The limits of blackmail

[GeneralPetrov]

First of all I just have to say I really like the new hooks system, and it was cool to see a bit of it in action in the stream yesterday.

The plotting and infanticide did get me thinking though, what exactly are the limits (if any) of using hooks to blackmail characters? For example, is it possible to use a hook to force a mother into plotting to murder her own child? Because I feel as though in situations like that, the power of the blackmail should be outweighed by the want to not murder your own child.

This also brings me onto another point: is it possible to refuse a hook? For example if someone with a hook on your dirty secret bedroom activities were to force you to marry your heir to their child, would it be possible to simply refuse, at the cost of having the secret exposed?

Apologies if these questions have already been answered, I re-read the dev diary but couldn't see anything that touched on what I'm asking.

 

[Atalvyr]

You can refuse when people use a hook, yes, which will make the secret public. You also lose the hook if the secret it is based on is made public due some other factor.

 

[GeneralPetrov]

You can refuse when people use a hook, yes, which will make the secret public. You also lose the hook if the secret it is based on is made public due some other factor.

Interesting, do you know where they said you can refuse a hook? Was there any mention of if the AI would ever consider refusing, or will they always accept no matter what?

 

[Alenarae118]

Interesting, do you know where they said you can refuse a hook? Was there any mention of if the AI would ever consider refusing, or will they always accept no matter what?

In the Dev Diary talking about secrets and hooks.

 

[Lordy's]

To be clear, you cannot refuse when someone uses a hook. You can refuse blackmail though: Someone knows your secret, blackmails you to convert the secret into a hook (you can refuse here -> secret becomes exposed) but once he has a hook on you he decide on what to spend it.

 

[GeneralPetrov]

To be clear, you cannot refuse when someone uses a hook. You can refuse blackmail though: Someone knows your secret, blackmails you to convert the secret into a hook (you can refuse here -> secret becomes exposed) but once he has a hook on you he decide on what to spend it.

OH I see, that makes much more sense. I still think it would make sense that there's some sort of limit to what you can hook someone into. Surely even with the strongest hooks you couldn't force someone to do something like say kill a close relative.

 

[Gwydden]

OH I see, that makes much more sense. I still think it would make sense that there's some sort of limit to what you can hook someone into. Surely even with the strongest hooks you couldn't force someone to do something like say kill a close relative.

That depends on the close relative—talking purely about the game here, of course.

 

[Varren]

To be clear, you cannot refuse when someone uses a hook. You can refuse blackmail though: Someone knows your secret, blackmails you to convert the secret into a hook (you can refuse here -> secret becomes exposed) but once he has a hook on you he decide on what to spend it.

Which is something I strongly disagree with. From a realism standpoint, obviously someone might be perfectly willing to accept a modified vassal contract to keep a secret without implicitly being just as willing to murder his own father. From a gameplay standpoint, it makes secrets very one-dimensional. If you find a secret, you just immediately blackmail the person and gain a free voucher for whatever you want (and if they refuse, it's not like you could have used the secret for anything anyway). If characters could instead refuse blackmail when you actually use the hook, you'd have to weigh how much they value the secret against how much they value whatever you're trying to get them to do, forcing you to use the right secrets at the right times and occasionally throwing wrenches into your plans when characters prove less amenable than you anticipated.

 

[Riamus]

I don't do multiplayer, but that sounds like it would completely invalidate hooks against other players. Even in singleplayer, it would just end up being annoying because you're left wondering if you've wasted your time with getting a hook and if the game just decided to randomly ignore your hook without a good reason when the reason isn't clear.

That said, I do think there could be some cases where the game could just not allow using the hook for something that wouldn't make sense, such as killing your own child (or anyone else if you have max opinion of them), though that could also vary based on the secret. Sometimes a secret might be strong enough to be willing to do that. So if the devs wanted to set up a specific list of reasons why a hook can't be used in certain situations, then I'm fine with that. But if it's just a hidden mechanism or if the hook can be completely ignored, then I don't think it's a good idea.

Not to mention, as a player, just about any secret that you have that an AI might find out can be overcome without much effort because you are human vs AI, so why would you allow the AI to use a hook on you unless it's for something that is really minor?

Sometimes gameplay has to trump realism.

