Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE Character Development => Topic started by: Casiella on 08 May 2010, 11:53
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What do you like to see in other pilots' IG bios? What do you like to include in yours?
Some folks go for the "dossier" approach, listing some basic data. Others use it as sort of a scratch pad: quotes, maybe some ASCII art, etc. Still others keep it blank or maybe just list some OOC contact data.
So from a RP perspective, what do you like, and why?
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I like to set out what people would likely see, should they run into a character. Basic physical description mostly. Sometimes only a line or so.
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Even though it may seem a bit dry I like the dossier type. I mean when you check the pilot you are using the CONCORD operated information system, what is more likely than getting CONCORD's public record for the pilot? :)
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I am fond of using it is a physical description, with some mannerisms and so on. I've got a notepad with a couple of outfits written down in them, and will copypaste those into the bio when they wear something different than usual.
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Tend to use in a short Dossier, as well as a Link to my blog.
Occasionally, I chuck something that's popped into my head at the bottom of it all as well. (At the Mo' It's "Training Cat Herding to 5")
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Using the dossier approach also. Not too picky how others use it, although "omg look how much damage I do" log lines do make me cringe :ugh:
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I like bios which rhyme.
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On the subject of bios... how much do you feel is IC available? How 'silly' does it have to be before you don't use it as In-Character knowledge?
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Using the dossier approach also. Not too picky how others use it, although "omg look how much damage I do" log lines do make me cringe :ugh:
2010.05.10 Notify Combat Your Crappy Damage Log strikes Myrhial Arkenath, causing her to cringe
Anyway,
I like bios that cater to my needs of understanding the character.
Failing that, quote bios are always fun to read.
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My only rule is to never make a bio with information that I don't want others to have knowledge of.
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I'm mostly asking because I feel a strong need to redo mine, which sort of sucks right now.
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I like mine to be empty.
If people want to know they can ask.
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I like mine to be empty.
If people want to know they can ask.
Hmm. Interesting approach. Personally I find characters with empty bio's not to rouse enough interest for me to bother asking them. If I see something in the bio that raises interest... well, much greater chance that they'll be approached for some reason or another.
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I tend to initiate conversation if I am in the mood to do so, so being approached is not generally a concern of mine. Then again I came from venues where the bios were so horrendously limited that people generally didn't bother to use them. So the people who never had anyone to interact with were those who never interacted with people.
I also will never /sip for attention or to keep the appearance of motion in the room. Which is a surefire way to get noticed in a negative aspect.
Keeping the bio empty then causes people who I opt to interact with (or react when I act, if you will) to actually go through the whole "getting to know a person" bit, since it's not all spelled out in their bio.
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I view the bios as an IC myspace or facebook type thing.
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Oh God... that... oh god...
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As a non-immersive RPer - i.e., I'm not in a totally RP corp because I also crave the action being in a nullsec alliance gives - my bio is not filled with IC information about Esna (you can look at his blog for that). Rather, I've made it my job to try and make people smile with quotes from friends, corpmates, and random passers-by.
I'd like to comment on something else I see sometimes in bios, though: ASCII art.
Sometimes it's offensive (I've seen plenty of ASCII art of people's genitals) and some of it is old (Brofist, skull and crossboes) but occasionally I see something amusing and impressive. Example - when I flew in Providence, there was always one U'K guy who had an ASCII U'K fist in his bio. A few weeks after that appeared, a CVA guy copied it... with a big X through the middle of the fist.
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The nowadays short lenght possible in the charachter biopage would make me do my char bio via link (in fact have always meant to do that but never seem to get round to it).
On a sidenote: it was a sad, sad day when BackdoorBandit came back to eve recently and logged in and his bio got nerfed....
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I'd like to comment on something else I see sometimes in bios, though: ASCII art.
Best I've seen:
(''') о___о (''')
-\ '( о_о )' /
--\ \_Ш_/ /
---l . . . . l
--/ ./---\. \
(„„„)____(„„„)
I SURRENDER
DONT HURT ME
Best. Bio. Ever.
