Cantr II Discussion Forum

The manner that characters age has always intrigued me. Age is obviously visible to characters. In fact, if every character were standing side by side, other characters could tell differences in age down to at least the hour. However, it's also established that how we as players perceive age has nothing to do with Cantr. A 110 year old can look like they're still 20 regarding physical appearance. So what it is about our characters that advertises their age?

There seems to be two types of age perception:

-decade perception through the 80s
-spawn order perception

Until a character reaches their 90s, you can always tell what decade in age a character is. Yet, side by side, you can tell which character is older even if they are "very old." Perhaps characters give off a dual-aspect aura? One solid color denotes their decade, while the second interacts with the auras of those characters around them, showing in minute detail everyone's age relative to everyone else so intuitively that in the blink of an eye, a character can order by age everyone in town.

However, it's clear these auras can't be seen with conventional sight. Instead, they must be perceived in another manner, a kind of cantrian 6th sense.

Any other theories?

Theory 1:

Cantr characters under the age of 90 have a permanent, changing tattoo on their forehead (or other blatantly obvious and visible location) that boldly states what decade of age they're in. Following that, within each decade there is a series of colors of the tattoo ink so that for wherever the color stands in relation to ROY G BIV is how characters of the same decade relate to each other by age.

Similar to Doug's theory, sure.



Theory 2:

The characters in one location ALWAYS stand in order by age, whether they mean to or not, and their surroundings change and adapt to what they're doing. Thus at hour 1 in Snickington there's a potato field next to a smelting furnace next to a chair, and in hour three there's a forest next to the smelting furnace next to the new under-construction town hall. People who roleplay standing next to someone else who is not right next to them in the age line are delusional and hallucinating.

Cantrians have "rings" (markings) on their bodies just like trees - only they are visible on the outside. By comparing the rings on different persons, one can order them by age.

Rings are bunched together, which makes finding the decade easier. But counting beyond 90 becomes tough. Old people can still be compared by looking at the rings as a whole (as images).

Snickie wrote:Theory 2:

The characters in one location ALWAYS stand in order by age, whether they mean to or not, and their surroundings change and adapt to what they're doing. Thus at hour 1 in Snickington there's a potato field next to a smelting furnace next to a chair, and in hour three there's a forest next to the smelting furnace next to the new under-construction town hall. People who roleplay standing next to someone else who is not right next to them in the age line are delusional and hallucinating.

I've always disagreed with the whole age thing and being able to see who is older. Age means a much different thing in Cantr than in real life. In Cantr, over the hill means nothing unless you choose to play that way. Someone in their twenties means they are young and there is a good chance they will die before they are 30. The older a character gets, the more reliable they are to be active. To line up the people in a town by order of age just makes it easier for pirates to decide who to kill in order to get keys. Some new spawn might look at one of my "very old" characters and call me "old man"... but in fact, I'm stronger, smarter, just as handsome, and have improved my skills for decades...

Doug R. wrote:However, it's clear these auras can't be seen with conventional sight. Instead, they must be perceived in another manner, a kind of cantrian 6th sense.

I'm not sure that I follow how you're able to rule that out.

I assume you mean because there is no convention among IG characters for representing age by visual aspects that we understand, but there is no reason that it must work this way. Perhaps to cantrarians, these aspects of age are as an innate part of their vision as the color yellow is to us - and there is no reason they would describe it via any other means, just as we state that yellow things are yellow, not that they "reflect only the same wavelengths of light that are reflected by a the petals of a sunflower" - and they might find it just as strange and unnatural to describe their visual depiction of age by any other means as we would to describe the nature of different colors to someone born completely colorblind.

It's like trying to imagine what it would be like to see reflections of microwave rays - there is really no good way to conceptualize it.

Perhaps there is some overlay or aspect of cantrarians perceivable to each other similar to the way we see colors. They might be able to loosely approximate certain segments of that "spectrum" into decades the same way we identify different colors as being in the "red" or "blue", or "orange" range, but not be able to finely identify a particular hue on their own except by how it compares to another, the same way we can tell which similar shade of pink is darker when placed side by side, but not when we see each of them at different times in different places.