Currently, this is how POLITICS FAMILIES looks like:

QUOTE

****************************************************

-------------------------------------------------------------
The Great House of Talnara 754 honour (Distinguished)
The Great House of Dekoven 183 honour (Respected)
The Great House of d'Murani 162 honour (Respected)
The Great House of Mes'ard -10 honour (Dishonourable)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Talnaras are now basically unassailable, what with ~600 honour more than the next Greathouse (Dekoven). So, they will for all eternity get to reap the top Greathouse privileges.

We all agree that this is lame, so here are a few things that came to my head:


i. INFLUENCING

Right now, the influencing bonus only affected the Greathouse with most honour. This can be quite unjust, as it is possible to be known and influential with fear and intimidation. As such, I propose that the Greathouse with the most positive honour gain Influencing benefits when using Empower and Seduction, while the Greathouse with the most negative honour gain Influencing benefits when using Paranoia and Weaken. Charity would remain unaffected.

Hmm...makes sense to me. Though I don't know/care much about the greathouses.

Not sure if I like this even as the lowest right now. Mes'ard probably isn't beyond climbing back out of the hole. What I would be more interested in is some sort of sliding scale with it, so that not only the house with the highest honor gets the bonus. The next few houses getting lesser bonuses for still being influential and such seems to make sense.

1. House honour needs to not get to a completely unassailable cap over time. Main problem with the whole thing.
2. However, rewarding people for being the -worst- rather than somewhere in the middle is pretty bad too.
2. Nice Zappa Shurimaru, where'd you get that?
4. When is this "more to come" coming? Gotta be a good idea somewhere in there!

I think the idea was for "evil" houses to have a chance to compete too.

Personally, I don't quite see why a house like d'Murani or Feyranti would want to be "honourable" in the eyes of the entire basin. I don't know if that is currently the case, but their RP might just as well center around.. you know.. being evil. But that is not an option in the current greathouse system. Makes it a bit bland and two-dimensional imo.

I've always seen honour as more not being honourable, but more how well known you are, as you said, d'Murani and the evil houses should be more evil, and not good and honourable, but they'd still be known the more they do public acts.

I think honour needs to be able to give certain buffs, or be spent in low amounts to provide certain things, maybe have family rites to increase exp for an hour for 10 honour, or small things like that.

The honour system needs to be deleted and something else put in.

It was a stupid system littered with bugs and led to a case of nobody gives a damn about honour anyways.

Yes, Talnara are never going to be beat because of a system that was designed badly.

Every family knows this and so no family cares at all about honour anymore.

Not caring = bad.

Spoken from truth.



Honor is so ridiculous. Someone divorces out (which the family has no control over) and you lose a weeks worth of honor. Hunting honor takes forever. If your family happens to have people in other orgs, it's like they don't exist. Our characters are coded into giving a crap about what the Basin thinks of us. Sure, d'Murani are the biggest and most successful family in Magnagora, but Talnara and Dekovan have more friends in Seren and Celest and this makes us sad. Stupid.

Sure, d'Murani as evil and dishonourable makes sense, but honour is a misnomer, and is derived from holding positions and offering and influencing for Mag (and inducting people), all "good" things in a sense regardless of whether you're evil or not. So it doesn't make sense to reward people who are the worst at it.

THAT SAID Gregori is probably right and it's pointless discussing the merits of the current system, heh.

If someone has an idea on how to make the honour system work better, I'm all for considering it. However, if you are just going to say to get rid of it because it's "stupid" then we're not going to go very far in this discussion.

What if you changed the words from Honour based to instead something about power/stability.

My suggestions are:

Entrenched
Inveterate
stable
established
Unstable
precarious
dubious

You start off as "established" with 0 points. This way it makes sense that if you have divorces and the like the family will lose stability, and as you lose positions of power, or do other things which weaken your influence in the world, the state of the percieved longevity of the family will be altered.

There were piles of ideas on how to make the system better given shortly after it first came out.

They were ignored.

At this point, nobody gives a crud about the honour system and any bandaids you put on it will have no effect on the real issue.

Which is a system was designed that allows 1 family to gain such an advantage over every other family that there is no possible way of catching up so long as they can maintain any form of honour gain.

make more kids! (or get them to have grandkids!)

There is no Shayle.

Feel free to link or re-post. If you don't care about the honour system and just want to complain about how awful it is, feel free to post about it in the Idiots forum. As this is the idea forum (and given that I even asked for constructive feedback), let's try and be constructive.

Well for one Killing people who aren't enemies is bad Imo. 2nd thing would be offering honour is almost none effective at all. 3 It affects guilds and citys in the families bind even tighter together to keep their positions. 4 It allows stagnant gain which means those who already are on top will probably stay. 5. It promotes zerg inducting into the family.

I think those are the major problems.

Edited for ideas. 1 give people something to spend their honour on. perferably not Buffs please. 2 make it so the longer you hold a position you get diminished returns on honour gained. 3 Bring out a real reason why we should care about it. Maybe organise some 1 on 1 duels or some quests that don't completly end in waagh fighting or Thoros versus some newb .4 Make more non-combatant ways to gain honour as well.

You may not think I was being constructive, but I was. The honour system needs more than bandaids. It needs a complete review and overhaul.

It needs to be something that -everyone- can participate in fairly and not something that a single family can speed ahead of everyone else on.

Too much honor is gained and lost through people joining and leaving the family, and just not enough for anything else. I think what makes a family great in the real world isn't how many people there are in the family, but what those people do. Give us honor through the little things. Maybe give something minor for those who vote for people in elective office.

It would be interesting to divide the system into four parts, having each giving a bonus depending on the city/commune the family is aligned with. If you do something against your city/commune's rules you could get honor taken away from you. I think you'd have to be careful to pick and chose a few things to use in this way, but it would be interesting to see the effects of such a change.