Edit: Amusing. In the post edit window the font is spaced correctly. In a finalized post, it is not. How about that?
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Sabi's and Celeste's are brief snapshots of what someone would presumably be able to find out from a public record ... because we all know how genuinely informative public records can be, even if they are up to date.
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I'd like to comment on something else I see sometimes in bios, though: ASCII art.
Best I've seen:
(''') о___о (''')
-\ '( о_о )' /
--\ \_Ш_/ /
---l . . . . l
--/ ./---\. \
(„„„)____(„„„)
I SURRENDER
DONT HURT ME
Best. Bio. Ever.
Edit: Amusing. In the post edit window the font is spaced correctly. In a finalized post, it is not. How about that?
I'm so gonna copy that and add a French Flag next to it.
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For Misan I just put in the info that would probably show up in a dossier lookup that CONCORD would supply. It's fairly minimal, some of it only included because people would ask me roughly how tall she was etc.
Personally I like the quote filled bios but character limits means I can't fit them in as well. :(
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For some reason I find the file thing as pretentious as hell...
Your bio is organic and a representation of the character.
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I'm so gonna copy that and add a French Flag next to it.
Amusingly the guy I saw it on was a Gallente.
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Your bio is organic and a representation of the character.
Could you elaborate on this? How would one have an "organic" bio?
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Your bio is organic and a representation of the character.
Could you elaborate on this? How would one have an "organic" bio?
Think it means that the bio should evolve as the charachter does.
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That's not exclusive from any of the other methods people have described, though.
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It might just be a guttural reaction to my lengthy span of using cheap RP mods on other games to offer totally physical biographies, but when I do get around to a bio I think I'm going to be sticking with the public file version. The button itself is called "Show Info," I can't think of what else you'd receive other than CONCORD's information on the pilot.
That's not to say its the only way of doing things, but it makes the most sense to me. Along the lines of systems I'm irked by... I don't know why, but, the "blurb of overheard gossip" thing always tweaked my ear for some reason.
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For some reason I find the file thing ...
[mod]Please express your opinion in a different way.[/mod]
Anyway, I've put the links to the news articles I was in, and a linky to mum's char, and some other stuff, that might be reasonably well known.
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I like bios which rhyme.
But writing them takes time.
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I like bios that give other players the information they'd get when meeting the characters - appearance, manner, voice (most of my bios don't live up to my own expectations /o\)
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It's easier when drinking a beer with lime.
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I like mine to be empty.
If your bio is empty it now displays "Here you can type in your biography"
:lol:
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I like bios that give other players the information they'd get when meeting the characters - appearance, manner, voice (most of my bios don't live up to my own expectations /o\)
I'm afraid if I did that, I might hurt people. Come to think of it, it might improve my killboard standings.
I'll consider that if/when I get back in game. :P
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Oddly something I need to put in mine that I am always curious about is what language are people speaking?
It to me is assumed all of us have built in translators in our implants, but we are still speaking native tongues I assume? And it's interesting to note if someone is speaking something other - like one matari corp mate I have is a freed slave and his first language that he speaks if you get him talking fast is Amarrian.
*note to update Zuzu's bio* Fun little dialect of Intaki ftw.
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Oddly something I need to put in mine that I am always curious about is what language are people speaking?
It to me is assumed all of us have built in translators in our implants, but we are still speaking native tongues I assume? And it's interesting to note if someone is speaking something other - like one matari corp mate I have is a freed slave and his first language that he speaks if you get him talking fast is Amarrian.
*note to update Zuzu's bio* Fun little dialect of Intaki ftw.
Yes http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=apr02
Question is though would those translate other languages if you have learnt them?
This would explain commonöly known greetings in as an example Intaki and caldari during communications. Have seen a few discussions about that in the past.
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The 'flavor' greetings are just people trying to be special.
Nothing more, nothing less.
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The showinfo on a character presents a great deal of information from the time the pilot became a capsuleer, so i mostly fill the text description with a dossier of origin and general background before that happened. Not in the format of a intelligence profile, but more as a wikipedia entry of a known individual.
