I feel Murder Schemes should have a lower max success chance.

[AHumpierRogue]

Maybe this is just me, but I really feel schemes should have a lower max success chance. I would honestly go down as far as like 75% chance at max(with less gain per person too) but even 85% would make a big difference. I just feel that even with the best laid plans having a 95% chance of killing someone is a bit much.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Maybe this is just me, but I really feel schemes should have a lower max success chance. I would honestly go down as far as like 75% chance at max(with less gain per person too) but even 85% would make a big difference. I just feel that even with the best laid plans having a 95% chance of killing someone is a bit much.

They're only getting 95% chances because they've got a *really* high intrigue character with plenty of supporters targetting relatively low intrigue characters.

But even ignoring that - is it reasonable that the best assassins in the world, employed by the most sneaky, underhanded, intrigue focused people, and assisted by many people close to the target would fail 1 time in 4 - even if the target is trusting, incapable, infirm, and already half dead? Because that's what a 75% chance for success means. Even 85% has it being about 1 in 6 *perfect* plots will fail. That seems unreasonable.

 

[Tuo]

Maybe this is just me, but I really feel schemes should have a lower max success chance. I would honestly go down as far as like 75% chance at max(with less gain per person too) but even 85% would make a big difference. I just feel that even with the best laid plans having a 95% chance of killing someone is a bit much.

You'd be surprised how frequent 5% chance really is in repetition.

 

[Duditsfireguy]

Maybe this is just me, but I really feel schemes should have a lower max success chance. I would honestly go down as far as like 75% chance at max(with less gain per person too) but even 85% would make a big difference. I just feel that even with the best laid plans having a 95% chance of killing someone is a bit much.

People keep talking about intrigue being OP yet ignoring the fact that the streams character has high intrigue as well as a high intrigue spymaster, most games with non intrigue focused characters are not going to have that high of a success rate. It worked exactly the same in CKII

 

[CyberianK]

I have a question about secrets.

It seems even a perfect murder plot that does not fail and is not discovered still generates a secret. So doesn't that mean there can still be consequences? Could this still be discovered by an enemy of yours? Lets say you kill the king of France and his heirs Spymaster discovers the secret and reveals it.

Could that give you some bad trait because you killed a fellow catholic giving you trouble with all your vassals opinion in addition to a massive opinion drop with the new French King? So maybe you end up in a Faction Rebellion and at war with France at the same time because of that.

If that could happen it would be great and the secrets being some nice additional consequences.

 

[Tuo]

I have a question about secrets.

It seems even a perfect murder plot that does not fail and is not discovered still generates a secret. So doesn't that mean there can still be consequences? Could this still be discovered by an enemy of yours? Lets say you kill the king of France and his heirs Spymaster discovers the secret and reveals it.

Could that give you some bad trait because you killed a fellow catholic giving you trouble with all your vassals opinion in addition to a massive opinion drop with the new French King? So maybe you end up in a Faction Rebellion and at war with France at the same time because of that.

If that could happen it would be great and the secrets being some nice additional consequences.

From what I've seen, an exposed secret gives you a reputation trait, and the one for murder was a rather significant -15 opinion penalty. And I believe as long as the people with the secret are around, the secret can be potentially found out by someone snooping.

 

[Razmorg]

You'd be surprised how frequent 5% chance really is in repetition.

It always amazes me how bad people are at feeling chances (myself included). 5% out of 100 might seem like some long shot deal but if you count to 20 one of those numbers is mathematically supposed to fall within that 5%.

Also to me I'd be fine with a system that has really low chances when you are bad but if you have the skills and the right agents it shouldn't be so hard. RNG is important to make the game feel more alive but it can also easily get into frustrating gambling which isn't always interesting.

 

[Vanhal]

I only hope that chance isn't counted like in X-Com where 75% usually meant "good luck lol".

 

[heniska]

Also with a 95% plot chance and with 95% secrecy everything goes correct 90.25% of the time. So even in the ideal case in 1/10 plots you fail or/and are found out.

 

[Rubidium]

You also have to consider that scheming against people is supposed to be the main benefit of intrigue (and a major component of the intrigue lifestyle). Unlike stewardship/martial/diplomacy (even learning), it doesn't have a significant passive effect beyond making it harder for other people to scheme against you (which is a passive whose value also depends on the power of plots). So if you weaken scheming to the point that it's not particularly viable, then intrigue becomes useless. If you reduced success/discovery chance to 75%, you'd have only a roughly 56% chance of any individual murder being successful and secret (actually less than that, as failed murder attempts can trigger discovery, but I'm not going to calculate that), which is a point at which I'd be antsy about using it if the penalties were significant.

CK2 has the problem that by later patches, murder schemes are actually incredibly inefficient. They are extremely difficult to get enough power to trigger, take a long time even once you have enough power, and have a high and random chance of discovery. Play as Alfonso of Leon in CK2 and good luck assassinating your brothers before they get an heir (Sancho in particular is usually popular enough that getting recruits is difficult). That makes intrigue actually quite weak in CK2, and is a problem they specifically want to avoid in CK3.

