Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Character Relations (Friend, Enemy, ...)

Everybody (hopefully) knows the awesome feature, that allows you/your character to add a circle of acquaintances.

The only problem is, that there are so many more types, like:

Employed by:
Slave of: (Don't ask me.)
Owner of: (Don't ask me.)

The options at the moment are limited, and there is no way you can cover all the (weird) relations from some characters.

Why not use just an empty textbox, so the users can fill out the information for themselves?
Or probably better, the user creates "Standart Relations - Headliners" for his char (like 5 different?) and drag and drop the newly added Characters into one of them.

It would also (hopefully) help to gather information about the "relations" used in RPR so it would be easier to build a family tree?

The current system is certainly imperfect. There are fringe cases that could be added forever.

The system you propose presents some challenges to the control I had been trying to maintain, wherein people can approve what type of relationship they are displayed as having with other characters. It'd be hard to do a system of text boxes without allowing editing. We may be able to find a way around those, but even beyond that, I simply don't have the resources to develop the system you suggest. Perhaps we'll come back around to it at some point in the future.

We do have an area for notes, that can be displayed publicly, that help to mitigate these outlier relationshp types. The idea is to pick the closest type and use the notes to modify. So if your character feels warmly toward its owner, it might go under friend with a note that that person is actually the master. Or if it's got enough Stockholm going on, perhaps it actually considers that person like family.

Yea, you're right, I didn't think of a few things.
You couldn't connect the friend/enemy textboxes with others character's and so on.
Otherwise there would be "Aunt of:" in both of them and so on.

I laughed about the Stockholm Syndrome
And if everything fails, I could always use a Text-Widget to [link] other rpr sites and write down in which relation they are ...

Btw, its not suiting this topic, but speaking of links.
I know you can use images and links BBCode on a rpr site, but is it possible to use both at the same time - like a picture that is clickable?

I'm glad to amuse.

Yup, absolutely! Just stick an image tag inside a url tag.

Thank you I couldn't find it in the "Want more way's to format your text - BBCode"

Yeah. Both commands are there separately, but not shown together.

What if you have a family member who is also an enemy?

This is actually pretty common.

I'd put them in family and then write a note for display that they have been banished/hated/whatever. Unless they've been outright disowned, in which case I'd put them in an enemy with a note that they used to be family until they abandoned their honor (or whatever).

Genius!!!

If someone wanted to do it without heads exploding I'd say reworking the system one more time for that though.

Base options:
Family
Friend
Acquaintance
(And in my opinion, Significant Other should be an option. ...that or a secondary depending, I guess.)

Secondary options, as in, highlight each after picking from above three
Friendly/some synonym thereof
Enemy
(Significant Other?)


For example, for me, Ash and Ero are brothers. Luci and Ferous consider Ash their father, and in a way he is. But Ferous married Ero at one point. Ero was the eventual enemy of all.

So as Ash, I could visit Ero's profile. + Connect; Family; +Enemy
As Ferous, I would visit Ero + Connect ; Family; + Significant Other -- or Enemy. Luci would be +Connect Family Enemy.

Then charting it actually isn't that difficult if you think of assigning each type as a color to the family connection. Names of characters highlight in their classification. Make it a drag and drop of names and connections from the friends list and still show connections IMO.