Hi! My real name isn't Victor van Meter, but I answer to it as a pen name. I just started playing EVE at the very beginning of August, and I currently play Constantin Baracca and Red Roman Joringer.
I started roleplaying using D&D books (yes, starting with Dragonstrike) when I was six or seven, and I was telling stories in Shadowrun by ten. My first online roleplaying happened in LORD on our old BBS systems. But my first really consuming RP experience was on Yahoo's IM chat boards. As most people have guessed and noted to me by now, I really got started as a forum roleplayer, where we were responsible with coming up with our own environments and rules. Chat length wasn't exactly limited. I tended towards being the storyteller and thus was the one who would need to describe the settings of these long RP game sessions.
The upshot of it all is I tend towards lengthy, descriptive posts. Just as a warning. I don't feel like I have to apologize for it if I've warned everyone beforehand.
I got back into RPing in games when I started playing FFXI, but really picked up again in World of Warcraft. I RP there when I'm logged in, although I've been sharing that time with my EVE time. It is a bit more entertaining when the setting isn't limited to just the space between our ships, but the EVE forums have more than drawn me in. People playing a video game that can generally write intelligently? Who knew that was even possible? So I'll probably be doing most of my RP on the IGS unless CCP follows through on this station space thing and it works. If not, I actually RP a lot through Gtalk (the Google IMer) so if you wanted to RP with me in some sort of setting, I'll be glad to do just that. Just zip me a line in EVE mail to Constantin Baracca for the user name.
I like to make characters interesting in the setting, and I've played a rather wide range. I like to make dynamic characters that shake the status quo, break just enough characters' expectations to stand out, and not break so many that they don't feel like they came from where they did. This not only develops my own RP, but drives along other people's RP who may have been stuck in a rut. My experience is that RP tends to get bogged down because people try too hard to make characters out of concepts rather than out of complex backgrounds. Sometimes, people need a good sharp turn to get themselves a new fold and wrinkle, so they aren't just playing characters by reading the directions. Characters should be idiosyncratic and dynamic for the sake of other people. Otherwise, we all end up staring at the wall muttering exactly what people would think their particular bloodline of their particular race would say. The most interesting thing about a character, I've always thought, should be a very human quality. Even if other people's characters don't relate to that trait, their players instinctively will.
In real life, I'm an architectural designer living in Ohio, in the U.S. The company I work for designs health care centers and hospitals. I'm working towards certification, which means I will eventually have to go back to grad school. At that point, I think my forum post volume will significantly increase. As it stands now, though, I'm married with a pair of dogs, working in my internship period. In the background, I tend to play bass and get lost reading historical and scientific articles on Wikipedia. I've also got something of an addiction to BBC light comedy panel shows, even though we can't pay the lisence fee and get it here. So I am somewhat knowledgeable about the U.K., but it's mostly about how George Osborne is actually a Bond villain.
Anyway, hi!