What i wish we had is about 10-20 more lines available to write, i remember it was cut down to save space on the database, but it we were given like an additional 200 characters would be great to add better formating and line breaks.
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Clear all formatting of text allows you to have some more visible characters.
Is seems that it using a sort of bbcode/html markup around the text and although this isn't visible it's still present and eats up characters.
An example would be.
Name: Darina
Occupation: Space nun
Is what you see and is 14 characters on line 1 and 21 on line two. But in reality it's more along the lines of
(p)(b)Name: Darina(/b)(/p)
(p)(b)Occupation: Space nun(/b)(/p)
(p)(/p)
Which suddenly increased the number of characters drastically.
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I use the Bio as an intentional space that my character can use to send messages to people who might see me in local and do a query.
It says things like "Hows My Flying? Did I just shoot at you? We're NRDS, so it's because you're red or I thought you were engaged in an act of piracy or support of slavery. If you think there's some mistake, get in touch with our diplomats...."
I find it distracting when people post stuff in their Bio's that I wouldn't know if I hadn't met them face to face. I can see how this reduces bandwidth requirements when RPing, but one of the things I particularly like about Verone is the feeling I get for his character's presence from his every Emote, rather than having it written in his bio.
(Does that make sense?)
I really like meeting people and getting to know them by the way their character is played - the mannerisms and use of emotes and language. It feels a bit like a Bio that describes that cheats a little. That said, I realise that sometimes it's a lot of work portraying a lot of stuff repeatedly when people who know you could just take it as read, so I'm not a purist about it.
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The 'flavor' greetings are just people trying to be special.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Christ, I thought I was curmudgeon enough for everybody.
The flavor greetings are just people trying to inject flavor. It's only when they get stupid or stupidly overused that it gets kinda ><
Anyway.
Ashar's Opinionated Bio Bullshit:
Do share information you want others to know. Everyone has a GalNet footprint, and GalNet is a lot thicker than our internet, a lot deeper. This google doesn't forget.
Don't put shit in there that's restricted information, though. I don't want to just be handed all your secrets. If you're gonna do that, at least write me an enjoyable story. If you make it long, I probably won't get through it and your secrets will be 'safer' from people outside your smallish group of regular playmates, who will probably read up on you extensively and thus gain an appropriate level of insight into your character's life.
Do consider providing essential facts. Very few are strictly necessary. Lately I've had a hankering for little things like height and degree of corpulence/anorexia, so I can emote better in relation to all these people of unspecified shortness and chub or intentionally run into someone's twelve-inch, spike-filled eyebrow piercing and make blood shoot everywhere. IF you don't provide these things, be prepared to tell people the relevant facts a lot. You'll be asked.
Don't just give one unit type for something like height. Or weight, if you're the sort that finds it relevant. I want the torque of your goddamn robot arm and the size of your new 'augmented' chest provided in units I can comprehend at a glance; if it's complicated but necessary, most people will fuck it up otherwise. Having your audience fail to grasp a fact central enough to go in your bio is to be avoided.
Do put things into your bio that people repeatedly ask of you, IC or OOC. It's wise.
Don't stick a slew of weird-ass formatting in there if you're trying to impress people. It's a bit more impressive to read that in a link where you're not running into a character limit and can actually think about composition - or how about some nice website design? It can be real easy, you know - just open a blogspot account or get on Gmail and publish a document. If you're going to share information with me, you can skip the weird ASCII characters fucking everywhere that look like you just went through a character map and cobbled together the WIERDEST shit - at least hold off until you can find a way to develop some useful information interspersed with your abuse of punctuation and symbolsets. A simple [characteristic goes here] before a colon will do for starters.
Do have a sense of humor about the thing. OOC info, ASCII art, links to your OOG and OOC art page full of comics, all that shit can go in there and no harm done. Not everything is required to relate to roleplaying. We like jokes and pictures same as the next man.
Don't get incensed at people who miss resources you claim are crucial to understanding your character if you fail to link them somewhere readily accessible - your bio, for example. Got a story or blog post or news item that defines your character, that is required reading for people who want to have meaningful interaction when they get past acquaintance level? GUESS WHERE THAT SHOULD GO.
