Noble Houses

[Kalanar]

GOAL: To encourage cooperation and competition on a noble to noble basis rather than realm to realm, religion to religion etc.

Possible features:

-Head of the House having certain powers over house members.
-Noble houses acquiring strong claims to certain regions making their nobles better candidates for Lords.
-Some sort of "marriage" option to join or leave houses.
-Estates of nobles become a sort of guild house for family members

To be avoided:
Large Houses that might as well be realms... There would need to be incentives or penalties to keep houses from growing larger than 5 or so real life players.

I've been watching a lot of "Game of Thrones" lately and love the family dynamics in the series. It's a rough idea, maybe someone can refine it.

[Norrel]

Every ingame family is already considered a house, so to speak.

[Shizzle]

Every ingame family is already considered a house, so to speak.

Yes, but they don't exactly encourage cooperation or competition, do they?

Usually family members are distributed across differed continents or realm, reducing their interaction to almost zero. If they do end up in the same realm, it mostly results in the well-know clone behaviour.

Now sometimes competition and cooperation does exist. But I find this to be situated more on an OOC level ("I know this player from past characters, I like/dislike him/her), and not really an asset ot the game.

In short, I like the idea

[Tom]

Yes, interesting possibilities there. All of them on hold until we're done doing the current code work.

[egamma]

GOAL: To encourage cooperation and competition on a noble to noble basis rather than realm to realm, religion to religion etc.

Possible features:

-Head of the House having certain powers over house members.
-Noble houses acquiring strong claims to certain regions making their nobles better candidates for Lords.
-Some sort of "marriage" option to join or leave houses.
-Estates of nobles become a sort of guild house for family members

To be avoided:
Large Houses that might as well be realms... There would need to be incentives or penalties to keep houses from growing larger than 5 or so real life players.

I've been watching a lot of "Game of Thrones" lately and love the family dynamics in the series. It's a rough idea, maybe someone can refine it.

How is this different than a guild? How can you not use the current guild mechanics to establish a "Guild House"?

[Indirik]

One wild idea that came out a year or two ago, but I doubt could ever truly happen, is to allow players to establish "Noble Houses", and let other players play characters in that house. So you as a player would not just be "the Kepler Family". Once you had enough fame/money/whatever you could establish your own noble house. As founder of the house you could establish certain precedents or rules (what those would be I have no idea right now) governing the house. Based on some criteria your house could have so many available members. Those available members could be played by *anyone*: The leader of the house makes the slots available, and other people can pick them up and play them. Has lots of interesting possibilities for politics and dynastic families.

[vonGenf]

One wild idea that came out a year or two ago, but I doubt could ever truly happen, is to allow players to establish "Noble Houses", and let other players play characters in that house. So you as a player would not just be "the Kepler Family". Once you had enough fame/money/whatever you could establish your own noble house. As founder of the house you could establish certain precedents or rules (what those would be I have no idea right now) governing the house. Based on some criteria your house could have so many available members. Those available members could be played by *anyone*: The leader of the house makes the slots available, and other people can pick them up and play them. Has lots of interesting possibilities for politics and dynastic families.

How would that work in practice? I'm not talking of the gritty details of the code, but just the naming convention.

Would I sign "Joe von Genf, of the Genfereien Noble House", and then player Kepler would sign "Bill Kepler, of the Genfereien Noble House"?

Or would he sign "Bill von Genf", but be played by Kepler?

Or would he just sign "Bill Kepler", but have his noble house information shown elsewhere?

[Indirik]

I dunno.

[Anaris]

How would that work in practice? I'm not talking of the gritty details of the code, but just the naming convention.

Would I sign "Joe von Genf, of the Genfereien Noble House", and then player Kepler would sign "Bill Kepler, of the Genfereien Noble House"?

Or would he sign "Bill von Genf", but be played by Kepler?

Or would he just sign "Bill Kepler", but have his noble house information shown elsewhere?

I think there would have to be three categories:

• Members of the main house—these would sign their name simply Bill von Genf, and maybe be just those played by the original creator of the von Genf house and those approved by him
• Members of lesser branches of the von Genf family—these would sign their name Bill, of House von Genf
• Members of branches of the family that have become prominent enough in their own right to have a separate name—these would sign their name Bill Kepler, with indication elsewhere of their membership in the greater House of von Genf.

(I was, at least in part, the originator of the system Indirik describes. And yes, I've been thinking about it for a long time. It would be just absurdly cool.)

[Longmane]

Definitely cool as having just started skimming through a book on how they "constructed" (the authors way of putting it not mine ) their families in the middle ages I'd be brilliant trying it     

[pcw27]

Couldn't this be done using guilds, or slightly modified guilds?

[songqu88@gmail.com]

No.

[egamma]

No.

why not? I'm assuming that's because guild positions aren't displayed to those outside the guild. If that was fixed, then why not?

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Someone else can explain.

At a glance: A character can belong to multiple houses. Finite positions. Limited to regions not family.

A guild is a guild. A noble house is a noble house. A passenger plane has the same facilities as an apartment, but they're not the same.

[Kalanar]

A "noble house" could have an honor and prestige rating as well as gold reserves. This would function differently than a guild in that these ratings could span realms and continents and would change depending on the conduct of it's members.

Permanent members:

Head of Household: FOUNDER or heir of the founder)

Permanent members through marriage: OTHER PLAYERS including a declared heir. Once you join a house, you cannot leave. (Or maybe you can with a huge penalty...?)

Conditional members: VASSALS of permanent members excluding those already belonging to a family...? I'm not sure how to handle this aspect. Maybe just leave them out of the equation all together not have vassals of members tied to the house. If they're a vassal, they're already indirectly tied anyway.



And it goes without saying you could make a guild and call it a noble house... But this post is about the potential benefits of creating an in game mechanic to "To encourage cooperation and competition on a noble to noble basis rather than realm to realm, religion to religion etc..." rather than using an existing mechanic and RPing the gaps.


Thanks for the notice Tom! And thanks for your hard work as well.