Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE Character Development => Topic started by: Saede Riordan on 05 Jun 2010, 21:16
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Inbound rant. You have been warned.
I'm sure most of you are aware of who my character is, but for those who need a recap, Nikita is roboticist and a cyberneticist, she is a sort of capsular without a capsule. Through a series of events within her backstory, Nikita developed...damaged, she refuses to stay within her pod, despite the fact that the system she has rigged up instead of it is not nearly as safe, her ship is entirely automated through her own expense of leg work, combined with powerful AIs and enough drones and robots to colonize a planet.
That's my character, yes, she breaks some of the 'rules' that seem to have been laid down in eve RP, even though the RP is freeform, and there really are no rules. Now, I don't want to play a different character, I've put a lot of time, and energy creating a character that is human, and has flaws, and isn't a Mary Sue. Everything written into her backstory is completely plausible in the eve universe, I read pretty much all the eve fiction I could get my hands on before I made her, and I even went through the item database to figure out what items she could cannibalize to do the things she is doing.
I think I did a pretty good job. Evidently, according to some people, a pretty good job isn't good enough, and well thought out and unique translates to bad, and stupid. So I must ask, what is wrong with my character? Why am I being told by multiple people that the entire premise of my character is bad, and that I should just completely start over?
I'm not willing to completely redesign my character, I LIKE her, so what do I do? Should I just stop roleplaying because the sandbox isn't big enough for my ideas? Should I what? What do I do?
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Honestly, do whatever you want with your character. If people have an issue with it, let them rant. I've heard a few things regarding this (Am still pretty Hazy) and it sounds like a lot of people also have no issues with it.
I'm of the opinion that people should be able to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn't impact upon the freedoms of others. RP'ing a character different from the 'norm' doesn't harm anyone, or It shouldn't.
Stay on track, and props for creating an interesting and significantly different character. :)
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Just keep doing what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with being out of the ordinary, and you should just ignore those people who criticize it.
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While i have not interacted with you ic as i can recall here is my 5 cents:
Yes, some of th things you have written in your post do not perhaps conform totally to pf. so what really? Its nothing major as i can see.
As always bottomline is that YOU should have fun.
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I hate to be the piss in the proverbial Cheerios, but im guessing you're looking for constructive advice, not an orgy of roleplay diversity acceptance.
One thing to consider are the ramifications of not being in your pod. What if you ARE podded and say they have your corpse? If people had the power to control ships that remotely, why are ANY of us in the damned things? Personally, I find the implications far too great to be immersive for me, and I'd probably ignore interaction altogether.
HOWEVER, I do think this has tremendous potential if approached differently. What about a psychological disorder like a phobia for drowning or claustrophobia; some kind of disorder that adds some flaw or weakness to the character. Seeing how people overcome these kinds of hurdles to achieve their goals can be fascinating and rewarding.
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Go out with a bang. Orchestrate an elaborate death to immortalise the good memories of your character before the bad ones start building up. Then start again.
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Playing like that, I wouldn't, simply because of the ramifications of death. Which I experience often enough that I don't bother with implants. (Still have a habit of not clicking my escape tab till its too late and session change deaths.)
Regardless, if I were to play something outside my pod, I would do the whole haul. If I died (even now) outside of my pod, I'd be dead. I'd log out, and you'd never see Goshien again. I know the thoughts a tear jerker for all of you but sadly, I am devoted to the idea that minus my brainscanner, I am mortal.
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I hate to be the piss in the proverbial Cheerios, but im guessing you're looking for constructive advice, not an orgy of roleplay diversity acceptance.
One thing to consider are the ramifications of not being in your pod. What if you ARE podded and say they have your corpse? If people had the power to control ships that remotely, why are ANY of us in the damned things? Personally, I find the implications far too great to be immersive for me, and I'd probably ignore interaction altogether.
HOWEVER, I do think this has tremendous potential if approached differently. What about a psychological disorder like a phobia for drowning or claustrophobia; some kind of disorder that adds some flaw or weakness to the character. Seeing how people overcome these kinds of hurdles to achieve their goals can be fascinating and rewarding.
