Human-ish Boards: Children Born Onsite

The age old question: How do children born onsite age in relation to the adults/characters already on the site?

Do children born in character have to follow the normal flow of time when aging? Do they get a special pass where they can grow at an increased rate until age X? Are they required to stay as NPC's to the parents until X age where they can have their own accounts?

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I'm curious as to what ways boards have handled this particular issue and if there are any solutions that have worked better/been more effective than others.

Thoughts?

 

Well it depends really. On a Star Trek site you get to break all traditional rules because you can create some sort of "wormhole" and they come back. There is time travel. It all depends on what you want to happen. I once had a character have a pregnancy in less then 3 months due to some steroid injections (similar to the episode in Fringe).

Standard humans though? (No human or time travel element) you should probably keep to the time restrictions as the adults. It'll be weird if in 7 months (game time) that a child is three....... That being said I have a supernatural site that a species (a succubi type species) they grow based on how well they are fed so they can essentially be played within a week of birth and the birth can happen in a month if one wanted.

So it's all relative (all of these have human elements thus my information) but in the end do what you feel is right for your board.

 

It depends on the site's rules, and how you want to play it. Some sites follow a strict system where you must follow real time, and therefore if a child is born, you would have to wait for several years on that site before you can start roleplaying them. However, on some sites there are loopholes. For example, in a land where there is magic, if you want to have the child grow up quicker you could find magical ways to do so.

 

I've never actually encountered the issue of birth or parentage on any site I've been on. (None of my characters have ever been pregnant or gotten another character pregnant. Though to be fair most of them can't due to the fact they aren't human or even organic and thusly lack reproductive capabilities...)

I've also never played on a site where there hasn't been some kind of magic or advanced technology. So there's always been some way for the character to be played relatively quickly.

But for sites that didn't have that luxury, I suppose an alternative option would be to have a sub-forum where you could play the character in the future. So this way you could play them when they're like 8, then when they're sixteen and again when they're 24 all in 3 different topics. Even though the character may have just been born in the non-future/AU sections. So this way you wouldn't have to wait either X-years of real time or use a timeskip in the game (where the whole world goes ahead X-years).

 

Well, playing on wolf sites previously, both Yaz and I have experienced shorter pregnancies and growing ups (lol). But now we're running a site where the characters are human, humans with powers, or shapeshifters. On one hand, I want to say no, leave it be and the player gets to deal with aging the child normally, but on the other hand, I'm thinking about speeding things up. We could actually say it's a defect/quality of the "more advanced" species that they've developed over time/generations. That would be rather easy, though I think what we'll end up doing is putting it up to the members to see what they want.

 

That's likely the best policy Gina.

 

CoSC is sort of hard-core about this... We're a cat game, and they're domestic cats... We have a 2:1 RL months to IC Moons ratio... and our characters are finally considered adults at a year old. Thus people spend two years playing a young cat. But we also tend to have characters who end up really well bonded into the society by the time they're adults, and already have strong IC ties with litter-mates and other age-mates. I feel like spending that time in character as a sub-adult ends up creating a better character.

Granted, I can see the problems it causes in a game with humans, in which the time-to-adulthood could be more than just a few OOC years if you're running 1:1. If you're running faster than natural time, or completely liquid time where things move at the speed of plot, I could see it working without having to fudge anything...

 

Nope. It's 1:1, mostly because Risk was designed to be as hands off for the staff team as possible. I know, it sounds like laziness, but the idea of a self-sufficient game is like a dream to me, mostly because I, as a moving-out-getting-married-full-time-working adult, have very little free time. I don't like spending my time worrying about stuff I have to do on the site when I could be posting. It's rather discouraging, because then I'd never get around to posting with all the stuff that usually needs doing on a site.

So yes, Risk runs on 1:1 time. I think we'll be having a member survey soon so I'll put it to them then.

 

Children age in the story time. Exactly like adults age. And, yes, pregnancy lasts 9 story months.

 

Our story time runs so slow, I doubt we'd ever get a full pregnancy to complete. I mean, 2 years of writing, and we're only a few months into the story time. It would take years and years for a child to be born on our site.

.... I may have built that in on purpose. Don't see much use to have a pregnant woman on board a pirate ship, or have them nursing a baby during battle. I would figure, the captain would dismiss the pregnant woman from service.

 

It's always been the same time flow on my boards. Some genres allowed a way to cheat, which was fine, so long there was an in character explanation.

 

Normal time for my game, although as far as I know, we only have two pregnant characters on the site. One is almost ready to pop and one hasn't found out yet in-game but they'll have to play their character out as pregnant, not skip it. I'm not wasting in-game time to push their characters' babies out faster.

 

Characters have always aged in "real-time" in-story(A story month might take a few/several RL months though), be they adults or children, in all the RPs I've been in.

However, there was this sci fi RP I was in, where one character had a 3-year old daughter, then later that same daughter came back from the future as an adult, so there were two of her running around, one in her twenties and the other a toddler. That was kind of interesting.

 

On my site, children age at the same rate as adults. However, different species age at different rates, which I put in in part so that if someone really wants to have a baby on board and then get to play the baby down the road, they can do it with a species that grows up faster.

 

It's a hard thing, sites that go by IRL time - I've had children of all species on my board grow into adults, and it has nothing to do with the fact that we have been around for 14 years!! :D

We do it as a combination of timeskips and IC time that moves with how fast the plot is going - for example, after we achieve another few plot points, we're going to do a rather long skip to prepare for the next stage of the current plot. I know a few members who are already planning some children to be born during this skip, of multiple species, so it's gonna be super exciting!

Though we do have a loophole, haha. There's a couple of Realms we have with time that moves faster than others (and some that move slower). So if a skip goes by and you want to age a character two or three years instead of one, put them in such and such Realm. Likewise, if you don't want them to age a year, put them in a slower-time Realm. Win win!