toss their asses in jail. Note: most of these nobles were also my knights. My knight nobles had 20-40 prowess each, so these are not pushover limp-wristed nobility that never held a sword or warhammer. I beat every single one. In a row. I'm not saying this because it's some super-ultra-faptome impressive feat; I'm simply pointing out that I know how to duel.
Long story short: my heir dies. Two generations of emperors killed in the course of 5 minutes.


3) I give my son and heir a shitload of land, my best artifacts, made him a king, and disinhereted all his 5 brothers in order for him to inherit the empire without splitting it up. I ask ("demand") one of my artifacts I gave him on accident. Then I noticed that I wanted to give him a better weapon, so I duel him for his worse weapon and give him a newer, better one. He becomes my rival, but still has 100 opinion of me.
I have my 42 martial Mashal set to Train Royal Guards, which reduces the chance of a hostile plot from succeeding by 40%.
I have a 32 intrigue Spymaster set to Disrupt Schemes, to add another layer of protection to myself from schemes.
My spymaster reports that someone is trying to kill me, and finds an agent. The chance was like 47% to succeed, which had me super worried, so I arrested the bloke and the chance dropped significantly.
Suddenly the war I'm in ends. Within one in-game week, I get a f*cking viper thrown into my bed. Instantly dead. Come to find out the plot was spearheaded by my son, who still had a 100 opinion of me. I guess his goodwill wasn't strong enough to overcome his vengeful nature.

4) I disinheret all my sons in favor of my daughter, because she had Genius, Amazonian, and Handsome(Pretty?) which means I could instantly hit up Strengthen Bloodline. Long story short: she lived about 6 months before she was assassinated by her ex-husband. She was 31. She was the Blood-Mother.

5) My 61 year old (Old Saxon/French hybrid) king of England (in Fine health) suddenly turns obese, dropping his health to "Poor." He suddenly drops dead about 2 months after turning obese, despite trying to lose weight, in the middle of a war. His entire kingdom erupts into a brutal cival war that ends with me losing the throne to some asshole.
I reload the profile back to before the war. I do the exact same events in the same order. My king ends up living another 3-4 months longer than the previous point where he died, but is still in poor health -- until he gets a random "take the dog for a walk" event that boosts my health from "poor" back to "fine." He ends up living another seven years, in which time I manage to consolidate much more power to the people I wanted to have it, and I put my affairs in order much, much more effectively. The transition between he and his heir took place without a hitch, all because he walked his dog.

6) Childbirth deaths. All. Day. Long. Having a spouse suddenly die and subsequently have an alliance unravel at a critical moment can cost not just a war, but an empire.

And so on.

If you play with Ironman off, and you never talk risks, and you make sure you have the best physician available - yeah, you'll live to a reasonable age. But you must realize that this game is highly customizable and there is no "right" or "wrong" option.

If you feel like disease is too forgiving and/or rare on its default setting, put disease up to high setting.
Look, there is a very easy mode, there is an easy mode, and there is a normal mode.
But if you're looking to crack up the difficulty, put the game to "normal" but crank up everything you can to make it as difficult as possible.
I will also say that Paradox engines are specifically designed to make modding the game easy. Paradox often has a "community spotlight" which draws attention to certain mods, which is my mind means that Paradox not only approves of mods, but in a certain sense even plans on mods. If you want the game to be more difficult, grab a mod that makes the game more difficult. There is nothing wrong with that.

But even with that being said, Ironman is a very, very unforgiving mode. If you make one minor mistake, it can turn into a dangerously major mistake quickly. Suddenly dueling the crazy asshole to get that sweet, sweet Aspiring Blademaster isn't a button you instantly press (unless you're as obsessed with the Blademaster trait as I am). Death isn't something that you can reload out of - it's something you play around or live with.

