Some suggestions for Cantr II or III

[Sicofonte]

Some suggestions for this or the next Cantr
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For simplicity, all kind of action must be simuled in the same way, that is, as a project. Simplicity implies as well that all projects must have the same attributes an mandatory to be flexible enough to represent realistic and confortably any possible action that could be done in the game: an action associated, a duration, one or more ending-conditions, and one or more base production rates.


Some project [sketchs]:

- Hunt (or fishing): you specify the time you will be hunting/fishing and/or the maximum weight of [piezas de caza] (that must fit in the inventory); your hability and the present fauna determines the result each hour, and the project ends when the time or the weight is reached.

- Fight: you specify the ruddeness and, one or more of the ending-condition parameters: time you will be fighting, the maximum damage inflicted to the adversary and maximum damage received; the combat ends when one of the ending-conditions are achieved.

The characters being attacked will stop their current project to defend themself, using the better shield and weapon available in the inventary. And yes, the attacking char could be killed by the defending one if the later gets to inflict enough damage in a single combat round (one hour).
The damage inflicted by each fighter on each turn (hour) depends on the base damage of the weapon (that should be adjusted to allow survival for at least 8 hours in bad conditions), the tireness and hunger, and the skill.

- Driving: to drive a land vehicule needs a project as well, spending all the time of the driver in the trip with that project; the skill affects the speed and deterioration of the vehicle.

- Sailing (for sail ships): depending on the size and class of the ship, the more sailors are needed in the project for sailing; the speed, direction and duration of the movement can be set by anyone participating in the project, but only when all the required sailors are participating; extra number of sailors, up to a particular maximum, can work in the project, increasing the skill of the captain (the highest skill in the sailors group) that reverts in an increasing of the ship's speed and huracan-endurance.

- Rowing (for ships with oars or paddles): the minimum number of rowers depends on the size and class of the ship; the process could be complicated allowing the rowers to change the speed and time but not the direction, and requiring a different sailor in a different project to be the captain leading the direction, but simplicity tells us that it's better to allow all the sailors in the project to sail the boat given the attibutes of a MMORPG; the maximum speed of the ship is only achieved with the maximum amount of sailors engaged in the project (and it is tired).

- Getting pregnant / Sex: one man and one girl required (I don't care about, but maybe it's better to requiere just "one or more person", allowing then the onanism, homosexuality and orgies); the time employed and the fertility skill determines the probability of getting pregnant, being subjected to the availability of players.

- Giving birth: the pregnant woman gives birth after a time, taking the project an hour, and automatically shuting down any previous project (even fight!); the child, having an equal probability of being son or daughter, appears as an object in the ground (just near the mother ;>). He or she requires (to be healthy or even alive) to be "used" in a bringing-up project, requiring to have in the inventory food for the child too, permanently during the first year, at least seven hours a day the next year, six the third year (when the boy is two years old and growing), five when three, four when four... until two hours when six, and after that two hours until the child becomes teen (what in Cantr? ten years? fifteen? must be decided carefully because it is the) moment when becomes available to be "possessed" by a player.

The newspawning or "possession" would be subjected to the availability of teen childs, as well as to the players waiting for an account, of course. An stimation of the players availabity should affect or even overide the getting pregnant probability.

If there aren't babies? Allow the player to present a (more or less) complete character-conception, including a history, that would be revised by the Players D.; if accepted, the new char will newspawn in an appropiate place for his or her history and expectatives.



Buildings:

The realism principle force us to redesign the building construction to be more flexible. Some premise and hints:

- In the building projects should be indicated how many doors (minimum one) and windows holes will have the building, and how many levels will be over the groud floor (0 would be a building with only ground floor), and if there would be a basement (maximum one basement floor?).
- When finished a ground floor you can continue building more floors (starting "enlarging" projects into the building) or engage in making a door.
- Yes: doors, windows and any "mobile" component of a building will be build separately, and installed in the building after finished, as furnitura and lock in the actual Cantr.
- You can start a light building project to divide a floor into two apartments (specifying the percentage of surface for each room?), getting connected by doors holes in "serie" (i.e. the first room, the one that is accessed by the exterior door, is connected with the second one that cannot access the exterior). If you want to make two separated rooms connected to a main room, you can divide twice the first room; on the other hand, to get three rooms connected in serie, you should divide the first and then the second one. Again, doors should be installed apart.
- The building of additional floors (up or down) implies stairs, that can have a door too.
- Ground floor buildings with windows or doors holes (without a windows or a door) can be accessed inmediatelly.
- Doors and windows will be objects with "estructural points", as vehicles, weapons and tools. Attacking them will damage and eventually destroy them. Some objects will receive extra damage from particular weapons (i.e., attacking a knife with a battering ram could be quite useless, but a door or a car could get severely damaged)



To be continued (not only by me!)

