Currently, the quality that triggers the event informing you of your scion’s existence (and which lets you choose their procedence a posteriori) does so at the first routine quality check (the ones causing ztutter at zea) where it’s active. This means you’ll be receiving the letter one second and a half after leaving port, quite immedieately after you had your latest lovely encounter from which they are presumted to come.
While I don’t know how MAGELLAN will affect these too-immedieate checks, currently I personally feel you shouldn’t be informed of their existence the very moment you leave port, as it only encourages you to stop and reverse the little distance you just covered to go see your scion (this hodls specially true to first-time players who’ll be much more curious).
While I’m not more versed in the technical details, it’d be nice if the scion notification came up more in the middle of a zea travel (requiring you to Ohave at least one port report would cover 99.92% of cases), or at the very least required SAY in order to pop up. Or to activate, if it’s reworked into a more generic, semi-persistent "spend a SAY to open and read your mail" at-zea event category, like the hunger and no-fuel ones.
Good call. The event requires no child, and a notable occasion (pregnancy?) fires with a Distribution of 100 (Which effectively means it’ll pop almost instantly when the conditions are met).
Yeah, I’ve seen this fire on at least four(?) different occassions. It’s always right after I leave port for London, which always means going right back to London, and inevitably makes no sense with the text.
It’s like - Lady, why couldn’t you have told me you were Preggers when I was on LAND? I just got on board!
Also, I know they were trying to be super fair and all that with this feature, but it really doesn’t make sense in the "I am pregnant" option. Because how are you sending a message to your lover once you’ve left port and are incapable of recieving messages? edited by MisterGone on 3/9/2015
I have two solutions (read: brainsorm lightnings, which I’m explaining just for the sake of discussion, not because I demand their implementation) to the "no, it is I who is pregnant" inconsistency:
-If the choices shall be confined to mere consequenceless flavours, then if the pre-choice text didn’t go as far as spoiling you that you’ve got a scion, it could instead say you have news of descendency, and then you choose wether those news are a letter from your loved one telling you they’re pregnant, a letter from them too (or an urchanage) telling you they adopted someone… or a biological sign (or lack thereof) on your person you’ve obvserved. And then, independtly of what you chose, you choose wether to accept the scion or not - that is, you accept if it is, and the wording is important here to make it make sense regardless of the previous choice, if "They’re the product of you and your sister’s wishes", so if it was you pregnant then refusing it makes the (little, but existant) sense of it being not from your sweetheart.
-If Failbetter were to receive a generous, anonymous donation for their work that gave them free time to add more content, AND the MAGELLAN update was released and corrected the stutter, and they felt like adding assymetry to the process: then the event that produces your scion will, in the currently inconsistent case, directly have you give birth (what, you didn’t notice you had been pregnant up 'til now? These zailors, I swear…) in the form of a Mascot Officer, who you’ll trade in for a Scion in London.