Don't tell us your character's life story in paragraph form. It always looks fucking weird and is usually far too compressed. If your character can be summed up well enough to roleplay with in a paragraph composed of public information strung together from simple research someone else might conduct in-character themselves, maybe we'd like to be given the opportunity to meet them without the temptation of reading up on your little miracle of elegance and simplicity and having to ACT like we're encountering a novel personality for once...Oh, and especially don't do it in the first person. "I'm Jack, let me write all about my childhood for a few sentences" always comes off like you're reading the diary of some mentally damaged individual who intermittently forgets who he is if you try to consider the information presented in bios in IC terms. Some people do. Throw them a bone.
Do keep the information blurb, or the novel, or whatnot that summarizes what people would find from taking a hard look at your character's track record SOMEWHERE. A notepad or a blog post or a private google doc, perhaps?
Do give us some indication of whether you're reachable if you tend to turn autoreject on/are one to have a lot of people to talk to. This is an environment of dynamic attitudes - some folks, especially newer ones, can't tell if you're merely busy in fleet or something, or if you're blocking the passers-by at random today or just too cool to talk to the plebs in general. As rude as it is to ninja-convo someone into an unneeded podding, it's arguably pretty fucking silly not to say 'I'm a bit hard to reach today, kids, but evemail makes everyone happy,' or whatnot.
Also!
Do consider that your bio is a PR public face. Misleading people with it for the sake of better roleplay might be useful or entertaining for everyone involved, or it might not. This is potentially a very handy lie receptacle or soapbox. Leverage it.
That's all I could think of, I guess.
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Do keep the information blurb, or the novel, or whatnot that summarizes what people would find from taking a hard look at your character's track record SOMEWHERE. A notepad or a blog post or a private google doc, perhaps?
Get out of my brain.
Er, I mean, yeah. I do this. In addition to the basic stuff I've got up on EVElopedia, I've got information blurbs saved off line for the poor souls who express an interest in taking those hard looks.
While the public intel's more or less static, the rest of the blurbs aren't one-size-fits-all. For example, if Poor Soul #1 says "I've got ground-level contacts in the Lutesse Planetary Defence Force. What can they tell me?" he/she'll get slightly different information than a hypothetical Poor Soul #2 who's said "I've got high level contacts in Federation Administration. What can they tell me?".
Do I have all of the answers to all of the possible questions figured out in advance? Er, no. I'm crazy, but I'm just not that nuts. I continue to learn things about my characters when I'm forced to think through the answers to the questions people have for me.
I ran into a situation like that just this week, at the tail end of a Heiian College conversation about how unwise it was to let demons name one's children (unfortunately, I didn't log it)-- Stitcher asked Celeste what her name meant.
While I already knew the answer to that question and I figured Celeste knew the answer to that question, I didn't know how Celeste'd wound up being given the name by her parents. Never had to think about it, you see.
So, in exchange for making me think, damn him, Stitcher got a little story about how Celeste got her "star-graced" name because she was born on the same night as a meteor shower fell on her family estate. Not that her family believed that boded grave portent: they were mostly annoyed that everyone was away at the hospital when the antique fire suppression drones failed to keep the hay barn from burning to the ground after a meteor crashed through its roof. Celeste went on to suggest that she first developed her interest in drone technology because she kept being reminded of this story ad nauseaum throughout her childhood -- and she wanted nothing more than to make sure drones (and technology in general) worked like they supposed to so situations like those would never happen again.*
*When I was later thinking about this pulled-out-of-thin-air story, I said to myself "Oh, crap. This helps explain the nature of Celeste's teenaged rebellion, her subsequent Senate career, and even ties into the shape of Vieve's childhood nervous breakdown after she set the Ishukone rep on fire. Damn. And why can't I do this shit so easily for the stuff I get paid for?"
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The 'flavor' greetings are just people trying to be special.
Nothing more, nothing less.
But Lal, everybody is special.
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"Hey, baby, ever done it with a demigod?"