I've returned to doing some planning on families. I'm still trying to look for a region-wide purpose for them, but that doesn't mean we can't have nice family things now. There are two ways that we can do families, and I'd like some input about which one would be most preferred.
1) Families formed top-down: This would require to matriarch/patriarch of the family to 'approve' new members into the family, or send out an invite to the person. The m(p)atriarch would need to keep track of everything happening in the family, such as marriages, divorces, adoptions, etc and invite accordingly. This would also mean that there's a chance that someone that married into the family wouldn't be invited or recognized, for example.
2) Families formed organically: This would allow any current member of the family (with the confirmation of the other person) to declare they've married or adopted a member, and they would automatically join the family at that point. This is probably more realistic, but would take some control over the family away from the person that founded it.
Either way, I'm going to
try to make it so that relationships are logged and displayed in profiles. There will be a character page with the person's name, titles, holdings, etc as well as their relationships (parents, siblings, children). It's kind of ambitious, but I think it's worth the effort considering how popular families were when they were introduced into the region. I also still think development of families will give Wintreath a unique recruiting point, and provide for the growth of the region...families will be self-motivated to grow, and thus be motivated to recruit and help people settle into the region.
I think there's a very bright future for families in Wintreath.
