Crazy Alt Game Mechanic

Terranah

Alright, so I'm bored and had this crazy idea for alts, so I thought I'd share.  It's out there!  But so am I,

 

My imaginary game mechanic involves creating an alt character.  Lot of people have alts and go crazy with them, but what if you didn't start off with 8 or so potential characters, what if you had to earn them?  This got me to thinking of a mechanic to do just that.

 

In my imaginary mmo, you start the game with only one avatar.  You unlock the alt feature by by teaming up with another player.  No sex required, lol, this is a family friendly mechanic.  But I envision this feature to be an unlockable achievment based on time and experience pts earned while grouped together, which would unlock a quest chain to have a baby.

 

The quest chain might involve performing a series of tasks/quests to prove worthiness to have a child.  Fail, and you can start over and try again as many times as you like.  It would be a repeatable quest chain.  But succeed, and one of you gets pregnant.  This could be decided at random or the players could be given the option. 

 

The second part of the quest chain would involve an incubation period, whereby time and experience would have to be gained without the pregnant party dying.  If the pregnant person dies ingame, they have to start all over again at the beginning of the quest chain to try and have another baby.  So don't die!

 

If you succeed in surviving for the alotted ingame time period and have managed to successfully complete the quest chain, you have a baby.  Yay!  At this point, you get an option to have a single child or twins.  The child or children would basically act as pets during the next phase of gameplay or quest chain.  Keep the child safe, provide food and clothing as the child character levels slowly to maturity.   don't let the child die!  Or it's back to the beginning and trying to have a child quest chain again.

 

At some point, the child reaches a certain level or maturity, and is ready to become an alt.  If you chose to have twins, each of you gets a child/alt.  The alt will have the combined random appearance of both of you, which you can keep (might be humorous) or at this point you would get the ability to custom design as you would a regular character.  If you had decided to only have one child, you child has higher innate bonuses, but can only go to one of you.  This would be based off of 'affinity' points, which are earned through providing food/clothing/armor or doing solo repeatable side quests.

 

I think this feature mechanic would more closely fit with a sandbox style of game.  It's something we would earn, which contrasts with something we are typically just given.  It's not your usual grind to get armor/weapon type of mechanic.  It's more rpish, so probably a lot of people would trash it or not understand it.  But I think there might be someone else on the planet who would find this fun.  Anyone?  Or maybe you would add/subtract or substitute some aspect? Maybe it's too elaborate and involved?

Terranah

Just to eleaborate on one aspect, choosing who becomes pregnant.  It would be fun if the pregnant party actually got a belly and maybe bonus penalties to movement or combat.  It would make it harder to stay alive.  Also, if you were a male character and chose to be the prego party, it would be funny to get a big pot belly.  I could envision a lot of pot bellied dads running around while they were pregnant, ahaha.

 

And if someone rubs your belly, they get a temporary bonus to luck in loots or something.  (giggle)

Thane

sounds as if you would have liked horizons.

they had good ideas,especially for the playable dragon race; with children, being HC once you reached adulthood with a dragon (you were actually growning from a dragonling) and such nice ideas.

 

 

 

unfortunately it didnt quite work out... as so often.