And honestly, an unfair or untimely death creates a lot of drama and tension which makes for memorable games.
Will I always remember when my host of 45 knights, 3900 Chasseurs, 2600 Mubarizun, and 500 House Guard took on and defeated a stream of ~600,000 mixed Catholic units attacking me in the Great Holy War they called? Yes, that is a shining moment in my memory. But for every dramatic succcess, there is a miserable failure that also shines bright in my memory. And I do not believe, for a moment, that characters live too long if you're playing on Ironman and actually RPing instead of playing like "you" every life.

 

[Jarolleon]

Don't get me wrong I know living to your 70s and 80s wasn't unheard of back in the middle ages, but it's way too common in CK3, for instance average lifespan was 31 in medieval England, I know child mortality contributed to that statistic but I'll get to that later.

Every single time my character lives past 65 with no problems, even hitting their 70s, this is some 19-20th century numbers, if you don't die in battle or duel or whatever you'll rarely die of natural causes, even drunkards live just as long but they live significantly less IRL even in today's time due to liver and organ failures I mean what the hell

Diseases are way too rare in this game, you mean there are no heart attacks, strokes or other life threatening medical emergencies in their 40s? Especially in a time with no first aid medication and 0 understanding of medicine. Also child mortality is a myth in CK3, if you have 10 children 10 of them will survive about 90% of the time, wasn't child mortality very common back in the day?

CK3 really needs to add more ways your character can die of natural causes, more diseases, higher chances of contracting them, more penalty to health from diseases, higher drunkard health penalty, pandemic/plague system (like CK2), aggressive "Sickly" trait for children, reduced lifespan, instead of mostly seeing my character live to 65 let's make it 55, we already have a skill tree that lets you live long so why does everyone else in this universe live too long anyway?

Children have a very high survival rate because Paradox has chosen to simulate child mortality with the drowning event from Meet Peers, and other things which any experienced player can easily avoid.

 

[MatthewP]

The more I play CK3, the more I begin to see the extremes and experience the patterns. And I gotta say - like I said earlier in this thread - I don't really agree with the central proposition.

Before I go on, full disclosure: I use the mod "better battles" which can trigger battle events. They're not common, intentionally so: the creator of the mod wants the battle events to feel special, not rudimentary or commonplace.

So here are just some of the deaths that I've experienced in the past month of so.

1) I get into a battlefield duel with the enemy commander. This is an "instant duel" in the sense that you pick one option, instead of working through the duel in steps. Anyway, I have a 73% chance to kill him, a 26% chance to tie (by wounding each other) and a 1% chance to die. I die.

2) Leading my army, I attack a force 1/10th my size. My "brave" Emperor hacks his way through the enemy forces that he finds himself alone and surrounded by a large group of assailants. I have a ~75% chance to live and gain a level of blademaster, and a ~25% chance to die. I die.
2b) I immediately pick up his heir, win the war, and the first thing I do is hold court. The second guy in line is a crazy asshole who wants to duel to me to the death. I have ~ 62 prowess to his ~21.
Now let me preface that I have quite an extensive grasp on dueling. I am mostly self-taught, with a little study and a little theorycrafting thrown into the mix. For credentials, I once played a wrathful king who white peaced out of a noble uprising, then dueled 32 nobles in a row in order to toss their asses in jail. Note: most of these nobles were also my knights. My knight nobles had 20-40 prowess each, so these are not pushover limp-wristed nobility that never held a sword or warhammer. I beat every single one. In a row. I'm not saying this because it's some super-ultra-faptome impressive feat; I'm simply pointing out that I know how to duel.
Long story short: my heir dies. Two generations of emperors killed in the course of 5 minutes.


