There IS life before 20 years old...

[west]

I really disagree with Icy about the parent thing; there's nothing in Cantr to suggest that any sort of 'parents' should exist; even animals just appear. There's no ingame precedent for it. There's also nothing in cantr to indicate that people don't just appear, or that 20 isn't just an arbitrary value assigned to a newspawn. They've never seen the outside world, there's no reason they should see any discrepancy. I have at least one person who's convinced people grow on special spawn trees and appear when the pods are ripe. There's also no reason they can't be born with what Lumera and the Soc refer to as common sense; knowing what an oven is for is different than being born knowing exactly how to refine steel or what bauxite does.

I prefer that characters start out as close to a blank slate as possible and let events in their lives determine how they are; in the beginning it's not uncommon for your characters to seem very similar, but they do develop personalities on their own fairly quickly.

I think any attempt to preform a personality for your characters (other than very basic tendencies) is stupid, either through the creation of an elaborate backstory or by modeling them after a RL person or character from other fiction. Characters CREATE their own backstories by living their lives. There are scores of beautifully articulated characters that started off with no preconceived notions of how they'd act, no ambitions necessarily, and still are some of the most nuanced people in the game--as opposed to Johnny Newspawn who is born, announces he's a Doctor and is setting up an Apothecary. (a who? a what?).

[Icy]

Ya, when I said that one of my characters knows how to do artwork, I didn't know that about her until after she had already spawned and was on a bit of a journey. The way situations played out, she ended up revealing that about herself. Thats how I play my characters. I don't make up their entire personality and past right away when I make them, but it develops as I go, and sometimes they say things about themselves that I don't anticipate them saying when I first make them.....if that makes sense.

[Icy]

Haha, I just read some of what the last post (before mine) said and I suppose that makes sense. I can certainly understand where you're coming from and if that's the case, then there's no reason they shouldn't be spawned with common sense. I'll have to use that for future reference.

[Icy]

Thanks for all the input. Haha, I think I understand how it's all supposed to work now.

[The Industriallist]

Thanks for all the input. Haha, I think I understand how it's all supposed to work now.

That put you well ahead of me...I'm still stuck on what exactly common sense is. For example, I knew from before cantr what hematite and bauxite are. Is that "common sense"?

[Lumera]

The way I approach common sense in Cantr is by figuring my characters already know the basics needed for survival, as well as a little about the resources in their location. ie: food is good to eat (they know how to grow it, and if there's none around they realize it's important enough to ask about or go looking for), stone is used to build things and cotton is used to make cloth, though they don't necessarily know anything about the actual tools or processes involved with the last two.

However, I've found that by Cantr's very nature, a lot of the more complicated grey areas are easy to avoid, since from day one you character is surrounded by older people who are going about their daily lives. Someone hands you a trowel and asks you to help build something, even if don't know what you're doing or even what a trowel is, you learn by imitating them.

Your character may need food but not know that potatoes are better than carrots, or either one is better than healing food, but if they look around and see carrot growing projects, they're likely to do the same. If there's an oven sitting there, then you're probably going to see someone cooking meat long before you get a weapon and manage to kill an animal. Same goes for just about any tool that might be lying around.

One of my characters was in a place where there wasn't much else to gather but wood. There were a lot of people hunting, and except for a few potatoes she's been given the only food she saw was meat, so she eventually decided she wanted a weapon. When you're in a forest, a billy club (essentially a heavy stick) doesn't seem too difficult to figure out, so she was fixing to make one of those when someone said they had a primitive bow for sale. She happily traded for it, because bows were what everyone else was using and were obviously the weapon of choice. But my point (and I do have one, I'll get to it eventually... ) was that by observing the other characters, she knew what a bow was and what it was used for long before she was in a position to get one of her own.

Characters may be brand new, but they don't have to be stupid. Now if you're spawned into a forest with nothing but wood and water, and say something like "I need to travel to such-and-such places to get hematite and limestone and coal so I can make iron," then duh, that's a CR breach.

But to address the last post, if you happen to spawn into a place with hematite, I guess it's not too far of a stretch to know it has something to do with iron; and even if it isn't technically "common sense", chances are you're going to see/hear enough of other players working with it or talking about it within the first day or two that it won't matter anyway.

[Antichrist_Online]

I agree with what was said above (My character was the one with the bow).
I tend to use appropriate knowledge in the area. Eg: Mountains are big rocks so will have rocky stuff (stone, hematie), forests have wood and that sort of thing. I also have (most of) my characters know what tools and machines they need in simple terms, like ovens for cooking or knives for sharpening/carving things.

[NetherSpawn]

I still maintain that if a Cantr character is in the same room as a machine that isn't in use, that character understands all the projects on that machine. They also have some understanding of anything on the basic manufacturing menu (at least what category it falls into). That seems inherent in the game's structure to me, anyway. Here's my proof:
It is dramatically illegal for a player to know something that none of his/her characters know, as is constantly being pointed out on the forum. Therefore, if Cantr itself provides me with information under the category of EVERY ONE OF MY CHARACTERS, all my characters must know it. QED.
So, either the premise is wrong and there should be no more censorship , or the ending statement is correct. (With Cantr as an axiom, of course).[/u]

[The Sociologist]

I still maintain that if a Cantr character is in the same room as a machine that isn't in use, that character understands all the projects on that machine.

