Slogged through this, I remember it being said that resetting honour periodically wouldn't make sense, but what about a rolling reset of the last decade or so.

Meaning that things that caused a big bump of dishonour twenty years ago is (understandably) forgotten in light of the years of dedicated service that followed it. Likewise, being a once-great house is (again, understandably) not automatically given a pass if the last generation has devolved into drunkenness, debauchery, and scandal, like the Paavik family.

Actually, on second thought, what if gains and losses were based on general family honour levels that favoured a median. Like:

Nightshade has a billion honour, so they are the very image of a wise and wyrden family. Eventually, people come to expect that level of honour from you, so that when someone DOES act out of line, say, by marrying an y'Kaliath, (Oh! the scandal!) it really hits your reputation.

Meanwhile, those despicable y'Kaliath are at it again. They have very little honour, so what's one more person marrying out going to do to them?

And, on the other end of the Great Southern Highway, a La'Saet traitor has seen the error of his ways, and instead of slaughtering people by the dozen, he lays his blades aside and starts to repair the damage he caused. The family's history is far from spotless, but his repentance shows that in the end, they have some honour to them.

In these examples, Nightshades start with a figurative 3000 honour, so they don't get all that much from their elected positions anymore. (1h/yr)
Because they are so honourable, when the black sheep marries out, they lose 100h for falling so far.
The y'Kaliath are at -3000 honour for this example, but when someone marries out of the family, it's just an average day in the y'Kaliath clan. -1h
And the La'Saet's are at -30 honour, when the traitor defects and joins Celest, the normally small boost to honour is amplified a bit, from, say, 5h, to 20.

As ANOTHER alternative, the gains/losses in honour could be offset by the number of active members (Oh, ANOTHER Talnara reciting that poem at me?/Oh, hey, you don't see members of House Peulus doing THAT every day!), or vote weights of the active members (Yeah, that one guy married out of Eli'Silar, but Telperion's ALWAYS here doing the Light's work, they can't be all that bad./Did you hear!? Phoebus is Archmage now! The Skyplumes must really be proud of all the hard work she puts into the Collective!), or whatever offsets are appropriate.

Having family honour reset makes about as much sense as having combat rankings reset. Yet combat rankings reset, and rightfully so, because even though "logically" a person could and should keep winning and winning, racking up more and more points until they are uncatchable. Like family honour. But combat rankings reset, because you are assigning arbitrary point values to it, and in a game like this, resetting the rankings every so often is healthy. I don't see why family honour has to be any different. It may not make "logical" sense from an IG perspective, but it is healthier for the game, and that is what really counts.

Nevermind.

This may just be nitpicky, but I believe a -huge- improvement would be simply to change the word "honor" to "prestige" or something similar. This system has absolutely nothing to do with honor, it never has, and most likely never will - it -does- have a lot to do with prestige, however.

That being said, here's adding to the ideas list.

Family Traits/Permissions
These would allow you to modify in certain ways how your family gains/loses prestige. For example, let's say d'Murani made a "No Merian" rule in the family. They could then ostracize any merians that popped up without losing prestige (or losing less). They might also add an "Aggressive" trait to their family, where they gain more prestige from defending allied territory (or raiding enemy territory). Each such trait should have a perk, and a penalty associated. In the previous example of "No Merian," this might enable merians to gain more prestige for their family when they kill members of the anti-merian family (Making them targets). Similarly, an "Aggressive" family might gain less prestige from influencing to compensate for the increased prestige of murdering. To prevent this system from being abused, new permissions would have to be done via a sort of family election or referendum, restricting how often it could be done, or simply giving it some sort of cost (Perhaps costing 2 prestige per active family member to add/remove a "trait/permission.")

This, in turn, could affect how prestige is gained for members of various organizations - if a family has a trait of "Glomdoring Sucks," then any members of Glomdoring might cause a minor, passive drain. While, setting a trait of "Gaudiguch is Great" would increase prestige gains for members of Gaudiguch. Organizational traits might be applied slightly differently - positive traits would have to be approved by the city in question (For example, after the family decides that they want to hang out in Gaudiguch, it then goes to a smaller referendum type thing within the Freedom Council in Gaudiguch as to wether or not -they- wish to be associated with the family). Negative traits might be entirely dictated by the terms of the city - Celest, for example, would set the "Screw d'Murani" trait, which would give d'Murani the "Celest Sucks" trait, allowing them to ostracize from Celest for free, take a minor passive prestige loss for Celest members, and give them an increased prestige gain for actions that would harm Celest.

This, unfortunately, would probably be a pain in the ass to code...but I can dream, yes?

This would be a cool thing to have, to better facilitate RP for families. Yes people can just decide "this is our rp" and go for it, but this will actually encourage more of it and give them benefits for sticking with their family rp.

Drop body count requirements entirely. Or if need be, have a small threshold. Five members, active or not? Then from there, base everything off of family honour. You're a lesser/great house based on overall deeds and renown, not the number of people.

I'm not sure about dropping number requirements entirely. 50 is clearly insane, 20 is much more defensible.

15 for lesser, 25 for great.

Only if you let me do something with my family!

