Just as an aside, the family system will always be competitive. Also, I want the family system to be relatively inflexible and unyielding in terms of being able to get out or undo any decision--i.e., our family system is not a casual RP device!

That's a shame. It would be nice if there was -something- in Lusternia that wasn't a numbers game.

And regarding deleting small families, wouldn't you like to have the chance to refound it with more active members? I thought that was one of the biggest complaints, if the other Founder goes dormant, you can't add more siblings. I was also thinking about database bloat, for the ones with no active members at all.

/agree.

The problem with being able to be in both your and your spouse's family is that where do your children go? And where do their children go?

They should be able to choose, IMO, which can go along with children going to the other family in the case of a divorce, which would be nice to see.

Yeah, that whole thing is the single biggest source of frustration with the system as it is, Estarra. I don't know if you can find ways to make it competitive in a way that's actually fun while removing that aspect, but if you can you should, because there's a pretty good proportion of the population who doesn't want their fun relationships being interfered with by drama pertaining to who does the marrying, whose kids they are, etc.

EDIT: I'm not sure why'd you want children to "go to the other family in the case of a divorce" though. Why it wouldn't still be their choice?

DOUBLE EDIT: Come to think of it though, if you do this you're just deferring the drama to the children instead of the parents. Hmmm.

You just love seeing broken homes. You're so evil.
Yes it is taken out of context. Back to the conversation at hand now. Nothing to see here.

Isn't this the sort of affair families went through "back in the day"? Isn't it pretty a-typical for medieval noble houses to marry off their children into families for the respect and prestige associated with it?

(That's largely how I've viewed the family system, at least - when Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon, Mary was still his daughter, and still a Tudor.)

I would really like a system that could capture the drama of actually having political marriages and marrying into another family and taking their name and losing your inheritance and such in your own.

The problem with it is that all of that is RP which I've never seen anyone really do, because Lusternia doesn't work like that. The family system now seems to be attempting it and failing.

I'd definitely like the wrinkles smoothed out of what we have, and we can totally dispense with the house system for all I care and just go back to using family clans, but I'm uneasy about people wanting two FTs and the ability to divorce and move children around and such. The easier it is to work with, the less of a decision it becomes, and I really like that once you find your family here, they are you family, not just some people you've adopted.

Isn't the sort of affair families went through "back in the day" completely unrelated to whether it's fun or not?

Though, I always found noble-family politicking to be really interesting and fun, to each their own.

So do I. The issues I've seen all seem related to failed attempts at a family because of dormancy or just plain mistakes. Things like wanting to have two FTs can be easily solved with family clans, honestly.

But one of the bigger complaints is that the system is not competitive. A quick look at politics families is enough to show that, plus... at best all of the lesser houses are on 0 points.

Perhaps one improvement there would be to make it so that if you are on negative points you slowly gain points to 0? It would fit in with the reasoning of deeds eventually fading into obscurity.



Err, I'm fairly sure it's not about ft... at all. It's about the fact that if a family allows their children to marry out any contribution they make ceases, in the case of an elected official this could be the difference between your net daily honour being positive, balanced or negative.

Reflected glory however could help with this, if say... Thiden married out of the Starleaf family and into the Talnaras, such a marriage could come with some family honour for the Starleaf (marrying into a more "honourable" family). Along with this, a portion of the honour that Thiden generates for the Talnara might also go to the Starleaf as well, this may or may not extend to spouses or children as well, however it would give an incentive to marrying people out with the hope that such a marriage may eventually provide benefits. Of course there is always the danger that Thiden (+spouse/children) may bring dishonour on to both families too.

Again, we're not looking at the house system, just the family system itself.



Just for the sake of discourse, if I'm going to allow my son to marry out of the family, my family ought to be gaining from it - dowries were a big example of just that. Personally, I think if people actually began that sort of roleplay and brought that into a level of acceptance, I say go for it! Ideally, that seems to me to be just what the system was designed to encourage.

Hmm that would be interesting...Start selling off my kids! Woo.

There needs to be a way to still bring prog. into the family if the other sibling is inactive, i.e. after one week if the other siblings are active, they can confirm it but if nobody confirms it after a certain amount of time (double-three times the time?) the bond goes through because there were no complaints against it.

Something similar for children would be appreciated too.

The ability for family founders at the least to bring children in either without a spouse at all or at least without the spouse being active. It gets really really tiring to have to consider marrying people not because you actually have an interest in it but because if you don't, you're family is not going to grow.

Where this falls down is that in Henry's time it was absolutely unambiguous whose family the children were in after a divorce. In most cases it was the man's, and in all cases, it was the family of greater importance. In Lusternia, it depends on who happened to have proposed. Perhaps if you want to simulate Henry VIII's situation, the children in a divorce should be assigned not by their own choice, but to whichever family is larger or has more honor. That'd still be a system to be gamed rather than used to foster relationships between players, so it'd meet Estarra's requirements; but it'd still prevent children from ending up stuck in the family that's tiny and unimportant, plus it'd be more accurately reflecting the dynamic you've cited.

Hmmm I think if there were a means for those families with five peoples or less to combine families in a ways. Lets say Lyreth and Fain found family "WTF", and Estarra and Roark found family "Sparkles". Neither are really growing and what not. So Lyreth and Fain say hey maybe we are really part of the Sparkles family. So Estarra and Roark go to the hall of records and FAMILY CONSIDER WTF. After like five years of waiting if everyone still wants to do it, it moves all members of the WTF family to now be Sparkles...

That would be kinda neat.