Why is the word "newspawn" considered IC?

[Chris]

I am curious why the word "newspawn" is considered IC. The new character is not born IC at the time of OOC character creation. The new character is 20 years old, not a baby, and presumably has a past, parents, childhood friends, etc. It's just that your character happens to notice that person only at that moment. If your character ignores the children and teens who are running around the town, that's your character's fault.

I believe that "spawn" is taken from other games that have much less concern with maintaining the distinction between player and character. Your character in WoW or Everquest or Lineage or whatever goes to an area that spawns monsters, which you kill, and then you look for more monster spawns.

The usage is so common that I would be foolish to insist that it be purged. But, for a game community that prides itself on maintaining character/player distinction, it does seem to be an oversight.

[Talapus]

This and derivatives there of have been debated many times before. From what I have heard, the consensus is that characters have no past history, no childhood friends, and to try to play out any of those is in bad tastes at the very least. Since the characters are twenty, but have no life before hand, it would be silly to say they were born; The closest term that could be found is spawn, which has therefore gained widespread popularity in Cantr, and has therefore been incorperated into the culture and heritage of the game. In my view, it is in no way an OOC concept because it is the word that most accurately describes what happens in Cantr.

[Liljum]

In the swedish zone we mostly use newborn. We rarely uses anything else, some players acts as their characters really had a life before they got spawn. But when i started to play Cantr newspawn was quite common in the swedish zone. Not as a translation but as it is, 'newspawn'.

[Sicofonte]

I think as Talapus.

It is annoying when you find in game a newspawn (just newspawned in and inland location) claiming he is Captain Whatever, the son of Captain Jack Sparrow. Or someone than says that he is Perico Palotes descendant of the great Pepico Mazorcas, the last Emperor of Loss Empire.
¬¬
The history must be created and performed in-game, along the play, not just invented.



It is not common in the Spanish zone, but I like to use "recien-creado" (recently created) instead of "recien-engendrado" (newspawn) since to spawn and to engender use the same word in Spanish, "engendrar", and no one is engendering the newspawn (but maybe god).

[SekoETC]

There is the dilemma of no one knowing the parents, the spawn him/herself not knowing anybody around nor nothing about the local culture and history. Everybody starts out equal save for skills and inventing a lineage might force others to treat you differently, so usually when a newspawn claims that they are a princess or something like that, everybody just chuckles and accepts that they are a bit quirky. Cantr is not totally free form in that it has resources and items, and no NPCs so you can't come up with parents because they would be NPCs, unless you pretend to know some of the people in the location which would be awkward because there is no real knowledge. Also you can't come up with a home because how come you can't go back to that home then? One of my characters solved this so that his mother had died and he had torched the house afterwards when he realized she wasn't waking up. But there is no wood around, the nearest sources are very far. So why would they have a cottage? Another character of mine had run away from home when her father tried to force her to marry an older man whom she didn't like. Also she had an imaginary dress until she could make a hide bikini. The people around played along, thanks for that. But the concept of family is pretty much alien to Cantr, and also newbies easily come up with items that would only be available for very rich people in Cantr.
Being 20-years-old refers to the state of development and size.

[Solutions Maximus]

It will be awesome if families and birth ever get implemented.

[the_antisocial_hermit]

It's never seemed OOC to me... I've never heard of a another game that used it quite like that, and they do just sorta... spawn. It's pretty much tabula rasa.

[Chris]

I had no idea that having a background story was frowned upon. In every other role playing effort I've ever joined or heard of, a background was encouraged, if not mandatory.

I have also never heard of RP that discouraged people from "making things up." Of course, any storytelling should not be jarringly inconsistent with the game mechanics and what other characters have lived through and observed. To assume that the character popped into existence with language and motor skills, etc., seems to be for the player's convenience, not any serious simulation.

Aren't Cantr's natural laws roughly equivalent to ours? I remember reading that skill levels are heavily influenced by the skills of two random parents in the place. I just thought that perhaps people lost track of who is whose child, as opposed to a fantasy/sf scenario where people materialize out of thin air.

[SekoETC]

I'm sorry. Cantr is a mixture of a roleplaying game and a building/simulator game which means half the people are of the type that only believes in hard coded facts. People interpret things differently, some believe Cantr is pretty much similar to Earth in that there is night and day (making hour 0 night), how else could we know when days change?; that there is a sun, that people look like people, that there are trees found in non-forest locations, that there is grass on grasslands even though it's not suitable for harvesting, etc. I think you can even rp making items out of resources that you have available in your location or inventory. But you can't make up people, unless you're a schizophrenic and seeing things.

