Referential age

[Gran]

This is a sort of "appeal" suggestion.

Characters have twenty years assigned to them for no special reason when they "spawn". Given the overall uselessness of such feature, here is brought to you a suggestion for the end of any perceived numerically based age distinction. Perception of age, would then, be directly affect by the character's own age, being the perceived age of others the result of the difference between his own and the observed character.

All will mantain, of course, a numerical idea of their own age since they know when they spawned (it's up there in the screen). Yet when concerning to other characters, no longer the qualifiers such as "in his twenties" or "in his fifties" would appear. Instead, a the qualifiers "older" and "youger" would be in use, with intensifiers applied if it seems necessary to distinguish between "somewhat older" and "much older".

[Doug R.]

I like this suggestion, and would add in Surly's suggestion of distinguishing newspawns as such.

[Marian]

I wasn't sure about this idea at first but then I got to thinking, all those specific ages like 60's, 70's, 80's carry a mental image from RL that's just doesn't fit with Cantr, where the older you get the more of a powerful badass you likely are (well unless you're just sleeping in the middle of the town somewhere...). And now that there are descriptions the ages listed will be even less accurate for RL, since not everybody who has a char get old is necessarily going to change their description to give them white hair or wrinkles.

I do think if this goes through it should be combined with Surly's suggestion like Doug said, that way there's still some way to identify newspawns.

[Gran]

I like this suggestion, and would add in Surly's suggestion of distinguishing newspawns as such.

I do recall such suggestion and it was the driving point to my thought. I think you mentioned about distinguishing newspawns in the "Thought or Rant" topic. I'm not all into distinguishing newspawns, but if it's decided such, I'll start searching for a nice translation to suggest outright.

I wasn't sure about this idea at first but then I got to thinking, all those specific ages like 60's, 70's, 80's carry a mental image from RL that's just doesn't fit with Cantr, where the older you get the more of a powerful badass you likely are

In Cantr, you age like Clint Eastwood. That's a well known fact.

[gejyspa]

The nice thing about Gran's suggestion is, that unlike the current situation, you never get to figure out a person's exact spawndate by simply looking at them. (Hmm.. yesterday you were in your twenties, today you are in your thirties, that means you were spawned exactly 600 days ago). Don't know that anybody cares about it, but there MIGHT be some characters who don't care to have their exact age known.

[SumBum]

I like this idea. It's always been one of those mysterious Cantrian sixth senses that they could tell the approximate age of someone just by looking at them. When giving a description of someone I'd try hard to avoid it by saying "he/she was older/younger than me". It's one of those things that goes along the same lines of should or shouldn't we use copied events instead of recounting an event from our char's perspective. Some will, most won't.

Not entirely sold on labeling newspawns but if it helps in some way, go for it.

[Doug R.]

They appear the same age as you.
They appear to be slightly older/younger than you
They appear to be moderately older/younger than you
They appear to be significantly older/younger than you
They appear to be ancient/a newspawn.

[Marian]

They appear the same age as you.
They appear to be slightly older/younger than you
They appear to be moderately older/younger than you
They appear to be significantly older/younger than you
They appear to be ancient/a newspawn.

And what would be the range here? I'm thinking give or take five years for 'slightly', ten to twenty for 'moderately', twenty or more for 'significantly'? I guess that leaves a pretty big gap at the high end, but then again the difference between a twenty-something and a guy who's made it into his forties is pretty hugely significant in Cantr. What's the percentage of characters that even make it that far?

IIRC someone in the other thread mentioned a translation issue with 'newspawn'...just curious, don't people in other language have <i>some</i> kind of term for newly spawned chars, even if it's not a direct translation?

[Gran]

IIRC someone in the other thread mentioned a translation issue with 'newspawn' [...]

Maybe just labeling them as a "newspawn" for the first 40 days would be enough.

Oh, the translator's nightmare.

[...] don't people in other language have some kind of term for newly spawned chars, even if it's not a direct translation?

As far as I can remember, there's no such term at all in my language group. They are called "recently born" if they are ever called something, but the term is avoided because of perceived extracharacterness. Though, for some time, there was a group of characters that referred to them as "sprouted".

[Abe]

I don't like it, because it would force me to name all the characters to understand what's going on. If I'm a visitor in a town and there's only one man who is in his fourties and only one man who is in his sixties, I can understand the events well enough without giving them names like "man1" and "man2" etc.
With this system at the age of 22 a character wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two in the above example. So if you're young it may happen that all of the characters are "significantly older". Same for a character with a really high age: "You arrived at ..... In this location there are 20 people, all of them significantly younger than you."

It's always been one of those mysterious Cantrian sixth senses that they could tell the approximate age of someone just by looking at them. When giving a description of someone I'd try hard to avoid it by saying "he/she was older/younger than me".

Wouldn't it be just as mysterious if a really old character couldn't tell the difference between someone in his twenties and someone in his fourties?

And how long would someone remain a "newspawn"? If you're a leader of a town, you can just put newspawn after their names so that you know you cannot trust them.

[Doug R.]

This is a concern, though you kind of have that problem now with most characters being in their twenties. One solution would be to make custom descriptions automatically appear in the hover-over, so you can tell them apart by "looking" at them.

[Joshuamonkey]

Although I've grown used to the current system, I think it's a nice idea, though the newspawn identification is definitely important to go with this.

Wouldn't it be just as mysterious if a really old character couldn't tell the difference between someone in his twenties and someone in his fourties?

This is my major concern with this. Some old characters would see most any character as newspawn or significantly younger. I personally would find it frustrating. People might start asking what people's ages are along with names, though I suppose that might be a good thing, and a workable solution. Also, I think this would help: Once characters reach the "ancient" age, calculate the difference between other characters based on the defined ancient age, as opposed to the the ancient character's age. So, a 90 year old would see an 80 year old the same way a 120 year old would.

One solution would be to make custom descriptions automatically appear in the hover-over, so you can tell them apart by "looking" at them.

I like this idea, and it's actually what I originally expected the hover over effect to do. It would help people pay attention to the custom descriptions people make for their characters.

[Abe]

I think Joshuamonkey's suggestion about the ancients would work well.

About custom descriptions appearing: That is just what I was thinking, although it only appearing in hover-over would be tiresome (because that would need moving the mouse over all of those people). How about having to define a prominent characteristic in the custom descriptions? It should be given in a separate text field and we'd get events like this:

A slightly younger man with long red hair says: .....
A same aged woman who smells says: ....
You see a moderately older man talking to a newspawn woman.

(Last two being without prominent characteristics). Of course we'd need to explicitly state that this "prominent characteristic" should conform to the above syntax so that we wouldn't have:

A same aged woman She is a woman who is quite small, her ... says:

I think this feature would not only make the events page easier to read (without having to name everyone) but would stimulate RP as well.

[Doug R.]

I think Abe's suggestion would work also, and I quite like it.

[SekoETC]

I seem to remember making a graph on this some time ago, how characters of a certain age should see people older or younger than themselves. I think it would be important to be able to tell if someone is a newspawn no matter how old you are, although how you define a newspawn might vary. For someone who's very old, a 26-year-old might appear very young, while for someone who had just spawned, this person might be considered significantly older, or at least almost. I think it would also be good if it was possible to compare the age of two people somehow, so that if you were an old guy and Bob and Bill both looked like young guys to you, you could still tell that Bob looks somewhat older than Bill.