Paradox Interactive games, especially the Crusader Kings series also have some pretty entertaining change logs. E.g., from Crusader Kings II, Patch 2.4 [0]:
- Handsome and lustful men now also populate the cabins in the wild for the pleasures of people who find them attractive.
- Characters who love their spouses very much are now less likely to join holy orders.
- Paranoid parents should no longer worry about potential plots against dead children.
- Fixed that bedtime stories can no longer be told to dead children
- You no longer punish yourself when a prisoner tries to flee from your prison by charming the guard.
- The Orthodox Patriarch is now concerned if Orthodox rulers have heathens in their court.
- Discovering two vassals of the same sex engaging in carnal activities during pagan feasts no longer let's the liege join in on the fun.
- Ambitious claimant adventurers now move out of the realm if they are targetting their liege
- No longer possible to banish your spouse or concubine
The logic is less complex than you'd think. It's generally something like "has flag paranoid, has flag child (patched to has flag alive child), then 1% yearly chance of fearing a plot." It feels complex, thinking of the actual logic killed a fair amount of the fun for me.
>And I wonder about dead children. I remember one game where there could be no dead children.
Probably Skyrim, though it's not rare. Crusader Kings somewhat encourages infanticide, as your brother's bastard could stop your character from inheriting a title.
> The logic is less complex than you'd think. It's generally something like "has flag paranoid, has flag child (patched to has flag alive child), then 1% yearly chance of fearing a plot." It feels complex, thinking of the actual logic killed a fair amount of the fun for me.
But doesn't this overlook the emergent complexity from many actors running these simple rules, plus interactions between them?
A lot of the shenanigans in Dwarf Fortress arise from relatively simple actors following their relatively simple plan, until those plans clash or interact with each other and crazy things start happening - such as prioritizing drinking booze over pulling a lever to lock out a monster.
>But doesn't this overlook the emergent complexity from many actors running these simple rules, plus interactions between them?
Somewhat, but it more feels like "wait for good flag, try to activate good flag events. Wait for enemy to have bad flag, try to activate bad flag events." Other's find it has lasting fun despite that, but I found I lost interest.
Starting sometime in the mid-'00s it became common practice to prevent players from gratuitously killing child NPCs. As I understand it, this was to comply with ratings boards. A good example of the change is Fallout. Fallout 2 had child NPCs with no invincibility, and in the German release they just made the children invisible and untargetable. This caused some issues. In Fallout 3 children can't be damaged by the player, but you can cause their offscreen deaths (with a nuclear bomb, even). Similarly, I think Crusader Kings can get away with it because there's no visual depiction.
As an aside, while I understand the motivation for this kind of thing, I remember finding a child's body after a firefight in Deus Ex and having a moment of moral anxiety as I wondered whether it had been one of my stray bullets or someone else's (or even unrelated to the fight).
If you don't want to see terrible things happening to children, I'm afraid CK is not the game for you. The game goes out of its way to model the worst aspects of medieval life.
There was a bug fix in Nethack a few years ago to make eating parchment spellbooks break vegetarian conduct. Which at one level makes perfect sense: of course parchment is an animal product. But the fact that it comes from the intersection of several kind of weird systems in the game made it such a great Nethack bug. First, that the game tracks vegetarianism at all. Then, the randomized unidentified item descriptions that are mostly flavor text but occasionally have gameplay properties. And finally, why are you eating spellbooks in the first place?
As opposed to eating rings, which can permanently give you the associated magical intrinsics (without having to wear the ring). This, in turn, means that which specific intrinsics you can get that way various from game to game (because you can temporarily polymorph into a metal-eating monster, but some rings are metal and others aren't).
For even more abstract ones I cannot recommend enough the Dwarf Fortress Bugs Twitter account[0]
The last of which is
> Flying creatures keep exploding into pieces and dying: Are they crashing into trees?
[0]sadly no Mastodon, https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs