The Need To Survive

[N-Aldwitch]

Currently, I'd say 50% of Cantr characters currently residing in the Cantr world have a high desire to put bravery, valiance and basic heroism on the line before their lives regardless of the case. For example, a killer has captured a character and rather than being calm and cool with the slaver, the prisoner will usually just be plain rude and act 'tough' to the slaver. Same with newspawns, but that's not a good example to persuade you.

This is because many Cantrians (before I say this, many older players and half decent players love their characters and don't do this) really don't see 'life' in their characters, they put the 'tough face' before the 'okay I'll do what you say- just to live'.

Now. Recent installments to Cantr such as the 40-day no-new-character rule have definately improved a player's "love" or .. for lack of a better word, "addiction" to their characters. This is a major plus. This will make a player think twice before bad-mouthing that pirate, or sticking the finger up at that arrogant Town Guard.

One thing that has majorly assisted in my CTD (Character Throwaway Disorder, totalling 100 dead characters plus) is having a social relationship with other characters. And I don't mean "Hey I'll trade you 5 gold for 20 iron, now lets be partial friends", I mean having Best friends, having Girlfriends or Boyfriends, later having Wives and Husbands and adopting children. This is called a social bond and really encourages a character's desire to live, to be lifted to another level.

We need to have implementations that encourage this kind of behaviour. New suggestions, etcetera.

That way, when your next ruthless, bloodthirsty character captures a town, he/she will hear "Oh mercy kind sir! Please don't hurt me and my family! I'll do anything for you! *cries hysterically*" MORE than they'll hear the typical macho-newspawn speech "You wait- reinforcements are round the corner and when I get out of here I'm going to slice your neck slowly and you'll die. You can kill me, I don't care anymore!"

So are there any ways to improve the social bond, or, better word, 'encourage' a social bond? Like making it more streamline to create a family? Etcetera... Feel free to discuss more ideas enhancing this idea, or to point out mistakes on my part.

[sanchez]

50%? Are you sure?

[N-Aldwitch]

50%? Are you sure?

40%? I don't know. There are a lot of newspawns. And a handful of decent RP'ers left.

edit: No need to focus on specifics either.

[km17]

maybe we should come up with ideas rather than fix his mistakes.

i dont see how you can encourage this with new things, maybe make a law that requires you to have a wife/husband.

[Spider]

maybe we should come up with ideas rather than fix his mistakes.

i dont see how you can encourage this with new things, maybe make a law that requires you to have a wife/husband.

You are crazy.

[Nosajimiki]

Wierd, i was just thinking about this yesterday. An idea I had was to make it so that when you spawn you know who your parents are. As is, it only takes two people to be in a place at a time to have newspawns. If instead there had to be mates. (a male and a female where one would send the other a "mate" request that would function as a sort of marrage proposal that would have to be accepted and could be canceled at a latter date). It would not be a project, it would just be a flag that makes the two able to have a kid. Furthermore, you should be able to have more than one mate. Poligomy would really help out large towns with limited female populations. This would do two things, one it would encourage leaders especially to take spouses to bring new gernations of subjects. Two, children would know who thier parents are and have a pre-established target of loyalty, ie: fewer run away newspawns, parents would also know thier children. This could also open up the possibility of brothers and sisters (I guess it will take a little getting over youself when you realize you're doing you sister or cousin, but hey, you do what you gotta do in a limited gene pool). In towns where mating is rare, there could perhaps also be "bastards" who only know thier mother, but this would be a lot more rare for women who have mates, not to mention it would be much fun for RP when a place gets boring and a woman suddenly has a kid who doesn't belong to her husband.
This could also be fun in those super dictatorships where leaders could inforce posstive breeding.

[sanchez]

This has come up many times. And while there are people who clearly really want to play out these kinds of traditional family relationships in game, it is repulsive enough to many others of us to drive fast and far away. Please. No. No enforced heterosexual pairs with children. No forced breeding for women.

[N-Aldwitch]

Cantr isn't a heterosexual game anyway, it doesn't even focus on hetero-sex. You can have a completely desolated island with only two guys, and still, a newspawn will still arrive somehow.
Isn't there some species, wait it's the frog isn't it- that can change gender depending on the situation? This sounds a lot like Cantr.

I'm against any ideas or stuff that -forces- people to have relationships.

That is why I emphasised a key word:
encouraged

That is, encouraged relationships, encouraged social bonds, etcetera- not forced upon relationships, ie Warning: 10 days left to find a mate before your character starts losing 10% health a day. LOL!..

I think there's something there that I can't grab at, or express. That's why I opened this post up.

Also, the parent idea needs to be explored further. Two major issues:
1) The parents would not always have a hetero-sexual relationship (ie two guys or two woman parenting a newspawn in a location with only two people). Some people aren't comfortable with RPing a homosexual relationshop.
2) How do you define who the parents are anyway? Imagine a town has Jill, Bob, Frank, Shirley and Harry. Harry and Shirley become parents! Then due to randomization, Harry and Frank become parents! Then Harry and Bob! Then Bob and Shirley! Then Jill and Shirley! It would be all over the place.

If someone can fix those two issues up then it may in fact be a plausable idea AND!! the most important part! give some characters another reason to beg for their lives like in real life! (unless they actually are valiant warriors, in which case they can do that anyway even if they know they have a wife/husband at home)

Not to stray away from the main issue at hand which needs to be discussed, but in all truth, this is just about creating a more emotional tie to the game.

[sanchez]

But forcing these relationships destroys the need to build them. You are looking for an easy way.

[N-Aldwitch]

Thats looking at it from one view. I am not suggesting anything at this point- I'm suggesting we look for suggestions.

How about if you created the relationship, then clicked a button, (different to this but this is an example) that says: "Ready for newspawn child with [drop down menu of people in location]". This means the first family to do this will be the first family to have a newspawn child. However! For it to work, both parties must be 'ready' for a newspawn child with each other.

This is where the next question is up to the community:
From here, either when creating a new character you have an option of 'Attempt to be spawned between two parents' if there is a potential carrier.. (which just then I realised is bad because it removes the random from Cantr and could allow for friends to spawn right when their friends are parents, causing a friendship trio),
or choice two is, the newspawn algorithm remains the same and they appear in what ever town they are randomly assigned to.

So this is one aspect of free choice of creating a real family, without imposing it upon players.

Now we need to look at possible other ideas that'd encourage social relationships... Any suggestions?

[sanchez]

Pardon the cynicism, but why not just try harder to talk to people instead of killing them? And spawn chars you expect to live to be very old.

[Zanthos]

ive never spawned a character i expect to die young, i just change my expectations on some of them after they're spawned

[N-Aldwitch]

Pardon the cynicism, but why not just try harder to talk to people instead of killing them? And spawn chars you expect to live to be very old.

Sure, that's all good and well to say, but I can tell you it's not happening in the Cantr world.

[the_antisocial_hermit]

If an individual feels like there's not enough social ties to make their character want to live, they ought to seek it out themselves. It won't just come to them; the person has to seek it out for their character. If one character doesn't respond, find another to try to set up a social relationship with (friendship or whatever). Main thing on that is, it's up to the individual to work on. It's hard sometimes to find characters, but it's doable without any other influences. Just have to put your char out there. I know of several places where there are strong social-emotional bonds between characters. Might be few and far between, but it's happening.

I'm just not sure there's any decent way to do anything about this issue by external influences or encouragements. In the end, it has to come from the players and be part of their desires and goals for the game.

[deadboy]

Awww.... it's sad when characters lose this survival instict and sociol-bonds and actually don't care if they die though.....