Comedy of Errors

There's probably a lesson in this somewhere.. I'm not entirely sure what lesson that is, but hopefully I'll figure it out and learn it soon.

The much-publicized changes to Hunger and the (lesser publicized) changes to Stamina were actually done for a larger purpose. Both needed to be done anyway, don't get me wrong, but there was a more compelling issue at hand than just the need to fix them.

Given the rash of recent Archenland marriages, the thoughts of nearly every female involved down there naturally turned to childbearing. Since I have fond memories of a pregnancy program that existed on an old MUD I used to play, I decided the time was right to set down a program that would mimic pregnancy in an effort to bring just enough realism to the whole thing to trigger some appropriate RP. I openly stated my plan to do this, but declined to mention when I expected to have it ready. I just told them all that they'd know when they turned up pregnant, basically.

Pregnancy obviously has certain symptoms, among them being fatigue and hunger. Thus, the programming update was necessary for both programs, and I did accomplish both pretty well I think. By this past weekend, I had done what needed doing and I was ready to inflict pregnancy on some willing victim.

I chose Priya to be my guinea pig. She, of course, was unaware of this... and I was anxious to see how long it would take her to sort out that something was up. The initial stages of pregnancy in real life are subtle anyway, so I deliberately made the pregnancy symptoms ingame subtle enough not to be a dead giveaway, but obvious enough that the player could tell something wasn't quite right.

Like any kid with a new toy, I was excited to see this in action. So I happily inflicted Priya and sat back to wait for her to log on....

...Just in time for her to have company and, you know, NOT LOG ON. For THREE DAYS. Not only that, but when her company left, she had some kind of plans with friends and stayed offline for another day for good measure.

As if that's not bad enough, her player did pop online briefly. I knew who her RL friends were and tried to make innocent inquiries as to where she was. I didn't want to make them wonder why I was suddenly preoccupied with Priya, but I hoped that by asking someone might suggest she log on just long enough to see that something was different. This had somewhat the desired effect, because she DID, in fact, come online and contact me. But she didn't log onto the game as Priya; she just sent me a message asking what was up. I had to come up with a plausible excuse (I mostly failed there). I then tried to innocently persuade her to log Priya on, even dangling waiting page #mail at her, but her player sweetly and politely indicated that she didn't feel she could at that moment. Then she vanished off to her real-world concerns and left me sighing.

Dreadful tease, that Priya.

At any rate, tonight she FINALLY LOGGED ON. And she did notice, and a healer was fetched, and her pregnancy has been discovered. So now I can post this. Whee.

Sheesh.. the lengths I go to.