I don't mean to complicate this by all my questions/thoughts below.. but....
Guys, what if we made it so that players could choose what their family marriage views are during their first character creation the same way we choose what region our family is from? Here's the flow:
Choose a name for your family:
Select the following marriage beliefs your family holds: Traditional vs. Free Love? Divorces allowed? Can marry anyone or only those of equal/greater standing?
I think that giving the individual players critical choices like these is the right move bc not everything in this game is SMA and an unknown amount of players will feel very strongly about having their own choice. And, just like your family home, you can change the setting later and that change would be recorded in the family history.
Running with this idea a bit, what if there are 2 characters within the same family that have entirely different views. i.e. Character 1 is of a Saxon/Christian mind and believes in 1 woman for 1 man under the eyes of God. but they have a relative (distant uncle, brother, or child or whatever) that is more of a Viking mentality - divorce happens and there is not really any shame in it. As long as the two remain semi civil and don't cause undue stress or harm to anyone else in the community, no one really cares about it..
I am not really in love with the idea of a "family" view of Marriage, but more on the character by character basis..
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Following a different stream of thought..
What if one spouse dies, is paused, or is deleted, how does that impact the status page? Does that complicate the coding at all?
A) If a Spouse dies, 1) I imagine the views on re-marriage from an IG perspective are dependent on the religion (assuming we bring religion into this) 2) from a functionality perspective - is remarriage a problem? do we denote the # of times a character has been married and to whom? Or once two characters are not married any longer (regardless of reason) do we pay no mention to the fact that they were at 1 point married?
B) What happens if one spouse gets paused? Do they remain married? This might get sticky in the sense that the player of the spouse might feel like they have the "right" to break the cardinal rule of RP.... don't take control of another player's character w/out consent..
C) What if a character is deleted? How does that impact the marriage - functionally I am thinking here.. Obviously in game the character (probably) dies and the surviving spouse becomes a widow/widower..