I agree. He or she is able to try out the machines.

They also have some understanding of anything on the basic manufacturing menu (at least what category it falls into). That seems inherent in the game's structure to me, anyway. Here's my proof:
It is dramatically illegal for a player to know something that none of his/her characters know, as is constantly being pointed out on the forum. Therefore, if Cantr itself provides me with information under the category of EVERY ONE OF MY CHARACTERS, all my characters must know it. QED.

I agree with that also. I think the remaining issue, as pointed out by The Industriallist, is to resolve what is "common sense". I knew immediately what a certain tub was for, but apparently some players did not.

Now I've a char sitting on a heap of animal parts and only one hop away from a town which has the stuff you dissolve in the tub, but not exactly much companionship and 10 lions outside. So, must he sit there for all eternity twiddling his thumbs, or go collect some of the stuff and have fun?

What he may do is find some spurious reason to visit the town so he can "discover" what the dissolving stuff is for, then go home and build a tub. But the spurious nature of this visit is somehow seeping through into his personality in this instance and making him a bit kinda sly and devious.

And I think the reason why I'm developing a problem with the char's personality in this instance, and not in others, is because the use of such tubs is part of my own common-sense general knowledge.

So I think there is little harm in providing a list of what is or is not common sense, eg "ovens are for cooking". On the whole it probably does less harm to the characters.
.

[Zoot]

I'm a bit halfway with this.

My character is spawned, I have her interact, a personality is formed based on who she talks to and where she is... and -then- I create the backstory.

Granted, such backstories don't give my character knowlege she wouldn't already have, and are only shared with other rather serious roleplayers who do the same thing. My characters don't shout "Let me tell YOU about that mother of mine" in the middle of Krif.

Perhaps I bend the rules, but I do so privately. They start out at twenty! It's tempting.

[fishfin]

With my caracters i asume they had parents who taught them everything but they had a (what's that word, it's when you like forget your past).

[the_antisocial_hermit]

I know my chars are 20 when they spawn... but... as far as I'm concerned, their DoB is the day they spawn, because that's the day they gain consciousness (well, some do, some wait a day or two, or until they die) and appear. They don't really exist before that, even though their age, 20, would make it seem so. Therefore, to me, 20=0, and they're just on a different scale, rather than the 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, etc. scale. Changing the scale to 20 only really rationalizes to us OOC that they are of the age to be able to take care of themselves, and it leaves room for adding in children later if it can ever be worked out.

Right, there's my view from another post in another forum.

[SekoETC]

what's that word, it's when you like forget your past

Amnesia.

Mine came from the space between roads and towns, that's why no one ever saw their families. The problem is once you walk to a town, you don't know how to go back anymore.

[saztronic]

I guess what I find most surprising about this thread is how seriously everyone takes it. Because, well, I don't. I haven't ever thought about it. But now I am, so...

Some people are just born good or bad. The prevailing sentiment in this thread seems to be a char should be spawned tabula rasa and then develop its character traits in response to its surroundings. But there is nature as well as nurture. Some people IRL are genetically hardwired to be a certain way. Using the tabula rasa argument, it's hard to believe that anyone in Cantr would be homosexual, for example. For that matter, it's hard to believe that anyone in Cantr would know how to talk. Or walk. Or pick something up. Or read.

But our charries are "born" at 20. They have some fine motor skills. They know how to talk. And with a few exceptions, they know how to read. Is it really such an increcible jump to think they would know how to use an oven?

Or want to be a pirate from day one, as one of my chars did? He didn't know what boats were yet, so it didn't take that form exactly, but he knew he wanted to steal from everyone and hurt people. Some folks are just like that.

And another char, I decided before he spawned that he would be good, honorable, loyal -- not shy about violence at all, but not looking for it. And he would have a crazy accent (which he could never have picked up otherwise). This char, though now dead, is the only one of mine that ever gets mentioned on the forums for great roleplay. There's a boat and a monument named after him.

Speech impediments, dimwittedness, clumsiness, physical size, food likes and dislikes, sexual preference, allergies, addictions, uncontrollable fits of rage, bipolar behavior, linguistic aptitude, and predispositions of all kinds -- to generosity, to cruelty, to hyperactivity, whatever -- can be affected by environment, but only rarely originate with environment.

So unless you chars spawn in fetal positions on the ground, and need to be bathed, and fed by hand, and learn to speak one word at a time, and take their first tottering steps in the game, and only learn that fire is hot by sticking their hands in it, then I find the argument that you should spawn tabula rasa disingenuous on its face.

That doesn't mean I think chars should have childhoods, but I don't wake up in cold sweats worrying about it either.

[The Cynic]

I concur.