Which is good, given that every character you play will start with a weak hook if you're not the family head.
"C'mon, sport, kill your best friend -- do it for your old man!"
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The limits of blackmail
- Thread starter GeneralPetrov
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"C'mon, sport, kill your best friend -- do it for your old man!"
I agree with this. The only issue is that if hooks aren't auto-accept situations, not only do the waters become a bit murkier because you have to determine what happens when a hook is used but you failed the RNG (do you expose the secret, thereby punishing the AI character who made the tactical call to allow you the hook instead of have his secret exposed, simply because his will proved too strong to cave to you now?)...
... but also, it risks cheapening hooks a bit. If a hook isn't a guarantee, it starts to feel like another flavor of bribe more than anything else. I agree that the best way to handle this is to differentiate between which demands require strong hooks and which don't.
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Am I the only one who feels like strong hooks are OP and will get nerfed?
Not only do they allow you to force someone to murder their beloved child, but they also can be used multiple times (so you can get them to kill all of their children) and the person you have the hook on cannot take hostile actions against you.
I'm also wondering about the "no hostile actions" part.
Do plots count as hostile actions (seems to be the case)? Because if so, that's faaaaar too powerful. If someone has a hook on you, you should of course be able to try to get rid of him...
I feel like a strong hook should give you the choice between one of the three options:
- Convert it into a reusable weak hook
- Prevent hostile actions
- Use for things that you cannot use a weak hook for.
On that note, I do hope that there are good incentives for players to accept blackmail in general. That requires more than just a general opinion debuff (-15 murderer) if your secret is exposed.
In particular, when it is exposed that you murdered, say the previous king, you AI liege should be very very likely to imprison you asap. Because not being imprisoned (and potentially executed) is a far better incentive than some meaningless modifier.
Also if the murder secret is exposed you should get negative opinion debuffs with the relatives* of your victim (I assume that will be the case). Additionally though, this opinion modifier should make it very likely that they start plotting against you. That way, even if you are your own liege, being exposed as a murderer has consequences.
*ideally only relatives that liked the victim and additionally friends of the victim, however its probably not possible to store that information since the victim is long dead. Maybe this could be implemented by adding the opinion modifier as a hidden modifier without any consequences when the murder happens and only activating it afterwards.
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First of all, I'm quite sure that Strong Hooks will be much harder to get. Also, while we've seen a few-very brief-bits of game-play, we haven't seen how Weak and Strong Hooks will function in a true Long Play situation covering multiple hours of game play at the very least.
Let's see how this all pans out before we start screaming for nerfs, please?
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It should be noted that a hook based on blackmail is lost if the secret is exposed, and while there doesn't seem to be a button for exposing your own secrets, there is a button for exposing those of others, including ones that you might be implicated in...
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Agreed, weak hooks are obviously a rehash of favors that’s expanded to include blackmail and such. Strong hooks are new to us, we need to see how they play out in game. I imagine there are ways of getting yourself out of it.
I would even consider an event where you confront the person and turn it into a weak hook or just let them expose you.
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Do you have a source for that? From my understanding of the DDs a hook is a thing that you keep once you get it (they have no pointer to the secret they belong to).
So if the secret is exposed before you blackmail, you cannot blackmail for that secret anymore. But once you blackmailed someone someone else can expose the secret and nothing will happen.
Yet, I think that it would be far better if that were the case.
Isn't that exactly how it works? There is a blackmail button next to the secrets that you know where you confront someone about their secret and get a weak/strong hook depending on its severity...
I think we know quite a lot about how hooks work and how you get them (blackmail for criminal secret -> strong hook). There is some uncertainty when it comes to how much the AI punishes players when their secrets are exposed.
But it seems quite clear that if strong hooks also prevent plotting against you, they are definitely too powerful.
And from a logical perspective it seems weird that you blackmail someone because he murdered someone and you can use that to force him to murder a dozen people with you. Afterall, he will then know that you are a murderer as well, so the blackmail should not work anymore.
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Indeed I do, from the very dev diary discussing schemes and secrets:
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Well, you say this but I noticed something in the stream today:
It seems as though it is indeed possible to fabricate a strong hook on someone, although I don't know if that's dependant on the skill of you or your spymaster.
