The Dead Character Thread

[Shedevil]

To the player of Me from Dhung - you are sorely missed.

[Outerhaircell]

Here goes nothing.

• Winnie Grubsworth. Certified psychic.
• Dr. Zavrashia. Professional nudist.
• Trevor / Traveller. Bit of an oddball.
• Scott Dawson. Definitely a sailor. Sort of.
• Nine others died namelessly, or may as well have.

None of these lived particularly long, nor achieved any particular feats. I'm posting mainly to draw the attention of those I've interacted with and thank them for their efforts. The game really isn't for me anymore. It lacks the greater driving force of scarcity and frontier exploration it once had, the overarching plots, grand goals, and culture. I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

Trevor was a good character for the brief time that he was around, such a shame. You're quitting?

[Rocket Frog]

I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

This is what sets me off the most...

[Sunni Daez]

I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

This is what sets me off the most...

Well, ya got food and clothes! lol. Figure it out. If you (in RL) Move to a new town, is the town going to say.. here's a job and you are now part of our circle of friends.... or.. do you go out, ask for a job, find a place to live, make friends? I've spawned, refused free stuff and figured it out. Others of course... well, want more than they are offered.. a couple of mine have felt entitled... again, I also have one that never asks for anything but has made a start to a pretty comfy life ... another that is 29, has the hide stuff given and has done nothing but work on other people's projects. Guess it doesn't bother me as much.

[Rocket Frog]

I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

This is what sets me off the most...

Well, ya got food and clothes! lol. Figure it out. If you (in RL) Move to a new town, is the town going to say.. here's a job and you are now part of our circle of friends.... or.. do you go out, ask for a job, find a place to live, make friends? I've spawned, refused free stuff and figured it out. Others of course... well, want more than they are offered.. a couple of mine have felt entitled... again, I also have one that never asks for anything but has made a start to a pretty comfy life ... another that is 29, has the hide stuff given and has done nothing but work on other people's projects. Guess it doesn't bother me as much.

What maybe pisses me a bit is the fact that most places look just like any other places and there's no cultural difference most of the time. There are rarely any distinctive features, traditions, or things that pull you in. Being given food and clothes just for spawning and literally saying to you "fill the rest by yourself"... Why giving you something in the first place? Or why not introducing you to the place's culture somehow? Why there isn't a culture?
Most of the time, spawning somewhere only makes a difference on which resources you can gather.
It feels pretty... Empty. That's my complain. And I bet this is the same complain of many, that lead characters to die.

[Sunni Daez]

I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

This is what sets me off the most...

Well, ya got food and clothes! lol. Figure it out. If you (in RL) Move to a new town, is the town going to say.. here's a job and you are now part of our circle of friends.... or.. do you go out, ask for a job, find a place to live, make friends? I've spawned, refused free stuff and figured it out. Others of course... well, want more than they are offered.. a couple of mine have felt entitled... again, I also have one that never asks for anything but has made a start to a pretty comfy life ... another that is 29, has the hide stuff given and has done nothing but work on other people's projects. Guess it doesn't bother me as much.

What maybe pisses me a bit is the fact that most places look just like any other places and there's no cultural difference most of the time. There are rarely any distinctive features, traditions, or things that pull you in. Being given food and clothes just for spawning and literally saying to you "fill the rest by yourself"... Why giving you something in the first place? Or why not introducing you to the place's culture somehow? Why there isn't a culture?
Most of the time, spawning somewhere only makes a difference on which resources you can gather.
It feels pretty... Empty. That's my complain. And I bet this is the same complain of many, that lead characters to die.

I agree with the culture part, absolutely. There is little difference between places. There is one place that seems a bit different to me. Very small place though, and not really a cultural thing, more of a habit thing they all do. It's an interesting place to visit for sure.. a punny place when I need a laugh.

[PaintedbyRoses]

Each and every one of your dead or dissatisfied characters had or has the opportunity to turn their town into something interesting. An active character can pretty much achieve whatever they desire. They might have to move someplace else to do it but they can do something to make Cantr a better place, in some way, than they found it.

This isn't a movie theater for characters to sit around and be entertained. It's a play and your character is on stage. Be notable. Be a ham. Do a song and dance. Be the bad guy. Fall in love. Struggle and win or lose. Experience loss. Create something, anything at all.

I'll admit that, although I am very creative in some ways, role play doesn't come easily to me and I'm not good at it. This has kept my characters from being accepted into many an active town. I get mad and I get frustrated. Cantr is actually a lot of work. I've learned not to create too many characters because I become overwhelmed sometimes with just reading what the other characters are doing and saying. I think it's better to have one or two good, active characters than 15 who do next to nothing.

One of my old characters wound up wandering around on a tandem in the wastelands of FU with little hope of ever meeting another person. So she started writing words of wisdom notes and dropping a new one in every town she passed through. This was her legacy and it made her an interesting character for me. I stole the words of wisdom from many RL people and mostly rewrote them to make them sound original. But this was her first note, without any rewriting, and my favorite:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[Valerie]

...
One of my old characters wound up wandering around on a tandem in the wastelands of FU with little hope of ever meeting another person. So she started writing words of wisdom notes and dropping a new one in every town she passed through. This was her legacy and it made her an interesting character for me. I stole the words of wisdom from many RL people and mostly rewrote them to make them sound original. But this was her first note, without any rewriting, and my favorite:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This is inspiring. I have one character that is doing a similar, but much less creative thing.

[gudgeon]

This quote is very good and fits in Cantr very well in multiple senses.

