Suggestion Add Support for Groups/Polycharacters

[Wes]

This suggestion is to add support for character groups in the Star Army, where 2 or more service members can join at the same time and have a linked career where they get orders, rank, and assignments together. These are good for siblings, best friends forever, and couples. Essentially a group page would be treated like a single service member and groups would have the same Star Army struct fields as a Yamataian character. The same would be set up for Nepleslians, and so forth. This would be an IC and OOC thing. The purpose of this is to basically reduce OOC work for paired or grouped characters a.k.a. polycharacters (e.g. Huginn and Muninn from the Frontier Skies plot) by bundling them together.

Characters could always decide to get their own pages later and split from a group if desired (it doesn't have to be forever).

If you like this suggestion, please upvote it using the upvote tools on this post.

As always, your ideas and feedback are both encouraged and appreciated.

 

[Cowboy]

It sounds like a good idea, especially for NPCs. Question: Would the pairs have to be the same rank? I mean wouldn't it get confusing if like one is an officer and one is enlisted?

 

[Wes]

Currently struct allows only one rank, so yes, that's the idea. I guess we could use the higher rank if needed? ...I'd like to avoid that though. If the characters have different ranks it might make sense to just make them their own characters pages, which wouldn't be that hard.

Also, I just remembered how traditional Nekovalkrja methods generated them in threes, which is an example where this grouping could be great. A big use case is squads of low-ranking NPC infantry support the player characters can command.

 

[Wes]

I've got to ask: I posted 2 ideas at the same time and the other one got a score of 7 and this one is only a 2. People who are against this, why? I'm genuinely curious.

 

[raz]

I think people mostly overlooked this (at least a few days ago) because it's very particulate and unimpactful rather than something actively downvoted.

Don't really care myself either way but! Question: Wasn't this already made a thing with the Groups namespace?

 

[Soban]

My understanding is that this is adding the struct to the groups namespace.

 

[Wes]

In a nutshell, it's

1. making it easier, IC and OOC, for small groups of characters (e.g. a 4 person ship crew, a rifle squad, a pair of twins, or inseparable buddies) to be treated the same way a single character would for struct, and
2. to make IC policies that support that (e.g. a program for keeping a pair together).

 

[Soban]

With regard to 2, We already have Paired Assignments, which notes that it doesn't just apply to couples but also to best friends, family/clan members, Nekovalkyrja batch sisters. The way I read that is that 'paired' is inaccurate and you could have a group such as a polycule, siblings, or batch sisters, or whoever use that feature to stay together. So in terms of IC policies, I think only a slight clarification of already existing rules is needed.

So that leaves, one which is like I said applying the struct to groups.

 

[Rizzo]

I've got to ask: I posted 2 ideas at the same time and the other one got a score of 7 and this one is only a 2. People who are against this, why? I'm genuinely curious.

Since I have permission..
One of the reasons I don’t like this idea is because eventually IF/WHEN those characters split, you’ll need to have separate pages anyway. Additionally, it can throttle the ability for those characters to truly become individual characters with their own personalities, motivations, and accomplishments.

IE: Candon and Tsuguka. They deployed together for many missions, but ultimately went on to accomplish different careers. At the point Candon departed for Osman, Primitive Polygon and I would have to spilt that page into separate pages anyway. It would be better to have had them separate from the start.

This might actually be a good idea for NPCs specifically, but for PCs I feel like it’s going to generalize themselves in regards to each other and create an unnecessary chance to have to rewrite character pages.