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). One issue is that there are few uses for it, but I suppose that could be expanded. Right now I beleive it is good for cookies and ice cream.
The crucial predecessor of Cantr was a game that had nothing to do with online roleplaying. From as long as I can remember, I have been playing a lot with lego. We used to build cities or ships or whatever we could come up with, and both I and a friend had quite a lot of it and always received new lego for our birthdays. Whereas I would always break everything down again - especially because I simply had to clean up my room again - my friend had a special room for the lego and the city we built there, we did not break down and we just kept playing with it. Then, at some point - and this was the crucial turn - either one of us came up with the idea to use Monopoly money in our game. From now on, we had to pay if we wanted to use new bricks. Perhaps not the money itself was so crucial, as well the way we used it - we did not give the players any money, but each individual character. We gave names to each little character (puppet, or whatever you would call it - we used the term 'poppetje', which is Dutch for little puppet) and made piles on a shelf with the Monopoly banknotes and a label on it to identify the owner.
With this start - individualised money and a permanent city - we had the start of what became one continuous story, to continue over something like ten years. Once we restarted when that friend moved to another house, but from then on, we kept playing and playing the same story. Almost every Saturday, and several days a week during our holidays, we would spent playing with the lego, even when we went through highschool and university. And because we had this continuous timeline, and we learned more and more about how the real world worked, our game developed in a complex society, with different cities and governments, as well as a wide variety of companies, newspapers, libraries, etc. etc. Our administration took as much space as the lego itself. The piles of notes were replaced by banking programs developed ourselves in Pascal, used by a number of different banks. International relations - between the cities -, business development, espionage affairs, revolutions, social security policies, police investigations, crime, ... it all became part of our little game.
The game also had problems, however. We were playing around 150 or 200 characters with just three or four players, making it difficult to play them really as individual characters with individual goals - which was a strong rule we always applied. Never were you allowed to play your characters as just a group, as revolt etc. would become way too easy that way. This is what has been called the 'capital rule' in the last version of Cantr II. Because we had so few players, it became difficult to play the characters actively enough. Hence, we wanted more players - but how do you find anyone else at highschool age who is going to share his Saturday with you playing with the lego? Another problem was that the lego bricks were finite in number. Hence, once all bricks were used in buildings and vehicles, etc., it became very difficult to make any further progress and the whole manufacturing part of the economy did not exist. All economy was service-sector, basically. Thirdly, with us going further in our real lives, it became more and more difficult to meet regularly at this one location to play, so we ended up playing once every couple of months, which made progress in the game extremely slow, and we almost started to forget who our own characters were, or what their names were.
Because of those problems, I started to search for a replacement of the lego game. Our game was unique in the sense that we could play all parts of a complete society - government, bankers, businessmen, criminals, army generals, etc. - and that we were experimenting with different types of governmental organisations - democracy, dictatorship, anarchy, monarchy. Everything was built up by us and we could participate in it all, which made it a very exciting game. We could play all these roles that one cannot - at least not simultanuously - play in real life. The solution for the limited number of bricks seemed to be to program the world in the computer; the solution for the lack of players and the problem of a fixed location seemed to be the internet. Hence, I started thinking about an internet version of the game.
Nick wrote:If you don't check your characters once a day, you're not going anywhere in Cantr.
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