Objection:
No one likes the rule that if you PERSUADE a unit, you get all
of the men underneath it. Steve Chapin said this was a real
pain in T'Nyc, too, so we have first-hand evidence that it's bad.
(It might also follow under this system that the death of a lord
would cause underlings to go independent.)
Solution:
I like the proposal to just move the underlings up a level.
If A dies or is persuaded away, each character sworn to A will
swear fealty to A's lord.
Some say raise the loyalty of these units; some say diminish it.
We could just leave it alone.
Note that the mechanics of the SWEAR command would be the same
as whatever PERSUADE did, so if you SWEARed a unit to your friend,
he'd only get the unit, not the units underneath.
(So a SWEAR would first extract the unit from the tree, then
reinsert it as a leaf elsewhere. Followers do not come along.
This is not obviously good, but it does eliminate the circular
swear problem: B is under A, A tries to swear to B)
This change should filter out the last disadvantage of faction trees.
We're only left with good things (??!)
morrow@remus.rutgers.edu:
> "Is all this complexity warranted by the effects it will produce?"
Although there is an apparent complexity increase in the system,
there really isn't much of an increase in code complexity. Right now
units can have a lord, but we mash it all into a big flat organization:
everyone's lord is the PC. Faction trees merely let the a unit's lord
be any character above it in the hierarchy.
SWEAR and attitude defaulting are slightly cleaner under the tree system.
scheidel@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Greg Scheidel):
> Along the same lines, under faction trees || heir system what would be the
> difference between the main PC and other units?
The PC is simply the top unit in the tree.
UD078317@VM1.NoDak.EDU (C. Patrick Simons):
> Ok. I'm just popping this one off, seems there is a ton of mail
> waiting for me to read all of a sudden...:)
Sure is an active list, isn't it? :-)
> How about having trees set up, and if the PC dies, the Heir keeps those
> units tree'd under it, and (hmm) the others either swear over to the
> Heir at a marked loss of loyalty, or become independant?
Yes! This makes perfect sense. The PC can designate an heir, one
of the units sworn to him. If he dies, the heir becomes the new PC,
and keeps all of the men under him. Other branches of the faction tree
may swear over to the new lord, but they may lose loyalty, and some
may desert.
Do we let the PC himself swear to a lower lord, demoting himself and
allowing another unit to rise to the top? This would be the equivalent
of PC-death. You could switch PC's without loss if you were careful...
-- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@rt.com> N2QAV