3) I give my son and heir a shitload of land, my best artifacts, made him a king, and disinhereted all his 5 brothers in order for him to inherit the empire without splitting it up. I ask ("demand") one of my artifacts I gave him on accident. Then I noticed that I wanted to give him a better weapon, so I duel him for his worse weapon and give him a newer, better one. He becomes my rival, but still has 100 opinion of me.
I have my 42 martial Mashal set to Train Royal Guards, which reduces the chance of a hostile plot from succeeding by 40%.
I have a 32 intrigue Spymaster set to Disrupt Schemes, to add another layer of protection to myself from schemes.
My spymaster reports that someone is trying to kill me, and finds an agent. The chance was like 47% to succeed, which had me super worried, so I arrested the bloke and the chance dropped significantly.
Suddenly the war I'm in ends. Within one in-game week, I get a f*cking viper thrown into my bed. Instantly dead. Come to find out the plot was spearheaded by my son, who still had a 100 opinion of me. I guess his goodwill wasn't strong enough to overcome his vengeful nature.

4) I disinheret all my sons in favor of my daughter, because she had Genius, Amazonian, and Handsome(Pretty?) which means I could instantly hit up Strengthen Bloodline. Long story short: she lived about 6 months before she was assassinated by her ex-husband. She was 31. She was the Blood-Mother.

5) My 61 year old (Old Saxon/French hybrid) king of England (in Fine health) suddenly turns obese, dropping his health to "Poor." He suddenly drops dead about 2 months after turning obese, despite trying to lose weight, in the middle of a war. His entire kingdom erupts into a brutal cival war that ends with me losing the throne to some asshole.
I reload the profile back to before the war. I do the exact same events in the same order. My king ends up living another 3-4 months longer than the previous point where he died, but is still in poor health -- until he gets a random "take the dog for a walk" event that boosts my health from "poor" back to "fine." He ends up living another seven years, in which time I manage to consolidate much more power to the people I wanted to have it, and I put my affairs in order much, much more effectively. The transition between he and his heir took place without a hitch, all because he walked his dog.

6) Childbirth deaths. All. Day. Long. Having a spouse suddenly die and subsequently have an alliance unravel at a critical moment can cost not just a war, but an empire.

And so on.

If you play with Ironman off, and you never talk risks, and you make sure you have the best physician available - yeah, you'll live to a reasonable age. But you must realize that this game is highly customizable and there is no "right" or "wrong" option.

If you feel like disease is too forgiving and/or rare on its default setting, put disease up to high setting.
Look, there is a very easy mode, there is an easy mode, and there is a normal mode.
But if you're looking to crack up the difficulty, put the game to "normal" but crank up everything you can to make it as difficult as possible.
I will also say that Paradox engines are specifically designed to make modding the game easy. Paradox often has a "community spotlight" which draws attention to certain mods, which is my mind means that Paradox not only approves of mods, but in a certain sense even plans on mods. If you want the game to be more difficult, grab a mod that makes the game more difficult. There is nothing wrong with that.

But even with that being said, Ironman is a very, very unforgiving mode. If you make one minor mistake, it can turn into a dangerously major mistake quickly. Suddenly dueling the crazy asshole to get that sweet, sweet Aspiring Blademaster isn't a button you instantly press (unless you're as obsessed with the Blademaster trait as I am). Death isn't something that you can reload out of - it's something you play around or live with.

And honestly, an unfair or untimely death creates a lot of drama and tension which makes for memorable games.
Will I always remember when my host of 45 knights, 3900 Chasseurs, 2600 Mubarizun, and 500 House Guard took on and defeated a stream of ~600,000 mixed Catholic units attacking me in the Great Holy War they called? Yes, that is a shining moment in my memory. But for every dramatic succcess, there is a miserable failure that also shines bright in my memory. And I do not believe, for a moment, that characters live too long if you're playing on Ironman and actually RPing instead of playing like "you" every life.

You say that you find the number of premature deaths fine...with your mod that increases them. It honestly seems like you've just written a thorough justification for the exact changes you say you don't agree with. The events you mention are great, just quite rare in vanilla. The "high disease" setting you recommend I also don't think exists, unless it was recently added (in which case I will use it, thanks).

Otherwise, it just boils down to "Yes, the suggestion would improve the game, but theoretically it can be modded so no." I don't find that compelling; lots of stuff can be modded and the devs should still try to improve the game.

