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Subj: Queen Victoria & her kids
Date: 97-03-19 11:31:08 EST
From: Armenelos

With all these involved state-of-affairs going on, certainly there must be
arranged marraiges between princes and princesses from various parts of the
continent. This brings about a minor rules problem:

How does one adjudicate ability score modifiers when the human is - say -
the child of a Vos warrior and a Khinasi cleric? Does the kid get all the
racial bonuses/penalties of both parents (which would still balance) or a mix
of the two thus taking after one parent more than the other?

In my campaign, I use heritage and history to influence a PCs life such as
blood ties and the manipulation from those blood ties. And a better way of
doing this is by having two distinct and separate parental influences acting
on the PC which is why I want to explore this unique aspect of BR gaming
(thinking of Aunt Natasha in Rjurik writing letters to her nephew, the PC, in
Anuire, asking for his help) - that sort of thing.

Moreover, I am imagining the related royalty that was spread across all of
Europe at the turn of the century who all had the same grandmother, Queen
Victoria. And we are talking the rulers of England, Germany, Russia and a
host of the other smaller countries and principalities. This is what I want
to bring into Birthright - related rulers across the continent. Oh what are
you going to do when that nasty old cousin wants to invade your turf?

Ed BonnySubj: Re:Bloodlines/Hereditary-123
Date: 97-03-20 01:16:35 EST
From: Memnoch I

Silveras writes:
>

So let me see if I have the gist of your concept correct (using the
Darien/Abruae angle). Darien Avan (Andurias, Great/74) has a daughter Abruae
(also Andurias, Great/74). Now as it stands, Abruae has the "proper"
Andurias-Avan bloodline, and she is also the last of the Andurias-Darien Avan
line. Now, being the adventurous sort she goes out and commits bloodtheft on
some unsuspecting scion(s) and her bloodstrength goes up enough to gain an
additional blood
ability, at this point, according to the way I understand your description,
she is now the proud owner of her own bloodline (Andurias-Abruae Avan line)
of which she is the "last of her line" due to the fact she has not designated
an heir or borne children and also due to the fact that Darien Avan had only
one child (according to all written accounts) he is now also the "last of his
line". Is this correct?
If so, I can see one direct result of all of this happening...any
blooded family that has adventuring scions would branch out like a hydra with
their own lines very quickly and this would give the (already overworked) DM
much more to do to in order to keep track of all of this. Now, instead
having the change in "proper" bloodline status be just with the gaining of a
new blood ability, it would be more reasonable, IMO, to assign that
distinction to the gaining of a new bloodline "rank" (i.e. moving from major
to great, great to true, etc). My reasoning in this is due to the fact that
the blood abilities of a particular "character" has nothing to do with
governing a domain or being an heir of a regent. Governing is more a
function of bloodline strength score and consequently bloodline rank. This
would keep the munchkins from saying " I have divine wrath and therefore I am
descended directly from Michael Roele.", which, with the stress (under your
described system) being with the gaining of blood abilities, keeps it from
being "munchkinized". (And from your previous posts seems to be your
particular point of view :-)

>

Granted that this does leave it open to DM interpretation, however this
interpretation would be fairly arbitrary considering the odds of rolling the
exact same blood abilities for two different scions with the same blood rank
Now, some blood abilities are going to appear more often, by the mere fact
that they are given wider range of percentage chances of rolling that
particular blood ability (ergo look at the range of numbers for Animal
Affinity vs Divine Wrath and you'll see what I mean) but I believe this is
more of a device of the designers than anything intentional with the purpose
that two scions of the same family having the same blood abilities.
Personally, I believe that two sibling scions should NOT have the same blood
abilities (especially if players are wanting to role-play siblings which
seems to be the case more often than not in order to rationalize a teamwork
type situation before gameplay). This would prevent the one sibling from
knowing exactly what the other sibling can do and brings in an element of the
unknown (to keep the "sibling rivalries" to a minimum.

Your system of designating the "last of a line" is a good one, however, it
seems to place too much emphasis on the game mechanic aspect of bloodlines
(i.e. blood abilities) and not enough on the role-playing aspect which is,
IMO, the given rank of a bloodline, which can be fairly obscure in most
instances. cont'd
Subj: Re:Blood/Hereditary123cont'd
Date: 97-03-20 01:31:19 EST
From: Memnoch I


This is merely due to the fact that the name of a particular "rank" does not
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* 1st 2.00 #9097 * Minds & parachutes only function properly when open.