[SekoETC]

Most of these ideas are good, but I have a lot of comments.

Hunting:
- A lot should depend on chance, since sometimes you can go for days without even seeing a glimpse of an animal, but when you get a kill, it's usually enough to satisfy your current need.
- Several people should be able to engage on the hunting project, just like any project. In general, the prey caught by two or more people is more than what these people could catch alone (one can stand still while the other one scares the animal to run right into the hands of the hunter)
- Killed animals should remain as entities and skinning and cutting them should be a project of it's own, to make it seem more important.
- Roasting animals should take less time than it does now, even a big animal should be preparable in just one day.

Fighting:
- Pacifist characters should be given an option to flee when attacked, instead of fighting back.
- If a person attacks somebody and then retreats, the person attacked will now be on their guards and there will be no element of surprise for the next attack.
- People should be allowed to protect others, making them respond to an attack as if it was directed at themselves.

Sailing and Rowing:
- requirements need to be adjusted to the fact that Cantr has a small player base with characters spread all around, having different sleep cycles, thus getting for example four people on the same boat, all willing to row, would already be an archievement.
- If this suggestion were accepted, the names of the current Cantrian ships might have to be changed to give a right image of them. As you can remember from the statistics, the maximum crew on a ship was 12. I assume that was a galleon. Thus galleons should have 6 pairs of rowing places. Even Viking longboats in real life have more than that. Longboats in Cantr are mostly operated by loners, thus they should be operatable by loners also after the change. I imagine rowing along would be hard, so they should be given a little sail.
- sails should be makeable of many materials, including all types of cloth, leather, raw hide and woven reed. Depending on the strenght of the material, they might rip and require patching.

Sex:
- should be consentual between the players, (but not necessarily the characters). If a character has been beaten up by someone who wants to have sex with her, the player might come to the conclusion that is better to give in than to die. Ingame this would be considered rape, but OOC the player would have given his/her consent.
- in case of orgies, the people who were already on the project when the new person joins in should give their consent before the new person is allowed to join. The same goes for someone popping in to help on a masturbation project.
- if more than two people are having sex on the same project, any male can impregnate any female on the project, because it is assumed that they are all having sex with each other and not just having one person watch, or having two couples having sex side by side, but not touching each other. If people want to have group sex with only one partner, they will have to have a separate project.

Giving birth:
- One hour is certainly too short, especially conscerning how hard it is to take care of the child after it's born. The average time should be 7 hours, but the variation would be from 1 hour to two days (though in the latter case the child would most likely be stillborn and the mother would have lost a lot of health)

Tending a child:
- What if the person doesn't have anybody to help her (or him) take care of the child and/or farm/gather/hunt/prepare food for her, thus forcing the character to leave the child unguarded in order to gather food? Even if the gathering project only lasted one hour, it is possible that the player couldn't access the Internet over the next hour, leading into the baby being untended over an hour a day. Would the baby die then? I don't think it should, but there should be a risk for such, increasing every hour the child is left alone. Naturally in an optimal situation, there would be a father to help in maintanance of the child - or maybe a whole village.
- There should be a chance for animals eating the child if it's left on the ground, thus leading into building cribs and keeping children indoors. (Animals should also be able to wander into houses that have no door or have the door left open, but they could be scared away with things that make noise, such as wind chimes.)

[Nalaris]

A fertility skill just sounds stupid. On top of that the problem with babies is incredibly great: either A)they start out as helpless infants(or something similar) and new inexperienced newspawns will get fed up with that really fast, or 2)they're NPC's until they turn twenty, at which point they either suddenly become a functioning member of the community (as opposed to being a resource leech who's only response to any stimuli is to die when not cared for) or spontaneously undergo a massive personality change.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want my history defined for me from the start. If I want something like that, I'll become an actor (or at least an improv actor).

I want to be my own character, with no defining events in my previous life determined by other players(ecspecially since this could give birth to dozens of histories which are random/sadistic).

[Pie]

On the baby issue.

The baby's, should be like a machine (in a way) and theres a project called "feeding the baby" WIch you can only do a certain amount of times a day with a sertain amount of food, and then theres changing the baby, and the like, and when you get through with all of that, POOF!!! A 10 year old.