 

[pengoyo]

Keep in mind the game has strong versus weak hooks. We know strong hooks allow for repeated uses (with a cooldown). But it might be possible that strong hooks can also be used in certain circumstances where weak hooks cannot.

Be cool if this was the case, could even balance it by having strong hooks be used up if used on one of these more demanding actions. That way you could make it so character won't generally help you kill their kin, unless if you get some really good blackmail on them. But using that blackmail on that could come at the opportunity cost of being able to repeatedly use it else where. It would help emphasize the magnitude of what you are asking them to do.

And even with this you could still have some actions that character will just never do, like help you kill their child.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

And even with this you could still have some actions that character will just never do, like help you kill their child.

Assuming that you aren't targetting the "father" of a suspected bastard, and that the child isn't the last thing between them and a kingdom.

 

[pengoyo]

Assuming that you aren't targetting the "father" of a suspected bastard, and that the child isn't the last thing between them and a kingdom.

Yeah I think some exceptions could be allowed like maybe also hooks on particularly sadistic characters.

One could tie it to if it's a character that one isn't allowed to initiate a plot against, then you can't be forced to join a plot against them either.

 

[BrokenSky]

I don't do multiplayer, but that sounds like it would completely invalidate hooks against other players. Even in singleplayer, it would just end up being annoying because you're left wondering if you've wasted your time with getting a hook and if the game just decided to randomly ignore your hook without a good reason when the reason isn't clear.

That said, I do think there could be some cases where the game could just not allow using the hook for something that wouldn't make sense, such as killing your own child (or anyone else if you have max opinion of them), though that could also vary based on the secret. Sometimes a secret might be strong enough to be willing to do that. So if the devs wanted to set up a specific list of reasons why a hook can't be used in certain situations, then I'm fine with that. But if it's just a hidden mechanism or if the hook can be completely ignored, then I don't think it's a good idea.

Not to mention, as a player, just about any secret that you have that an AI might find out can be overcome without much effort because you are human vs AI, so why would you allow the AI to use a hook on you unless it's for something that is really minor?

Sometimes gameplay has to trump realism.

Presumably they'd do this the same way they do everything else in game:
something like
Alice has -23 reasons to join your plot:
+100 strength of hook
- 50 unwilling to murder own child
- 50 opinion of [victim]
- 30 kind
+ 7 opinion of [murderer]

Which wouldn't feel any worse than any other time you can't make the AI agree to something no matter how much pressure you apply (i.e. a bit annoying, so she goes onto your "to murder" list too).

Presumably if you allow the AI to reveal your secret rather than support their plot you could also become stressed (situation and traits depending)? There are ways it could be made balanced.

 

[GeneralPetrov]

If characters could instead refuse blackmail when you actually use the hook, you'd have to weigh how much they value the secret against how much they value whatever you're trying to get them to do, forcing you to use the right secrets at the right times and occasionally throwing wrenches into your plans when characters prove less amenable than you anticipated.

This is exactly what I had in mind, although I would add that the chance of acceptance modifiers should be clear to the player so that you don't end up frustratingly wasting hooks. These aren't exact numbers of course, but something like "Would negatively affect me -100" or "Would negatively affect a close relative/friend -50", that would weigh against the value of the hook being used.

People are naturally focusing on the child murder aspect of this, but I think refusal of a hook could apply to other scenarios where the target is sufficiently screwed over. For example let's say you have a hook on a duke because you know about his sexual deviancy. In this case the duke's only heir is his daughter, and she is unmarried. Clearly the best course of action for the player in this situation would be to force the duke to marry his daughter-heir to your heir. But considering the fact that this would result in the complete destruction of his dynasty's powerbase, I think it would make sense that the weight of the hook would be outweighed by that of the marriage.

As far as I can tell though, currently the duke would have no choice but to accept, which I think is a shame. This is a game about complex human relationships afterall, hooks shouldn't be so one dimensional.

 

[Riamus]

Clearly the best course of action for the player in this situation would be to force the duke to marry his daughter-heir to your heir. But considering the fact that this would result in the complete destruction of his dynasty's powerbase, I think it would make sense that the weight of the hook would be outweighed by that of the marriage.

