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Comments
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Honestly, bloodlines are more an accident of who happens to take you to Delos one day than anything else. You get the surname you get, because you happened to hang out with people who were also bloodlined by someone with that surname, once upon a time. There's no mechanical limitation for it, unlike in metamorphosis.
I do think that dismissing someone out of hand simply because 'they're not playing right' (which I think is Shirszae's underlying point, possibly? One of them, anyways) is never a good way to approach Achaea, which is less about rules than it is about working with others to create a fictional world together.
A. Found someone nice they like to hang out with, and want to find a reason to keep hanging out, so they ask or agree to be bloodlined or,
B. Have friends OOC they want to alt with, or maybe have been introduced to Achaea by, and so, to give a new character an excuse to hang out with an established one, they agree to bloodline beforehand.
If you take a look at my bloodline/honours, you'll see Anedhel shares his name with only one other person in the whole of Sapience, precisely because I want the right to be uppity about who wears it; I don't just force that on other people, I develop what I want my character's family to be like, and begin from square one, instead of one day randomly deciding 'this is the way the world ought to be' and getting pissy at everyone who doesn't agree.
But, it's pretty cool to just assume, too.
C. Got approached by someone who spams BIRTHDAYS for upcoming bloodlineable kids when they were a clueless newb who didn't know any better and basically got conned into signing the legal documents
Watch the Xa'sai family grow!
*quality of children may vary
The general opinion in this thread by people not involved in that kind of setup seems to be "No, mechanically it works this way, this is how I use it, therefore whatever you're trying to do with it is wrong."
So according to the playerbase, nothing in this game bears any kind of validity unless it's mechanically implemented?
But then conversely, when asked for mechanical implementation, those same people claim that we can make it work with what we have and it doesn't need to be mechanically implemented...
And the reason this is coming up OOC is because there is no IC way to address it that hasn't already been addressed, other than kill them repeatedly which is literally mechanically against the rules of the game.
As a note: While Wintermourne works similar, in that you have to earn the right to wear the name, regardless of blood, we have not had any of the above mentioned issues, so I'm not personally invested in whatever the rogue Lichlords and Aristatas do.
" It's not like they suddenly yesterday appeared and said, "Okay, we're commandeering this surname, ya'll need to gtfo.""
They.. kinda did. While they have been working on their current incarnation of the Aristata name being passed down by deeds for perhaps the last century, The Aristata name has existed for centuries before that as a surname passed down through heritage and bloodlines. As a rather optimistic estimate for Saeva and the current Aristata style : they have probably only been about for 1/4 of the Aristata at most, leaving 3/4 or more of the existence of the Aristata as a surname that was passed down via blood.
So yes, they sorta did Commandeer the the existing surname with maybe three centuries (I'm not sure when the quoted founders actually founded the surname) of previous history of being passed down through blood and started telling people to GTFO.
If it had been a new surname, or maybe a more recent one there may have not have been so much trouble. But yes, it was pre-existingly passed through bloodlines and that's where its all gone to hell.
I'm a Gagnon, but trust me, my ancestors have not bred any guard-hounds for centuries. We've been bakers for generations, but at some point we decided to stick to one and pass it down. The same is true of all the Smiths, or the Blacks etc. you englishmen have.
This happened in Ancient Rome, actually forcing the creation of new name categories because people kept passing down their personal ones down. It happened to some extent in the Muslim world if I remember, too, though it is not the standard yet.
It's part of the organic evolution of a lineage. You guys can have your Aristata RP all you want, but sadly, someone passed it on or hung onto it because he considered it earned, and it's really okay. Your job to treat them like unrecognized pariahs, instead of doing mock praising.
I think it's pretty interesting that anyone who is actually a part of or close to any of these sort of 'family' members doesn't seem to have any trouble grasping the concept being expressed but those not tied to any seem really indignant and effected lol.
If anything, that right there is what sounds snowflake-y to me. But maybe I'm missing something obvious.
I'd just like to say, one last time, that families are something you should control by being interesting and engaging, not petty, sour, and hyper-critical Oocly, I suspect.
While there is room for debate between Aristatas on how their "family" dynamics have/could/should evolve, (Just like there is debate within Knighthood as to what makes a Knight) it's a pretty poor argument to say that there's "no wrong way to play" when you're talking about a well-established IC institution. There a lots of "wrong" ways to play lots of roles in this roleplaying game, based on the canon lore and player-influenced history of the organizations and cultures that have developed over the years, and just because there's not a hard-coded Excommunication option for every House/Order/City/Clan org in this game doesn't mean those orgs have no basis to police themselves and keep folks true to the org's established RP.
