The Family System

Esei

You know it. You love it, you hate it, you love to hate it. Permanently full of tangled, over-cooked spaghetti, so the story goes.

In the official Discord, family code has been debated time and time again, to varying degrees of argument and/or agreement. I've collected a few of the most common issues and a few suggestions and even solutions, if you will.

ISSUES:

- Family honor tends to be punishing and punitive - to varying degrees. Some people enjoy the grind, and others don't. (Which is not surprising!)

- When you fail upkeep, you also take a huge hit to honor loss. This is displeasing to many. (The human psyche generally dislikes when it 'loses', even if it's not strictly losing anything except one's time.)

- Some are displeased with the strictness of matrimony and similar bonds.

- Some are displeased about the strictness of marrying into someone else's house, or having to create your own, when you might just want to stay in your birth house.

- All of the positive benefits from being in a Great House simply do not exist anymore.

- The family system was designed in mind for a population that would, ultimately, never wane. This is no longer the case.

- The family system was designed with a mindset that stated 'everything must have a mechanical purpose to exist'. This is no longer the case.

- Many families end up relying on only one to three people actively maintaining family honor, which is simply not how it was meant to be played.

- The families with most honor have such low ticks (such as 1 per hunting tick) that collecting enough honor not to lose it for the year can take the entire year to do so.

- Some families tend to scoop up novices who may not be properly suited to the family due to family honor.

SUGGESTIONS:

- Temporarily freeze family honor while a proper fix is worked on. (Xenthos, Ayisdra?)

- Polygamy and/or some other form of polyamory where you can express a secondary relationship in addition to your spouse(s), such as handfasting. (Yinuish)

   - Additional: while in the current system it may be unable for more than 2 parents of a child, it would be cool to have if this happened. Otherwise, any spouse that confirmed the first parent's adoption would become the child's second parent and would be an option for the below. Alternatively, a child could reject one spouse and take another, provided the respective parties remained married during this specific time period (e.x. Bob is married to both Sarah and George. Bob Jr is initially adopted by Bob and confirmed by Sarah. After the adoption succeeds, Bob Jr changes his mind and adopts George as a second parent) (Esei)

- Optional joining your spouse's house - instead of forcing one or the other to take a family name, both can keep their names and remain in their respective houses. Any children adopted by this relationship can choose which family to join. (Evette)

- Make family honor into a vanity resource to buy various RP-related perks, such as family typecasts or emotes. (Kailanna, Lavinya)

Please feel welcome to make discussion in the comments below, this is just what I was able to find and/or remember. This is not an exhaustive list and should not be considered one.

Ayisdra

If freezing honour isn't on the table, even a simple 'disable upkeep loss' would help leaps and bounds until admin have time to properly redo the system (be it a full on delete or making rp perks).

Mugushulishi

Not sure if this is the right place to add this, but as a recent newb it's really difficult to learn more about the families that are available (who to contact, what they "stand" for, what the various distinctions between them are, etc.) to the extent that if you aren't proactively approached by an older character, the whole thing just seems completely not worth your time looking into. A HELP file similar to what you see when you look up a guild or city would be really nice, or even something more detailed like a CLANHELP overview.

Esei

Belatedly, I myself have always kind of wished that families had some sort of helpfile system, like clans, orgs, guilds, orders, etc do. It would be an easy way to keep track of certain traditions (like what might be typically used in proposals or wedding ceremonies, etc), histories, etc without needing to build some sort of library and manually write it down.

Esei

Ok, I've been doing some thinking on this some more, and have collected a bit of an idea of what a family system rework could look like (though I doubt it would remain the same if the admin chose to pick it up at some point). Obviously, ymmv on if this is likeable, and feel free to suggest changes/comments/additions/etc.

- Completely transfer family honor to a perk-based system, where you could buy certain perks for your family with xyz amount of honor (e.x. anything from a typecast to a full homestead that would still require admin oversight, or more gameplay related but still RP-themed perks, like family heads being able to officiate weddings with the same restrictions as CLs/GLs).

    - Similarly, remove the penalties for failing upkeep, as there would no longer be any upkeep required. With perks, there's still something to strive and/or grind for for those that actively enjoy it and want to. It can also be justified RP-wise by a family spending a bit of reputation or calling in 'favors' to have more things for the family.

- Deal away with having to join your spouse's House/family after marrying, as aforementioned in this thread, and allowing folks to remain in their birth families.

- Ideally laying the groundwork for polygamy/polyamorous relationships - I rather doubt this would be ready out of the gate, but possibly something to consider accommodating.

- [???]

- profit