[formerly known as hf]

Becuase the Critical Rule states that you cannot use an OOC information for any individual character (inclusing any information you may have garnered yourself, but with other characters) that makes backstories a bit of a no-no.

How can you build a convincing backstory if you, as a player, don;t know anything about where they spawned?
And if you did know about the area in which they spawned, using that to develop a backstory would be breaking the CR.

So, yes, quite different from most RP. But it is necessary to how Cantr works - the RP is freeform, but is grounded entirely in the game and what has happened in game.

You therefore, couldn't have a character who is the heir of some famous, far away land, if that land doesn't exist, and the character had never been there in game. Neither could the character have a history of being a child in the area they spawn - as that history does not exist in game.

That's not to say you can't develop the personality of a character before spawning, or other less specific backstories.
Some people like to develop these things first, others like to let the events in game affect how their character's personality develops. (The argument often goes that why would a character spawned in an area where all they know is violence and the like, have any problem with it? Personally, I see that as importing out of game ideas...)



Anyways, as for newspawn. It's probably for want of a better word...

[SekoETC]

In one place we call them fledglings.

I think there's a difference between "I come from the space between roads. My parents sent me to get food but now I don't know how to get back. Maybe they knew that would happen, they just didn't tell me so that it would be easier to go." and "I am the heir of the Xian Empire, you all must bow to me!" The first one doesn't hurt anyone while the second one might just ruin the game. Likewise if you would later recognize one of your other characters as your long lost brother/sister, that would give them an OOC reason to co-operate.

I'd say a bg story is OK if
1. you acknowledge that you can never go back to your home
2. you weren't given any items or resources
3. you were only taught skills that are available in Cantr, or ones that can be rp'd and do not hurt anyone (for example singing, dancing)
4. you cannot encounter people from the made up past later in the game (unless you're seeing things)
5. the history doesn't make your status higher than that of other newspawns in your location
6. that the home didn't have technology unknown to the region (requires studying your environment upon spawning or OOC knowledge of the region)
7. you don't know anything about the people in your spawn location other than what you can read on the notes

[Wolf]

I recall old posts where some things were explained.

1. Cantrians do not have genitalia or reproductive organs, which makes it kinda strange for them to have children.

2. Cantr is not like our world, different timeframes, different natural laws and so on.
Even in our world there are differences.
When I look like in my twenties to human standards, how old would I look like in dog years?

3. This is one not pulled from an old post but from myself; the word spawning has been around since quite a while, even before it found use in video-games.
So the assumption that the word "spawn" was pulled from other videogames and as such would be a CRB, isn't really holding water.
It'd be easier to argue that other words used in the English language areas would be CRB's, for example the Makisu, or even the Apache throwingstar which has been discussed quite a while ago.
In fact, it'd be easier to say that the use of English, or any playable language for that matter, is a CRB because it comes from the real world, but then we'd really be up the creek, because our Cantrians would just be grunting and building unknown items to see what the "buggabugga" does different than the "buggabooga", and we wouldn't know whether we were farming for much-needed food or pulling up hematite until we found out the difference when that Cantrian starves.
Some hang on to spawning, some say their Cantrians were born, and among the latter there's even a division betyween those that say they were born 20 years before they became noticed, and those that just say they were born on their spawndays.
Some people even manage to properly roleplay some kind of family bond between them, and while I'm feeling more secure and pleasant in the thought that someone just drops in out of the thin air, one of my chars is being considered for fatherhood, because someone else is actually playing a good part as possible offspring of that character.
Long story short... born, spawned, that arguement is about as sensible as saying that all humans are supposed to be born with two arms, two legs, a nose with two nostrils and two eyes... until we see someone who's born with no limbs, a deformed face with no nose and only one eye.
It happens.
If we can accept that in the real world where we deal with stuff that's more hard-coded than the Cantr world, then there shouldn't be an issue about spawning vs. birth in Cantr.
And everyone knows that I'm always right, so that settles it once and for all

[SekoETC]

All of my characters have genitalia How else would you know the difference between men and women? But I think they should implement the neutral gender for people who don't care about the gender of their characters.

[Darkle-ish]

Oooh! An 'it' charrie.

[Chris]

3. This is one not pulled from an old post but from myself; the word spawning has been around since quite a while, even before it found use in video-games.
So the assumption that the word "spawn" was pulled from other videogames and as such would be a CRB, isn't really holding water.

Salmon spawn upstream. A hellfire preacher might call the town drunk a spawn of Satan. But no one uses "spawn" to refer to normal, everyday human procreation -- unless it's meant in a humorous or insulting way. No one in RL asks, "Where did you spawn?"

The word "spawn" used to mean "appear fully grown, seemingly out of thin air" is, I believe, unique to computer/video games.