 

[grommile]

I only hope that chance isn't counted like in X-Com where 75% usually meant "good luck lol".

X-Com original quoted the odds of a perfect on-target shot hitting dead centre, 100% honestly. You could actually fail that chance, but still hit your intended target, because the size of the random divergence ended up being less than half the width of the target.

XCOM 2012 on easy or normal underestimates your chances of hitting, because it quotes the calculated odds for an honest dice roll, then fudges the dice themselves to pander to human cognitive biases.

XCOM 2012 on classic or impossible quotes your chances of hitting on an honest dice roll, which makes it look like it's lying because it rolls the dice honestly and you are a squishy meatbag affected by cognitive biases such that you need a 90% hit rate in order to believe that you have a 75% hit rate, and a 99% hit rate in order to believe that you have a 90% hit rate.

 

[ShadyGuy_SuspiciousGoal]

From what I've seen, an exposed secret gives you a reputation trait, and the one for murder was a rather significant -15 opinion penalty. And I believe as long as the people with the secret are around, the secret can be potentially found out by someone snooping.

This is why you only invite enough people to get 95%, and should choose the older/sicklier characters instead of younger better shaped one. Or you can pull a Ching Shi Huang and murder everyone who knew about the plot.

 

[Zarine]

I main problem is more that we know exactly that it is 95%/95% which is too much information from my point of view.
I have no issue with a plan being easy if your character is good at intrigue, but knowing the numbers is "meh"

 

[grommile]

I main problem is more that we know exactly that it is 95%/95% which is too much information from my point of view.

This may be my inner tabletop grognard speaking, but I see nothing wrong with knowing the odds of success.

Now, by all means, I'm perfectly happy for an option to reduce the display granularity to, say, five probability bands from "very unlikely" to "very likely", but it should definitely only be optional, and it should not be the default setting.

 

[Evangeline]

I agree, the precise numbers are ridiculous - how would I know that soandso has a -67 on joining my murder plot? As I mentioned in another thread, it should just be a vague guesstimate based on various factors (including your intrigue skill, it should make you better at guessing who hates the target/is immoral enough). Then asking them to join would be a bit risky (and more risky the lower your intrigue skill because your guesses may be very wrong), and they might refuse, be outraged, and expose your plot instead. Much more fun mechanic, too.

 

[ShadyGuy_SuspiciousGoal]

This may be my inner tabletop grognard speaking, but I see nothing wrong with knowing the odds of success.

Now, by all means, I'm perfectly happy for an option to reduce the display granularity to, say, five probability bands from "very unlikely" to "very likely", but it should definitely only be optional, and it should not be the default setting.

I absolutely agree. Maybe I'm too casual, but having a number is always better than a vague word. It's a game after all, so I rather have a quality of life improvement over immersion in this case.

 

[Iaminfantry]

If your going off the let's play its because the pc has outstanding intrigue lol

 

[sstabeler]

The fundamental problem is that caps on the chances of something simply serve to make what happens more reliant on the RNG, as opposed to player skill. Which reduces player agency. Now, that isn't always a bad thing- it's certainly perfectly true that no scheme is going to be a guaranteed success- but it's worth bearing in mind that one of the most aggravating things is when you are trying to play a game and the RNG means that how your character develops seems to be basically out of your hands.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

I agree, the precise numbers are ridiculous - how would I know that soandso has a -67 on joining my murder plot? As I mentioned in another thread, it should just be a vague guesstimate based on various factors (including your intrigue skill, it should make you better at guessing who hates the target/is immoral enough). Then asking them to join would be a bit risky (and more risky the lower your intrigue skill because your guesses may be very wrong), and they might refuse, be outraged, and expose your plot instead. Much more fun mechanic, too.

Ultimately the numbers for that sort of thing are to replace the fact that you can't interact with the characters and get a feel for what is going on, and how much they like you/hate the target, and how likely they are to do a particular thing.

Vague, almost blind information is not good in most cases, especially when the only information you have about something is what the game supplies as chances. If you have broad categories you get situations where you don't have any real information about what to do to improve your chances of getting someone to do things for you, but that the character would have. Alternatively you end up with a situation where an experieneced player with a comprehensive list of traits and their interactions *can* figure out the percentages, but a new one (or someone without the wiki open) cannot - at which point it is fairer to expose the numbers anyway.

 

[Barnham]

If I, as the player, could go to the inn where my target was staying, find the chair to funnel him to, calculate the distance from the chair to the manure pile outside, sniff the manure to assertain its level of explosiveness, sleep with the barmaid to coax her cooperation, and hide in the woods to direct the execution of the plot, I'd be pretty happy that it's player skill deciding the outcome of the plot and therefor I don't need to game to calculate the chances for me. But I think that's a different game.
Also, I think that's a game I really want. Court Spymaster, from the teams that brought you Hitman and Crusader Kings. Serve as a loyal Spymaster, or sleep with his wife and daughter, you decide. Release date 2024