Possible/Conditional Future Workers

[Skummy]

Just a thought as I came across some stories from the '20s suggesting that Frank Gotch Jr. might become a wrestler - he never did, but what if things had gone differently?

It could be interesting, particularly for fantasy mods, to include "Yet-to-debut" workers that might not necessarily ever show up. It could be based on percentages, or based on only debuting if they meet certain conditions - for an obvious if somewhat morbid example, a second-generation wrestler's debut would be reliant on their parent being alive at the right time; if you're playing a historical scenario and Dusty Rhodes dies in a freak accident in 1984, Cody Rhodes wouldn't be able to debut.

Beyond that, there could be broader requirements - second generations of masked gimmicks (not necessarily family relations) not debuting if the original never got above a particular overness, as one such idea.
 

I remember when Future Workers were first added to TEW, there were a few present-day real world mods that included a load of wrestlers' kids as workers set to debut later down the line - Undertaker's son was in there, that sort of thing. That's obviously not realistic, as we don't know if any of those kids will ever become wrestlers, or what they'll be like as wrestlers if they do. But having no future workers means that, in longer games, the game world will become depleted as existing workers age out and retire or die, and players might want a little bit more character and familiarity than purely randomly generated workers offer. So adding in a degree of chance to whether some future workers ever debut could add that extra sense of unpredictability to long-term games using current day mods, could really expand fantasy mods in dynamic ways that add more variety to different playthroughs, but could also open up potential curveballs to historical mods if some creative license is exercised and "what could have been" workers are added as potential debuts that never happened in real life. 

 

Thinking further on this, there could be different dates for potential debuts too - a story circulated recently of Koko B. Ware, as a talent scout, attempting to recruit Kurt Angle in 1987. He then showed up in ECW in 1996 (and was offered a ten-year deal by the WWF that same year), before finally debuting in 1998. So as well as there being a variable chance of a future worker debuting at all, there could be % scales for wrestlers debuting at different times - so in a historical playthrough it's most likely that Kurt Angle debuts in 1998, but there's an outside chance of him debuting in 1996, and an extremely slim chance of him debuting in 1987. 

Edited August 8, 2023 by Skummy

[The Masked Orange]

I think the best way to do this is to have a setting where wrestlers are set to debut with a narrative, since that has a % chance of happening built in, and if the narrative requirements aren't met than they never debut. Would be a cool additional narrative type. It could also allow you to set up multiple versions of the same wrestler to debut, say Jim Cena and Mirror Universe Jim Cena, and only one would debut based on the narrative requirements. Could be a fun fantasy way to deal with the future child problem as well, set up a few plausible versions and let rng take the wheel.

[Zero]

Or what type of relationship (more detail).  If Dusty dies in 1980, then no Cody Rhodes and that data becomes inactive?

[Saffir]

Don't forget divorce could be a factor, or it could delay the birth/debut of a worker if the worker's parent marries someone else?