Someone can absolutely just decide they want to wear the "Sir" or "Dame" title. They are absolutely within their rights to tell me to fuck off when I point out they haven't earned the right to wear them by getting accoladed by one of the Knightly orders. That's a legitimate line of RP for them, (though not very interesting or respectful to the IC institution) but it is also 100% within my rights to tell them they're in the wrong, because I have 300 years (Perhaps thousands of years if you count the Seleucarian histories) of IC roleplay history on my side to back me up. That goes for any long-standing Achaean institution, whether city, house, or "family".
I don't know if you're just playing devil's advocate or just not taking time to understand a separate point of view, but that last post, at least, came off as pretty dense.
Ah, sorry for my mistake. I only saw/heard people getting the Aristata name via bloodline when I was in Mhaldor those 300 years ago. It is possible that they fulfilled some criteria as well as being bloodlined so I acknowledge that possibility.
ETA: Dead horse is dead, but, really, while it may sound like I'm being very critical, I remain hopeful that people'll make families something worthwhile and valuable, in Achaea, not something to have very silly fights over in a purely OOC setting.
It is why I feel it is worth defending families who do work hard, in general, through blood or through a series of challenges/choices, in an OOC setting. I'm not fond of wasting my time for something I don't believe is worthwhile.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
ETA: I certainly take Anedhel's own family very, very seriously, and I spend my time in-game with family more than with any other group by a very, very large margin, for the record. But I don't ever force others to subject to my vision of what family is 'supposed' to be- not even Anedhel's own family, which is really what I've been trying to convey for a few days now, to no avail (particularly only to get angry about it OOC and not change things IC when people disagree with what I think is the way things should be).
Again, that's not an accusation against any of the wayward Aristatas. Whether they have a "right" to the name is a valid debate that the Aristatas, as a whole, get to discuss and decide.
I think that the Knight comparison is better. It encapsulates the impotence of the situation, being annoyed but unable to do anything about it. It's like yelling at another player they can't possibly call themselves a knight because they didn't go through the same institute/program as you did.
This is even a thread in the Roleplaying Section of the forum.
Now that we've arrived at the conclusion that we're meant to be in-role, one tends to be expected to drop hard understandings of mechanics. However, for the same reason that you already literally cannot be removed from a bloodline, we should respect them.
The point though....is this. People have great debates about the qualities of 'RP', because one group sees passively being in role as the barest minimum (using say, using class abilities, being there at all) as being enough. The other side of the spectrum enjoys long form emoting and challenging themselves to adhere to simple roleplay rules that have been well established long before us, ie ;Metagaming, But whether you put in the bare minimum or go out of your way to be 'an RP snob' one thing is always the same:
The IC world is meant to be treated as reality to a character and we fill in all the rules of reality based on the way we know our own to be.
You can choose to believe that in the world of Achaea, families are actually formed as organizations and have nothing but a telepathic organizational channel in common, but if this was so the point of them being families would be entirely moot.
Your family name is a construct, technically irrevocable, whether in the real world or in Achaea's 'real world'. (read: In Character). Therefore, the above example of that Player being Aristata by choice is true. It has absolutely, 110% nothing to do with that Character. The reason I'm pointing this out is because addressing it to the player is exactly pointless. The subject being discussed is Roleplay.
Now, you spoke about the price of freedom in another post and this is the main takeaway that I see being important here. As Achaeans we have a healthy respect for the amazing level of involvement in the perpetual development of the MUD that is afforded to us as players. So much so that we go through all this theorycrafting about the mechanics, Classlead is a huge deal, etc.
Talking about tenure in a Family, mechanics to leave it, determining legitimacy, etc, is removing that freedom that the permanency of it is achieving. For those of us RP snobs out there that want to see things simulated as closely as they should be, the permanency is the most important part.
tl;dr
Nothing about families is leavable beside participation, whether in the real world or Achaea's virtual one. The only concept that makes any sense to debate about is that one should be bootable from the Clan. The Clan is the main source of communication. End of story. You can't extract the blood from their veins too. Please, please stop preaching the gospel of metagame.