[Chris]

What maybe pisses me a bit is the fact that most places look just like any other places and there's no cultural difference most of the time. There are rarely any distinctive features, traditions, or things that pull you in. Being given food and clothes just for spawning and literally saying to you "fill the rest by yourself"... Why giving you something in the first place? Or why not introducing you to the place's culture somehow? Why there isn't a culture?
Most of the time, spawning somewhere only makes a difference on which resources you can gather.
It feels pretty... Empty. That's my complain. And I bet this is the same complain of many, that lead characters to die.

Cantr leaves culture and history, etc., to players. You can be anything you want, blah blah. There have been some great cultural achievements over the years, but players alone aren't going to sustain anything for long.

Cantr is called an RPG, but pick up any RPG book (D&D, Shadowrun, The Dresden Files, etc.) and you'll see hundreds of pages of background about people, places, and history. Creativity flourishes within constraints. Imagine a GM shows up to a group and says, "OK, what do you do?" No system, no setting, nothing. Just be whatever you want. I'm sure the best of the best GMs could pull it off, but for 99% of them, it will be the worst session ever.

[gudgeon]

Well if you spawn into Genesis there's no clothing in the barrel...

[zymurge]

I wonder how much of this recent malaise with spawned characters is caused by the new spawning algorithm. My theory is this:

The well established towns are established because they've been around for a long time, have pretty much all of the resources and facilities they'll ever need, and have settled into doing busy work to maintain food and stocks. The people there in charge have been around for decades and have established a nice stable status quo. The town centers essentially become social circles and people hang out to mostly just chat in RP persona while doing their busy work. Because there's a lack of urgency for survival and little opportunity to advance the towns, there's a lot of inertia for change.

Add in the new spawning algorithm that heavily favors dropping spawns into towns with lots of conversation. That means most spawns end up in place described above. The big towns have become kind of meh about their newspawns, because so many of them lose interest and die. Players don't really want to invest in forming new relationships until the spawn shows that they going to hang around and add some color. This culminates in the point to the bucket and let's see what you got greeting.

It's become a death spiral. Too many spawns in big cities mean low investment in the spawn because of low life expectancy. Too little attention on the spawn causes the player to lose interest and abandon the character, thus fueling the first issue.

The solution is to provide less spawns to the established towns. Make them rarer and something that the towns will have a vested interest in. That higher level interaction will entice more players to keep their characters there. Meanwhile, more spawning into the frontier areas will give players a different set of survival goals and hopefully increase their desire to stick around. Those that want to be in bigger towns can do enough to gather basic survival gear and then find a way to a bigger town. At that point, they've invested enough in these characters to keep them alive once in the larger town.

To summarize all of this with a practical suggestion, I think there's essentially a few different preferences for players starting new characters:

1. I want to spawn in a thriving place where I can focus on RP with an active group
2. I want to spawn in a small town where there's much to do and a few people to do it with
3. I want to live on the edge and spawn in place where I've got frontier level work to do just to survive
4. I want to roll with what life throws me, so totally random

So here's the crazy idea. Give the player a choice between those options at character creation time. Then the algorithm can find a fitting spot. This works because part of RPing your character is to define the type of setting that they want to start in. We already typically preselect things like names, life goals, back story, personality type, etc so picking their spawn setting isn't a stretch. Also, by allowing the player to pick, that reduces some of the cases where a player doesn't like the spawn situation and abandons the character because of that.

[Black Canyon]

...The solution is to provide less spawns to the established towns. Make them rarer and something that the towns will have a vested interest in. That higher level interaction will entice more players to keep their characters there. Meanwhile, more spawning into the frontier areas will give players a different set of survival goals and hopefully increase their desire to stick around. Those that want to be in bigger towns can do enough to gather basic survival gear and then find a way to a bigger town. At that point, they've invested enough in these characters to keep them alive once in the larger town.

To summarize all of this with a practical suggestion, I think there's essentially a few different preferences for players starting new characters:

1. I want to spawn in a thriving place where I can focus on RP with an active group
2. I want to spawn in a small town where there's much to do and a few people to do it with
3. I want to live on the edge and spawn in place where I've got frontier level work to do just to survive
4. I want to roll with what life throws me, so totally random

So here's the crazy idea. Give the player a choice between those options at character creation time. Then the algorithm can find a fitting spot. This works because part of RPing your character is to define the type of setting that they want to start in. We already typically preselect things like names, life goals, back story, personality type, etc so picking their spawn setting isn't a stretch. Also, by allowing the player to pick, that reduces some of the cases where a player doesn't like the spawn situation and abandons the character because of that.

I really love this idea! Can we make it an official suggestion?

[*Wiro]

Here goes nothing.

• Winnie Grubsworth. Certified psychic.
• Dr. Zavrashia. Professional nudist.
• Trevor / Traveller. Bit of an oddball.
• Scott Dawson. Definitely a sailor. Sort of.
• Nine others died namelessly, or may as well have.

None of these lived particularly long, nor achieved any particular feats. I'm posting mainly to draw the attention of those I've interacted with and thank them for their efforts. The game really isn't for me anymore. It lacks the greater driving force of scarcity and frontier exploration it once had, the overarching plots, grand goals, and culture. I hate to say that nearly every character I spawned could be summed up like this:

"Welcome, there's hardly any laws, don't kill, clothes and food are in the barrel. Sort the rest out yourself."

Trevor was a good character for the brief time that he was around, such a shame. You're quitting?

Yes, sorry about that! It was just a two week attempt at finding my way back into the game, but it wasn’t meant to be. Trevor left a lovely drawing behind I hope finds it way into the right (or wrong) hands.

[Outerhaircell]

Trevor left a lovely drawing behind I hope finds it way into the right (or wrong) hands.