It'd be interesting to have positives and negatives on both sides of the scale, say for Influencing, begging and Empowering might work better with a positive honour, but weakening and paranoia might be weaker, and the opposite with a negative honour, weakening and paranoia would be better if you're further into the negative, and begging and empowering would be weaker.

But then you'd need a way to passively decrease your Honour, unless the choice of holding positions was allowed to increase or decrease honour, the same with shrines.

Your noble and rich and everyone knows you, so you can beg easier? Shouldn't begging gain your dishonour?

I'd say positive honor should give boosts to seduction, weakening and empowering while negative honor would give boosts to paranoia and charity. After all, if someone rich and famous is trying to seduce you, it'd work a lot better than someone from that family down the street everyone knows cause the oldest boy got busted for that meth lab, wouldn't it? Weakening and Empowering both mess with self esteem, so once again, if someone popular makes fun of you or says you're awesome, it'll have more of an impact than hearing the same from someone unpopular.

On the other side, you're much more likely to give charity to someone from a poor family than a rich one. And if someone kinda shady tells you about shady dealings it's easier to believe than if some one from an uppercrust kind of family does.

That's how I see it anyway.

I think being in negetive pointst should always be a bad thing. Just make the system more neutral, so that even the "bad" families get possitive points. (like the naming convention I suggested, or maybe even a better naming convention).


I don't know how the system works, but here is how I think it should work. Break up the points internally into categories (could be seen publicly also I guess, but no need for that) Here are my suggested categories.

MEMBERSHIP

You get x amount of points for every family member gained, and lose x amount for every family member lost. (and make it so that if you lose a grandfather/mother, you also lose the grandchildren)
If a family member goes Dormant, count that as losing a family member (but don't make it recusive down the family line) and if a player comes out of dormancy, add the points back.
(calculated every IC month)

POLITICAL INFLUENCE
Each member of the family who has an elected position give the family x amount of points.
Each member of the family who has an appointed position gives the family x/2 amount of points.
(calculated every IC year)
Actively doing things, such as influencing/bashing/questing gives the family some amount of points. (This is to stand in for "login time" without causing people to just idle)

Each member who publishes a book to the librar/creates a play gets the family some points. (each time a play is removed or a book is removed they lose points)

If family members are logged in, drain 1/100th of the amount of points they would have gained if they were influencing/bashing/questing.
If a family member does not log in for two IC months, that should also decrease points. (i.e., the guild lastlogin command returns >1)
( I think that having constant and regular drains to the points will help allow new families to catch up with old ones)
this will help new familiese able to catch up with the olders ones, and


FINACIAL INFLUENCE
Every 5,000 gold that the family has, either in bank accounts or on the persons give a point.
Every 1 credit that family members have from the trade in values of their artifacts gives the person a point.
Each member of the family gives the family some amount of points for every skill they have at trans.
(This would be an overall score, calculated every IC day at midnight, the only way to go into negetives with these points, is you somehow have negetive money or credits)

FAME
Each time a family member hits the #1 spot in some ranking, give the family some points.
Each time a family member loses the #1 spot they lose half the amount of points they would have gained.


Thats how I imagined a system like this would work.

Some folks might want their family to be infamous though. To me, it makes sense for families of very negative social standing to have some 'perks,' families of very positive social standing to have 'perks' of a different nature, and neutral families who don't have many points either way to have little or no special perks at all.

Well, thats why I suggested moving away from the "honour" verbage, and instead choose something like stability. Let the family be honorable or Infamous in a RP setting, and let the mechanics just define how stable and well entrenched the family is into the world. We already have families who are famous for certain things one way or another because of their RP. I don't think we should try to code something so subjective. However, if a family is stable, or if its got its fingers everywhere, or if it could buy out the entire credit market, are objective things which can be coded, and balanced. (Sort of like how the world organizations rank countries)

I was wondering if the whole count or honor thing could reset randomly every set period of time to make it sort of up in the air. Like culture stuff.

Pretty much a requirement.

What daganev had looks good, except for the drain of having people inactive, it's a bit hard sometimes for people to always be around, and a lot of the great houses 50+ people would have a lot inactive, so they'd be automatically starting with a passive drain, not to mention if this is applied to the Banner houses, they'd probably start off with more drain than positive.

Thats why I thought it would be a good indicator of which houses are actually up and active. All houses would have an equal amount of drain etc. But when a family is realy active, they would actually be at the top. I.e., a house with the max rating, would really be a house that achieved max rating, rather than being the default state for most houses.

I just figured that if everyone had the penalty.. i.e. it was assumed that the natural state would be that these points go down then the system would be more dynamic/usefull. I can see a once famous house now being in total instability/dissarray because nobody is actually around or active anymore, and the people who are would want to marry out of the family if possible.

But it was really just an afterthought after thinking about how to prevent on family from being so far ahead of everyone else, and keeping the system consistent and non-random.

I want Shervalian to grow and become a Great House. But I can't adopt without Forren.

I want to be able to adopt alone.

As I always say, solution: Make Forren come back! Comes with a spin-off benefit of the Celenwilde being even stronger.

Thinking that rather than the top family getting all the benefits but incremental benefits. For example, if top family is rank 10 of the family system. They get the whole 10% improvement of influencing. Then the next family down may get 9% all the way to 0% increase for families with no or negative honour.

Oh and what about some benefit to Banner houses aligned to Great Houses. Get half of whatever the Great House members are getting.