View Single Post
Old 06-08-2005, 11:22 AM   #5
Greenstorm
Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 30
Greenstorm is on a distinguished road
I think I was early on the family bandwagon on Chia, because i've always liked entering the game with a glot of familiar people (ICly) around me. On Otherspace this was briefly sucessful, but really wonderful when it was, when I would do things like brother-sister relationships.

The problem with brother-sister, or any one single kin relationship, is that so often players or just the character stops connecting as much. Even in romantic relationships, you get the feeling that you're the crutch, where you're rping with each other because it's too hard to o initiate RP with other people. And when you just RP with one or two people, often the char gets stagnant, and you don't wanna play them anymore.

What happened on Chia was that there's this feudal system with six houses. So, that's six families, and if you create a noble char you're related to everyone in your family, albeit somewhat distantly. Then you can have closer ties too, and somehow it's more socially acceptable there to do so: there are big families, with the mother and the children all played by PCs, and cousins thrown into the mix, and then second cousins, and uncles, and...

So what that means is that even if one person slips idle, there's still a bunch of relatives. Together you kinda devise ways to excuse peopel not being around as much, and on Chia, if someone really does disappear, the character often goes up so someone else can play them.

It tends to -create- a lot of intrigue, just because if you need your brother's permission to marry, and he doesn't like your beau, well, that's tension. If your son is behaving unacceptably but has a very powerful position, what as a mother do you do?

So anyhow, I really like it when it becomes the norm-- not a rule, but almost everyone is related at least to someone in that social class.
Greenstorm is offline   Reply With Quote