Idea: Dynamic height/weight with age

[Jeax]

Hello,

I was just talking to someone on Staff about character height. I think it would be neat if when a character is "young" or beneath their age of adulthood, like say a human under 18, that the minimum height could be lowered. So you could have young characters that still have one growth spurt left in them.

Not really sure how this would work codedly, my idea would be that chargen would read your age and calibrate height accordingly, and then later when you submit a description change request for your character's more adult appearance, that a height update would be part of that. Because it makes sense that your description change and growth spurt would happen together.

[Harmless]

Well, why make it change with age, or prohibit people from being short if they're over 18? Can't there be midgets who stay at dwarf height forever? I don't see why it adds anything to put a age requirement on being really short, if we're discussing increasing the height range. After all, all everyone wanted was more flexibility.

I think your idea as a concept is fine, but can't height or weight changes already be done via a description change request?

But I worry about it in the sense that, as Shaleah mentioned and I think the docs somewhere, Zalanthan age ranges are all in the young adult to adult range. The reason we can start at the current minimum age with humans is that they are, at that age, for most intents and purposes, fully grown.

[slvrmoontiger]

No see when I read the subject on this I was thinking. Wow, there's an idea. Maybe expand on this more. Make height/weight actually dynamic. Make it so when you gain an age and if you are at an age where the character would still be growing, they would have the possibility of growing an inch or two each birthday, just like the chance of characters increasing/decreasing attributes on each birthday. *shrugs* At least that's what I was thinking when I saw the subject.

[Jeax]

That's definitely a possibility, but it's just more of a pain to code, of course. You have to put that into the aging code and make different stuff for each race, whereas adding it to the chargen would basically be a switch statement, or a single if/else statement for each race.

But a human can start at 13, right? There are plenty of people who grow from 13 to 18. I didn't really, but there are people who do. A male human can technically continue growing until 18.

[thatkid]

You'd also want to randomize it a bit, maybe, so that really scrawny, tiny former rinth rat might have a huge growth burst or something.

[slvrmoontiger]

Actually a male human in RL can continue growing until they are 24. A female human until they are 20 or 21 I believe. This doesn't always happen but they are possibilities.

[Qzzrbl]

Code Select Expand

Welcome back <pc name>!
Happy birthday! Your character has aged 1 year since you've last logged on!

How much have you grown? __ (select from <insert appropriate number range here>)

At least until the "age of growing" is done?

Spitballin' here.

[Barsook]

I dig that idea, Qzzrbl.  But I think a range should be shown though.

[Qzzrbl]

I dig that idea, Qzzrbl.  But I think a range should be shown though.

Yeah, that's what I was going for. :p

I couldn't pull an appropriate format and number range out of my ass so I just put that there as a placeholder to get my point across. c:

[Jeax]

Yeah, I think having the player input inside of a range on their birthday(s) is awesome.