That newly founded family, started last week by a couple of 30-something year old characters that got married? I think it shouldn't take them long to get put into the family ranking system. Say... one adoption. Two adoptions. Three, maybe. Immediately let them set org loyalty, favored family race, favored divine, or other family factors. (I think those are great ideas, by the way.) It might be a while before they become significant. They might never become significant. But don't exclude them from the fun.

I'll expand on my earlier suggestion.

I would like to see far more families in the family honour system. As I mentioned, make the cost to enter much smaller. Say, five members in the family. Or even three. I see nothing wrong with there being 100 'families' in the rankings, as long as we don't wind up with 98 lesser houses and 2 great houses. It seems odd to me that we have less than 1 great house per org. We ought to have two or three per org, with some orgs having up to a half dozen.

I would like to see most of the family honour hits fade over time. Store all such hits in a table, with its value. Every year (or decade, whatever), shift those values closer to 0. When a given modifier to the family honour hits 0, it drops off the table. Certain modifiers should not fade, which would together form a base. What those values are, I'd leave up to the admins. But basically, they should be those facets which influence the family honour and do not get stale. Body count, total might, total xp, total explorer levels, whatever the admins feel forms an appropriate, stable baseline. All else decays, good or bad, though points gained for positions shouldn't fade while that person is still in that position. You could even make it so that certain honour modifiers fade at different rates, depending on the significance of those deeds. Certain accomplishments might put two entries in the table, one small one that's permanent and one larger one that fades.

The stable baseline family honour should not be the bulk of the family honour. It should be a somewhat significant gap between a huge family and a barely-enough family, but it should not be the most significant deciding point on whether a family is a Great House or a Lesser House. CURRENT deeds and accomplishments should be more meaningful to family honour. I like the idea that Not Every Family Member is a PC*, which means every family in the system is notable... just some are more notable than others.

I'll use La'Saet as an example. It should be a formalized House, in my mind. It's relatively small in terms of total people, but there's a lot of accomplishment there. It's a fairly notable name. It might be on the wane, or it might be on the rise, depending on the weights put on various accomplishments. But in the system I have in mind, a number of family names that aren't even in the family honour system would be fairly highly placed. Whether they stay there is a matter of activity and accomplishment.

Not Every Family Member is a PC. At some point, a family name should go beyond the PCs. Just like there are nameless Ur'guard and Moondancers and Pyromancers out there that aren't PCs, just like there are countless citizens in an org that aren't even in guilds - bakers, farriers, chandlers, chimney sweeps, bank workers, dock workers, clerks, gaolers, whatever, significant families should also be seen as having individuals that may or may not be PCs. The nameless throng of people assumed to occupy each org... they actually do have names, after all. This change in perception means that the La'Saets (again, just an example) could easily be large enough to be considered a significant House, even if there's only a handful of PCs that are actually the movers and shakers within that family. After an arbitrary length of time after founding, or perhaps an arbitrary length of time after hitting some minimum threshold, it should be assumed that the PCs are only the most notable members of that family, not the entirety of the family.

Eithne! She even came to our wedding.

Someone mentioned reducing the threshold to be 10/20/30 for lesser house/banner house/great house. I'd agree with that, as it gives more people the opportunity to enjoy the house system. I also really like the family honour system. It is a very cool concept with a lot of potential and I would hate to see it done away with. It would be nice to see it expanded upon to give families more power to have an effect (like increased vote weight in city/commune elections) and to have some city-RP, even if it is something like a guard bowing to a Great House member when they enter.

I don't really think the affinity-esque loss of honour from non-city house members is a good idea. I don't think it would be completely unrealistic or out of bounds for a Hallifaxian family to have a relative or two in Glomdoring. If that loss is going to be incorporated, maybe only make it work if some significant portion of the family is outside of the city. I wouldn't be against having a loss from family in rival orgs, though. No upstanding citizen could ever respect a Hallifaxian family who didn't disown anyone who went to Gaudiguch! :-P

That was what I had in mind. IF your family is affiliated with an org, members of that org have a small gain, opposing orgs would have a small drain, and the other orgs would have neither a drain nor a gain. So as you say, there would only be a drain if a Hallifaxian family had a member join Gaudiguch This way, if for some reason a family wanted to keep a member who had joined the 'wrong' org, they would have to work a little harder to offset that.

I've also noticed people seem to forget that there is no difference between a Lesser House and a Banner House. They're just two names for the same thing, whether they're pledged to a Great House or not. So there is only the current 20/50 threshold.

That would force Estarra to define "opposing org", which is something she likely doesn't want to do.

Really? I thought it was Celest/Magnagora, Serenwilde/Glomdoring, Hallifax/Gaudiguch. They've got hard coded conflict quests and everything.

Yeah it's pretty obvious who each org's 'rival' is. The Gary to their Ash, the Draco to their Harry, the Viral to their Simon.

I'm not sure that one works out so well, but points for Gurren Lagann anyway.

Psh we need to bring back the tainted fae!! Oh except we can put their bodies in the spheres on Continuum and they turn into robots..

It's still there in Xion Initiative form, kind of.

Woo families.

There's also the Xion initiative and whatnot though. Estarra seems to want to allow orgs to be flexible in their politics.