Advancement: Effectiveness v. Connectedness

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, that's sort of it. Say you have to pay x amount to get an entirely new slot, but you only have to pay a bit less to transfer that slot from one person to the other. This makes total sense. One only has so many hours in the day, and you cannot maintain more than so many contacts. They "erode" over time through disuse. So, iff you swap out, it has to be with the character who you've had the least contact with.

Using your idea with other skills, if you have Sensei 7, perhaps when you leave him, you retain a "Trained by Sensei" 7 skill, but have lost the contact.

Switching contacts would still be beneficial then, encouraging characters to grow. Perhaps switching back to an old contact might be done with a discount. Lots of things to do with this.

Now you have me thinking of a Feudal Japanese setting, something like what I discussed for Shotgun Musashi. Hmmm.

Mike

[contracycle]

A thought:

An actual map could be drawn with rings of proximity; family in the first ring, friends in the second ring, professional acquaintances in the third ring etc.  Rings indicate intimacy.  Entering a romantic relationship would be portrayed by moving an NPC (or PC actually) from ring 2 (friends) to ring 1 (family).

Similarly, characters could be estranged and pushed out of the characters orbit, as it were.  Not everyone you are physically related to necessarily counts as family and vice versa.

[Balbinus]

Contra, nice idea.  That way you could represent it visually on a character sheet which makes things much easier in play.

[GB Steve]

It is a nice idea, although Intimacy isn't enough to represent a relationship. There's also the tone/flavour/emotional content of the relationship.

I suppose it's easier to have strongly flavoured personal relations (love/hate) with those people you are more intimate with.

[Mike Holmes]

And you can still do slots as well. Fewer on the inside than on the outside. This seems counterintuitive at first; the objection comes up that a person with a large number of siblings should have more slots. But I think that there are always people even in our own family that we are more or less intimate with, and only the top tier get the inner circle. The rest really are more like friends.

I'd go four rings:

1. Intimate Family, closest friends, true love.
2. Family, close friends, lovers.
3. Friends, professional relationships, dates.
4. Aquaintances, one nighters

The last would be for people that you know fairly well, but have not built any rapport with yet.

And I'd allow people to skip steps.

As for the Male/female relationship, note how I tried to leave sex out of the equation. Sure it will tend to draw people together, but it can be as light as casual friends. In general, I think that any type of relationship can be on any level. There are just tendencies to some. For purposes of this model, and how it will affect things mechanically, I think this will work.

Just a sample model. I'm sure it can be tweaked.

Mike

[contracycle]

Hmm, it could also be zoned, but that might get crowded.  But say a hex split could be introduced so you get 6 cascading pyramids away from the centre point, the character.  The only downside to such categorization is that it might present the possibility that one person needs to appear in two places.  On the other hand (and in the light of the discussion of mindreading, teehee) it might indicate ambivalence or confusion on the part of the character to the notional alien anthropologist.  You might know that X knows Y, and then be surprised to find out they had two different types of relationships.  But that may well not be the most useful form of representation.

[Seth L. Blumberg]

The type of relationship you have with someone doesn't seem to be as important in the mechanics that are being discussed as the closeness of the relationship. Thus, there's no need to zone the sheet, or have one person in two places, etc.--you just indicate the nature of your relationship to the person next to them in their box on the sheet.

I'm looking forward to this game. Someone please write it.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm looking forward to this game. Someone please write it.

Yeah. Max? Isn't it about time that after all the play you've done across the years that you finally give something back? It was you're idea.

;-)

Mike

[Balbinus]

I'm looking forward to this game. Someone please write it.

Yeah. Max? Isn't it about time that after all the play you've done across the years that you finally give something back? It was you're idea.

;-)

Mike

It's all going toward the Renaissance game, slowly but surely...

Bloody slowly actually.  Not much time to progress stuff.  Still, the ideas are creeping together and by the next millenium or so we may well be there.