 

[CollectorOfBolts]

The "high disease" setting you recommend I also don't think exists, unless it was recently added (in which case I will use it, thanks).

With no mods installed, the only rule I can see that is disease-related is titled "Minor Diseases" and has the options of "Default" and "Fewer".

 

[Mastigos]

You say that you find the number of premature deaths fine...with your mod that increases them. It honestly seems like you've just written a thorough justification for the exact changes you say you don't agree with. The events you mention are great, just quite rare in vanilla. The "high disease" setting you recommend I also don't think exists, unless it was recently added (in which case I will use it, thanks).

Otherwise, it just boils down to "Yes, the suggestion would improve the game, but theoretically it can be modded so no." I don't find that compelling; lots of stuff can be modded and the devs should still try to improve the game.

It's not a mod that increases death. It's a mod that increases risk vs reward. I for every death in the past month - thanks to the mod - I've had 5 emperors with Legendary Swordmaster. I'd call that a fair tradeoff.

If the game was vanilla I'd be far more frightened of disease, as Legendary Blademaster gives a "huge" (+1 heart) disease resistance, and this is besides the whopping 12 prowess.

With high quality weapons, armor, dynasty perks, chivalry lifestyle perks, and legendary blademaster, I actually think my overall survival rate has increased over what it would be in vanilla. But even with all those, I can and do still die from infected wounds to being obese.

I don't think the game needs more default mortality; what I think most people want is a genuine "hard mode."
Ironman is the closest thing we have to hard mode, but ironman makes the game hard in a different way than what most people mean when they ask for a difficult increase.

 

[MatthewP]

It's not a mod that increases death. It's a mod that increases risk vs reward. I for every death in the past month - thanks to the mod - I've had 5 emperors with Legendary Swordmaster. I'd call that a fair tradeoff.

If the game was vanilla I'd be far more frightened of disease, as Legendary Blademaster gives a "huge" (+1 heart) disease resistance, and this is besides the whopping 12 prowess.

With high quality weapons, armor, dynasty perks, chivalry lifestyle perks, and legendary blademaster, I actually think my overall survival rate has increased over what it would be in vanilla. But even with all those, I can and do still die from infected wounds to being obese.

I don't think the game needs more default mortality; what I think most people want is a genuine "hard mode."
Ironman is the closest thing we have to hard mode, but ironman makes the game hard in a different way than what most people mean when they ask for a difficult increase.

I don’t think it’s in anyones interest to quibble about your mod, so I wont.

I do think you have a point in the last paragraph. Most folks complaining about mortality would also agree the game is too easy, Ironman or not. I think this issue has legs on its own though. Surprising/premature death isn’t just difficulty for its own sake, it’s a specific type of difficulty that adds a very positive element of variability and excitement to the gameplay experience. I could go into more detail, but It’s clear from your earlier post that you agree with this already. So I would say there are plenty of things the devs could do to make the game harder, but not all and maybe not many of them would make it harder in as engaging a way. It doesn’t really belong in a hard mode, though personally I don’t care too much since I’d likely play a hard mode if one existed.

 

[Dayvit78]

I remember I had a ruler in CK2 that had really good traits and I had high hopes for but he ended up getting incapacitated while leading a battle when he was like 20. It was very tragic and memorable. I don't remember any of my CK3 rulers, they are all really good and nothing ever happens to them.

Not quite. My most promising CK3 heir ended up being a reclusive, adulterer and then a murderer (one too many hunting trips) before I was able to take over. No way to fix all those mistakes though. But you're right, they won't die!

 

[Lollipop_but_rock]

If you feel like disease is too forgiving and/or rare on its default setting, put disease up to high setting.
Look, there is a very easy mode, there is an easy mode, and there is a normal mode.
But if you're looking to crack up the difficulty, put the game to "normal" but crank up everything you can to make it as difficult as possible.
I will also say that Paradox engines ar

That's the thing. I'm curious where are you craking up normal mode when every single game rule is about making things easier and more forgiving than normal mode.