Don't get me wrong I do like all the new systems being introduced for scheming and skulduggery, but I do think that they may not be entirely balanced from what I've seen so far. Of course it could still all be rebalanced before or shortly after release so I guess we'll have to wait and see.
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Yes, it is certainly too much to be able to fabricate strong hooks.
Also, I noticed that in the event for the fabricated hook were they pretended to save him from bandits, it gave a negative opinion penalty "Fabricated Hook". In general, I agree that fabricated hooks should have a opinion penalty, but in this case the flavour event doesn't conform with that (they mix up fabricating a favor and fabricating false evidence).
Also, I don't see how they are blackmailing someone for
"I saved your life when the bandits robbed you. Now, help me murder someone or I'll tell everyone about your bad deeds."
That literally makes no sense at all.
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Yeah, that one looks weird. Hooks for saving a life should be different from hooks for being caught doing bad deeds...
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The negative opinion penalty and the flavour text is probably a bug, but I think the rest of it makes sense. You're not blackmailing them for a hook in this scenario, rather they owe you a favour for saving their life. As I understand it, hooks are not necessarily the result of you threatening someone with blackmail- you can also get them on people who owe you a favour, and I think you can get them on house members if you're the house head.
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But even still, this case makes it clear that there should probably be more than just "strong" and "weak" hooks, which limit what they can be used for (or rather what, also depending on other factors, the AI will accept them being used for).
Maybe something like Favours, Debts, Threats etc?
Then perhaps people might be unhappy with you if you use threats against them, but if you use the fact that they owe you a life debt they'd be less put out when you ask them to let you marry their daughter?
Different characters might also be more or less likely to care about different ones (e.g. if you fabricate strong blackmail of a stubborn, honest character he might refuse it in principal regardless of the cost of face, whereas someone who cares more about there appearance might be more easily persuaded even by weak blackmail material). Potentially, deciding on which kind of hooks to go after to get leverage over someone might then become an important part of acquiring their backing.
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In terms of blackmail, they simply *must* create a way to expose your own secret when you're ready in order to get rid of hooks other people have because of it.
E.g. let's say you have fathered a bastard and have always kept it a secret as long as your wife was still alive. But now your wife has died of typhus and you no longer care if anyone knows about your bastard - you should be able to expose the secret now that conditions have changed.
I also think that fabricating stories should never give you a strong hook automatically: what happened to the whole blackmail part of giving the other person the choice if they let you slander them or if they accept a hook?? Why do you just get the hook immediately? Why can't they just say "sure, go ahead and slander me with this lie"?
E.g. let's say you have fathered a bastard and have always kept it a secret as long as your wife was still alive. But now your wife has died of typhus and you no longer care if anyone knows about your bastard - you should be able to expose the secret now that conditions have changed.
I also think that fabricating stories should never give you a strong hook automatically: what happened to the whole blackmail part of giving the other person the choice if they let you slander them or if they accept a hook?? Why do you just get the hook immediately? Why can't they just say "sure, go ahead and slander me with this lie"?
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I'm glad I discovered this thread - it has some extremely important discussion going on. I had not looked at Hooks like this before and there are definitely some great ideas in this thread about how to improve the system. Here are my thoughts:
- Instead of having two categories like "Weak" and "Strong", hooks should have a strength rating from 0 to 100. This rating will be dynamic and will be calculated depending on:
- Source of hook (knows about murder secret, did them a favor etc.)
- Target's traits
- Target's rank
- Target's lifestyle perks
- Blackmailer's traits
- Blackmailer's rank
- Blackmailer's lifestyle perks
- Whenever trying to use the hook, the target will weigh the strength of the hook against reasons that would incline him to not accept the hook e.g. if the blackmailer is asking the target to murder their own child.
- If the hook's strength is bigger than the target's reluctance, they will accept. Otherwise they will refuse and the blackmailer will be free to reveal their secret.
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The threat system is there, I think: there's a whole intrigue skill tree based on "dread" and making people fear you.
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Huh, I could have sworn exposing your own secrets was a feature, but in searching for it I can't find anything. Does seem like a bit of an oversight, I can't think of any reason why you shouldn't be able to leak your own secrets.
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So while I'm not opposed to a system like this. I think one of the main reasons the when with a less granular system is that it works equally well in multiplayer as it does in single player.
Now there probably is some work around to get your system to work with multiplayer. But maybe it wasn't considered worth the time to blanace that all out when there is something else they could work on.
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