I understand where you're coming from and to a point I agree, but a hook can sometimes be the only way to get a decent marriage in certain situations. I wouldn't want to lose that. After all, the reason you would use the hook there is that they don't want to marry their daughter to your heir in the first place. So now you eliminate the hook as a way to force the issue and it devalues the hook too much, imo.

I could see there being the possibility of choosing to let the secret be revealed to bypass the hook, but as I mentioned earlier, as a player, having your secrets revealed really doesn't matter very much because as a player you can usually recover from that easily. So you basically could just refuse a hook all the time unless it's for something minor that you don't care about anyhow and it won't hurt you much at all. I don't much like that idea.

 

[Varus90]

Here we see a Vizier using a Hook against his Sultan.

 

[GeneralPetrov]

I understand where you're coming from and to a point I agree, but a hook can sometimes be the only way to get a decent marriage in certain situations. I wouldn't want to lose that. After all, the reason you would use the hook there is that they don't want to marry their daughter to your heir in the first place. So now you eliminate the hook as a way to force the issue and it devalues the hook too much, imo.

I'm not suggesting that a hook in this scenario could never be enough to get the marriage, rather I'm saying that it shouldn't just automatically force the marriage by itself. In this instance for example, you'd either need a stronger hook (I.E. evidence of murder or incest), or you'd have to combine the hook with other modifiers, such as a positive opinion or fear of you.

I don't want the hook to be useless, but I don't want it to just be an auto-accept sort of deal for everything. That would be a bit boring and exploitable IMO, especially since hooks can be fabricated.

I could see there being the possibility of choosing to let the secret be revealed to bypass the hook, but as I mentioned earlier, as a player, having your secrets revealed really doesn't matter very much because as a player you can usually recover from that easily. So you basically could just refuse a hook all the time unless it's for something minor that you don't care about anyhow and it won't hurt you much at all. I don't much like that idea.

Perhaps the issue here is not that you can refuse a hook, but that the consequences of refusing a hook are too small?

 

[Riamus]

They did comment on weak and strong hooks, so I assume there's some difference in what each will work for. So you might already have something like what you're thinking, where a weak hook won't get you certain more "difficult" things.

 

[Varren]

I don't do multiplayer, but that sounds like it would completely invalidate hooks against other players. Even in singleplayer, it would just end up being annoying because you're left wondering if you've wasted your time with getting a hook and if the game just decided to randomly ignore your hook without a good reason when the reason isn't clear.

That said, I do think there could be some cases where the game could just not allow using the hook for something that wouldn't make sense, such as killing your own child (or anyone else if you have max opinion of them), though that could also vary based on the secret. Sometimes a secret might be strong enough to be willing to do that. So if the devs wanted to set up a specific list of reasons why a hook can't be used in certain situations, then I'm fine with that. But if it's just a hidden mechanism or if the hook can be completely ignored, then I don't think it's a good idea.

Not to mention, as a player, just about any secret that you have that an AI might find out can be overcome without much effort because you are human vs AI, so why would you allow the AI to use a hook on you unless it's for something that is really minor?

Sometimes gameplay has to trump realism.

You're assuming that having your secrets revealed is just an opinion debuff. If that is the case (as it is in CK2 most of the time), then secrets already don't matter for the player, since they'll just refuse all blackmail before it becomes a hook. Heck, that's actually an argument in favor of changing the system: With the way things are now, you have to always assume they'll use their hook in the worst possible way and refuse all blackmail out of hand.

As for using hooks in multiplayer, you just have to be smart about them. Sometimes you really do want something that's minor enough on their part. For bigger things, you'll just have to wait until they're in a delicate situation (say, burdened by heavy stress) and threaten to reveal their secrets at the worst possible moment. It's still better than the current system, where PvP blackmail is effectively impossible without some sort of gentleman's agreement, since human players can be far more creative about forcing you to screw yourself over.

They did comment on weak and strong hooks, so I assume there's some difference in what each will work for. So you might already have something like what you're thinking, where a weak hook won't get you certain more "difficult" things.

Strong hooks are reusable. Weak hooks are not. No other differences have even been hinted at.

 

[DaJay42]

From today's video:

It seems we'll indeed need a strong hook to force someone into a murder plot.