[N-Aldwitch]

Two issues that majorly block the potential of any of this getting thru,
1) It is unlikely for them to rewrite Cantr to make Cantr 3 (though it would be smart, because you could implement it with Roadmap)
2) If they don't do number 1, these are massive changes so it's best just to rewrite cantr bebfore implementing all of these- so number 1 is required to do no.2...

[SekoETC]

Oh great, the baby problem... we ought to go revive a separate topic for that. It's totally a rediculous thought that someone younger than twenty years old could not be an interesting character, and do lots of stuff. They may be physically weaker but even SIX-year-olds can do a lot of stuff. You'd be surprised. Most children would grow as a part of a community, as newspawns do in today's Cantr. But it would be possible to survive alone from certain age on, if you think about the "wolf children".

[Sicofonte]

Two issues that majorly block the potential of any of this getting thru,
1) It is unlikely for them to rewrite Cantr to make Cantr 3 (though it would be smart, because you could implement it with Roadmap)
2) If they don't do number 1, these are massive changes so it's best just to rewrite cantr bebfore implementing all of these- so number 1 is required to do no.2...

I know, I know, there are almost no probability of rewriting Cantr. But to write my suggestions was free .

Anyway, it could be possible that someone (I'm not pointing at anyone xD) with the necessary time, resources and will to do it get engaged in the project. I mean... it's possible to have a server running Cantr II, and another server running Cantr III [EDIT: and I'd play both!]




SekoETC, all your suggestiosn are good, I like them all!!!

[Nalaris]

I know kids can do things. If fact there's a growing belief that your more intelligent children are more capable than most adults. But giving a twenty year old his entire history written out for him, when the player probably came into Cantr with a totally different idea for his character, is stupid. If we're going to have player run kids, they're going to have to be,
1)optional. If you want to play a twenty year old, you should be able too.
2)Young. About five/six-years oldish. That way they have no history except for having been fed by the parents.
3)Vulnerable. Not capable of sustaining themselves right off the bat, so they'll have to be dependant on the parents until they're at least 10 or so.

[SekoETC]

Yes yes yes, finally someone's thinking approximately the same way I am! Go Nalaris.

5 to 6 years of age is just when we start to think on our own. There are some memories from when you were four, maybe, but those are rare and kids can act a bit funny when they're very tiny. Irrational from the perspective of adults.

But in some cultures, 10 year olds were considered adults. In fact, I once wrote a story about 10 year olds in a rite of passage, therefore I must've been about that age, since once you pass an age, you start thinking people of that age are all childish. No matter how old you grow, you still think the people a few years younger than you are stupid and childish.

Think about all the things you did when you were six. I remember a lot. I remember the adults didn't understand me...

Anyway, you cannot give a history to someone and accept them to chew and swallow it, unless they're an advanced roleplayer who considers it worth the trouble. You cannot force someone to read logs for a year just to be able to play a child. It's understandable that little children forget things, although it would be nice if a little bit of background information would be transmitted to the new player. Mother and father (or who ever have been the main caretakers) should be recognizable without them introducing themselves to you. It doesn't have to be their real names, how many kids know the real names of their parents, anyway? They could be "bababa" and "momo" or something like that.

Another thing that would be nice would be a message that's sent to the player when he or she gets access to the character, holding random quotes from the last year or an OOC description written by one of the parents. However, it should be restricted to about 150 words so that it's short to read.

Also some statistics on how often the child has been hungry, beaten, left alone for extended periods etc. would be useful in determining the personality. There shouldn't be numbers.

[Sicofonte]

A fertility skill just sounds stupid. On top of that the problem with babies is incredibly great: either A)they start out as helpless infants(or something similar) and new inexperienced newspawns will get fed up with that really fast, or 2)they're NPC's until they turn twenty, at which point they either suddenly become a functioning member of the community (as opposed to being a resource leech who's only response to any stimuli is to die when not cared for) or spontaneously undergo a massive personality change.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't want my history defined for me from the start. If I want something like that, I'll become an actor (or at least an improv actor).

I want to be my own character, with no defining events in my previous life determined by other players(ecspecially since this could give birth to dozens of histories which are random/sadistic).

But giving a twenty year old his entire history written out for him, when the player probably came into Cantr with a totally different idea for his character, is stupid. If we're going to have player run kids, they're going to have to be,
1)optional. If you want to play a twenty year old, you should be able too.
2)Young. About five/six-years oldish. That way they have no history except for having been fed by the parents.
3)Vulnerable. Not capable of sustaining themselves right off the bat, so they'll have to be dependant on the parents until they're at least 10 or so.

You like the word "stupid", isn't it?

