Preface for Heather: Chrom needs to be married off ASAP because you only have until the end of Chapter 11 to get his stats and his wife's stats leveled before his child appears. The other characters don't have a huge time constraint; that time constraint is based on how much of the game you want to play.
Alright, I figure that if Heather wishes to make good on her statements to the chat and if something like 100-200 people want to make a series of decisions in a democratic fashion, some logistics need to be worked out. For those who don't know, Heather stated she's letting the chat determine her support pairings for marriage, and there are MANY options. Marriage options can be fairly complex because they're a chain of decisions. If two characters get married off, they're married for good, and their child's fate is basically set in stone. I am writing this post to 1.) provide a general background of how the system works so the chat members who choose to make their decisions can make informed decisions and 2.) propose potential avenues by which we can determine the fate of Heather's motley band of heroes.
A word of warning! There will be spoilers ahead! If you want to be 100% spoiler-free be wary! There will be no major plot spoilers, but character names and the Child mechanic will be revealed!First off, I direct you all to this page of Sernes Forest outlining every character that can be used in some way with Marriage (under the Initial column), and the "children"characters(under the children column)-
http://old.serenesforest.net/fe13/character.htmlUse the link above to familiarize yourself with the potential characters. If a name I discuss later is unfamiliar to you, refer back to that link.
So, down to the meat and potatoes and this ordeal. The
Marriage system in Fire Emblem Awakening is a development off a system that was present in the older Fire Emblem titles, but to my knowledge is the most recent fire emblem game to use the system, and the only one released officially in North America to use said system. The marriage system is an extension of the
Support system in which two characters that fight alongside one another build up a friendship, their bonds strengthen, and their ability to fight together increases. This manifests itself as increased stat bonuses when using the Pair Up mechanic, and increased likelihood of Dual Attacks and Dual Guards in Pair Up mode. Marriage can most simply be defined as getting an S-rank support between two characters. Only one S-rank support can ever be formed between two characters- the husband and wife. Because of this,
Pairing the husband and wife together will turn them into relentless killing machines (Unless the wife is a cleric or troubadour for some reason.)
Now, why is this important you might ask? Is this just a weird flavorful thing those silly devs did to appeal to a new playerbase? I say nay! Marriage is an incredibly important event in Awakening because a married couple will produce a
Child!. Without spoiling too much of the story for those interested, there's a mechanic in game in which after a marriage is completed, provided the first half of the game has been beaten, a new side mission will appear that allows the player to find and recruit an version of the married couple's child. This is important because the child characters are, typically, much stronger than their parents. I won't bore you with the mathematics, but essentially the child gains stat bonuses from both their mother and their father, meaning that a particularly strong couple will produce an even stronger child. In addition to this, the child can inherit skills from their parents' class, including skills they could never normally access. For example, Galeforce is a skill that only females can learn, because only females can Class Change to the Dark Flier class and gain that skill after achieving enough levels. If, however, a male child's mother learned Galeforce in her time as a Dark Flier, she can pass that skill onto her son!
In short, management of supports, marriages and children are a cornerstone of this edition of the Fire Emblem series. Mismanaging marriages won't cause you to lose the game as it would in some older titles, but still, we may as well let Heather get the most bang for her gameplay. Heather's given the chat a great deal of power and influence on her game, more so than perhaps she imagined. If you're still around, good on you. Follow me down further where we go over the nitty-gritty details of who can be married off to who, where children come from, and how the chat can make marriage happen. Get set to play matchmaker.
An important thing to note about marriage in this game is that marriage only exists to produce a Child character. This is the reason why one of the protagonists, Chrom, is forcibly married off at the end of Chapter 10 to one of the 5 marriage candidates that he has the best relationship score (Support level) with. If he doesn't have a relationship with any of the eligbile girls, he marries a village girl and Lucina, his canonical daughter and another major character, is born and appears in the storyline.
As seen the list at the start of this post, there are 13 potential children. All of them should appear in Heather's game because Heather's units can't die on Casual mode, meaning that there's time to form a support between all the possible pairs. The following bit is key:
With the exception of Chrom or a Male Avatar, the mother always determines who the child is. A good way to think about the marriage system in a tactical manner is to think "What father can I pair with what mother to produce the child I want?" With that said, the following list will show what females (and Chrom) produce what child, and we can then discuss how the marriage pairing will work going forward:Chrom yields Lucina
Lissa yields Owain
Olivia yields Inigo
Maribelle yields Brady
Cordelia yields Severa
Cherche yields Gerome
Female Avatar (Hodor) yields Male Morgan
Panne yields Yarne
Miriel Yields Laurent
Sumia Yields Cynthia
Tharja yields Noire
Nowi Yields Nah
Some characters have limited marriage options. For example, Chrom can only marry Sumia, Olivia, Sully, Maribelle, Female Avatar or Village Girl.
The way I see it, we have two options. One, we stagger the pairing options and vote then and there with the units Heather has available. This could result in limited choices in the later parts of the game, which I feel would be disingenuous to force people to make a decision based upon needless limitation.The second option is that we go down in the order of the list provided and methodically pair off the characters via strawpolls, with each strawpoll having limited options. We should start with Chrom because his marriage will probably happen first and remove a female from the marriage pool (I don't think Heather can do village girl because her Chrom probably has support with an eligible female.). After we do Chrom, we can then randomly determine the marriages of the other girls and guys. We shouldn't run out of potential males for a given female, and will probably have a 1 or 2 guys left over.
A sample of how the voting proper could work is as follows: Heather posts a strawpoll in chat before her stream and during her stream to set up the canonical pairings as far as Heather's Handhelds are concerned. That pairing becomes canon, and we do it again, removing the newly married man from the list. Here's an example of what I mean:
First, we vote here: "http://strawpoll.me/4518632"- Let's say that Hodor wins. Hodor and Chrom are officially wife and husband and are removed from the pool. They become Morgan's and Lucina's parents.
Then we do this: "http://strawpoll.me/4518658"- The chat decides that Cordelia and Libra get paired together. They're both removed from the pool. The next randomly assigned poll would remove Libra from it, so on and so forth until the chat decides on every marriage. In addition the children generation can get married in the same fashion that their parents can (there's no option for homosexuality or incest in either case. As such, a male Morgan can't marry Lucina if she's his sister, Chrom can never marry Lissa, etc.)
I'm not going into the details of what makes a good marriage primarily because it's not that relevant for Heather's first playthrough; essentially I encourage you, the reader, to do whatever research you want before you make the decision. Hell, which name sounds coolest could be a major factor. If anyone wants to start a discussion pulling for a specific pair feel free. Once again, thanks for reading, and everything is fine.