On top of that:

1) Fertility could be useless, but why stupid?. Please, bring me the light.

2) No one has suggested here to give infants as chars for newbies players (for anyone indeed). We are talking about implementig them as objects, machines or something like that, until an age in which the get "possessed" by a char.

3) No one has suggested to give a personality to the NPC infants, so it can't change after the "possession". It just would be expressed. It is unrealistic, yes. More than to be born aged 20?.

4) No one is talking about "giving a twenty year old [char] his entire history written out for him". The suggestion of allowing the player to present a history por HIS/HER char is for giving the chance of born without parents (an it is just a copy of another suggestion).

Anyway, no one decides his/her previous history in RL. Or maybe most of us are sons and daughters of famous/rich people with the life solved? (and the people that aren't is 'cause they choose it)

It is REALISTIC to be bounded to previous people's actions.

I understand that some people likes to start a newspawn saying things like "I am Captain Nalaris, descendant and heir of an ancient family of pirates. My vessel sunk in a storm and I'm hungry, can someone give me some food?", although there is no coast line in the town. But... it is... stu... stuborness, given that all that char is telling is just FALSE in Cantr and no one is going to humour him. The char was just NEWspawned and has NO history.

But don't get fed up. The only history that couldd be stated by another players would be your family name and their properties. The new players would be just descendant of someone, but nothing else. If they want to ve pirates or millers or stupids, it is up to them.

In my suggestion, masterly supplemented by SekoETC, and based on all that I have read in this forum, was looking for a balance between starting as a defenceless babe and being magically spawned aged 20 and without any kind of history.

Well, I think so...

[Nalaris]

First of all, what does it matter to you what my word choice is? Second, please, don't insult me because of any newspawns mistakes. Some people are trained to come into an RP world with a background, and they wouldn't dream of coming into a world without a mother, a father, and at least a brief history.

A fertility skill would require extra programming and would be, as you have stated, useless. Thus it is stupid as it is work for no result, except perhaps to make the game worse.

If we're just going to have nothing but a food-consuming machine for twenty years and then suddenly get a newspawn twenty year old like any other, why bother? Why not have the child start at age six, as suggested before (and have the option to play either a child or an adult when you begin), thus meaning the child wouldn't really have any past except the parents.

[Sicofonte]

First of all, what does it matter to you what my word choice is?

Do you mind about what matters to me? Oh, you really flatter me.

Second, please, don't insult me because of any newspawns mistakes.

To think that I have insulted you is an stupid idea

Some people are trained to come into an RP world with a background, and they wouldn't dream of coming into a world without a mother, a father, and at least a brief history.

I know, you know, everyone knows, and it is the reason for suggesting the family, the dencendancy, the upbringing of babes in Cantr. Then... you agree with me. And you can swear it: oh, you flatter me.

A fertility skill would require extra programming and would be, as you have stated, useless. Thus it is stupid as it is work for no result, except perhaps to make the game worse.

Extra programming? No, just to add another skill.
Useless in the same way that the rest of skills. The reason is for realism, not for usefulness. If you want to do usefull things, turn off the PC and start studying.
Stupid... stupid... I think that to play Cantr is stupid, but less than to talk with you.

Nalaris, the happiness is in the contemplation (Aristoteles).

If we're just going to have nothing but a food-consuming machine for twenty years [Nalaris, better in teen age, and not fixed], and then suddenly get a newspawn twenty year old like any other [no like any other, one with parents], why bother? [why not? why bother about realism? why bother about playability? why bother about answering your stupid complaints? why not?] Why not have the child start at age six, as suggested before (and have the option to play either a child or an adult when you begin), thus meaning the child wouldn't really have any past except the parents.

Nalaris, you are like a wall. I REPEAT: in this suggestions there is the possibility of being a orphan or better "unparented" newspawn, or a child with parents (and no history but the parents history).

I give up, now I'm sure I can explain nothing to you, maybe my English needs to be improved.

[SekoETC]

Please don't fight. I think you're both on the same side, you just don't know it.

I think people who want to play children should be permitted to "possess" a character between the age of 2 and 6. Any further than this and the child would have to be regarded as a retarded person, since kids should have formed a personality by that age.

Besides, we must think about the parents as well. I know many of us have tended to sleepers, but that's usually people whom you have been close to before they fell asleep. When it's just a computer entity, of which you cannot know how it'll turn out to be (what if the player assigned turns out to be a troll who speaks OOC and tries to steal all the notes?) Eventually you start wondering wether the person will ever wake up. Six years = 120 days - a pretty long time to take care of someone you've never met.