Well the thing is, your however senario is exactly why she won't go in the pod, there was an accident when she was growing up that left her floating alone in the dark in a fuel tank for three days before being rescued. She isn't special per say because of how she does things, she is damaged goods.
Well the pod exists for several reasons:
1. it functions as a sensory deprivation tank, which doesn't work with my character for some reason, she is always aware of her body, which plays more off her issue with being in the pod.
2. The pod functions as a neural link to control the ship by, I still have the neural link, it takes a lot of mental willpower to be able to control both the body and the ship concurrently but I manage well enough.
3. To clone you upon death. I have built a backup burn scanner into my brainstem, using information I've gained through my consulting work on Project 514, I also I have a pod, that I can jump into if the need to leave the ship arises, but for everyday things, I don't need to be in it. my pods are also personally modified to be well lit inside, and gravimetrically stabilized, instead of using ferrofluid in the dark.
I've been over most of this stuff, and I accept and acknowledge and have addressed all the issues with it, its not the idea per say as it is what to do about the people who don't accept it, which from the feeling I get from most of the posters, is just to do my own thing and let them be elitist asshats elseware.
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The block button is a cool feature. Or just tell them to get over it :lol:
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Block button I wield often enough. It's useful, both as an IC and OOC tool. Basically comes down to the same thing, if I don't want to listen to someone, I don't have to. Neither does Goshien, though that carries the issue of not being able to talk at all OOC as well.
OOC wise if I block you it's more or less permanent. You now do not exist outside a flash on my overview if it comes to that. Being a fan of online games as long as I have, it's the only was to deal with asshats is to wipe them from your mind entirely.
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On the one hand, there are large parts of your RP that are to some extent or other not really compatible with PF.
On the other, you can certainly RP your character in any way you would like.
It is valid for other people's characters to react to you as if you are nuts, though. If your character approached most of my characters with, for example, the bit about the burning scanner built into your head, they would just assume your character was delusional.
That doesn't say that you are doing it wrong, or I'm doing it right. At some point, though, OOC you and I start playing by a set of rules different enough that we aren't in quite the same game anymore. That really hampers how we're going to be able to interact IC.
Most of us take liberties, of one degree or another, with PF. Either where something isn't defined at all, or where there is a bit of controversy about what PF there is, or even where we need to make a bit of a stretch for character reasons, as it might be said you have done.
Accommodating those various quirks from other people's characters is a courtesy, not a requirement. Everyone draws the line at different places. A problem arises when you simply expect people to accept (OOC) these things. You are effectively the one that is going 'I'm right, you're wrong' in that case.
I think it is fair for people to say to you, OOC, "This is something that breaks PF and my immersion, so I'm not going to interact with you." or IC, "You're obviously crazy."
It is fair for you to say to them, OOC, "I think this is possible, and it's how I play the game." or IC, "No, I'm totally not crazy!"
Neither side should expect the other to change things because there is one 'right' way of doing them. There isn't. It's a sandbox. People just have different ideas about where the sides are, sometimes.
All that being said, the further afield you go with PF, the more likely you are to have more limited RP opportunities. Someone who says 'I'm Jamyl Sarum's Long lost daughter!' or 'I'm a cylon!' will find themselves with very few opportunities for RP, long term.
Obviously your character is situated somewhere where a lot of people will have issue with it (Though it isn't all that far up there, on a scale from 0 to Cylon). As some other replies here show, there are people willing to accommodate it. So, you have them to interact with. You have people who will probably be willing to interact even though their characters IC might think your character is quite eccentric, or shake their heads sadly and go 'Podder dementia. Sad it's got another one.' then move on and have meaningful interaction anyway.
So people don't agree OOC that your character fits their ideas of what PF is. Don't RP with them. Block them if they make a big deal out of it.
Just keep in mind, some people, and I probably would have done this myself if I had run into IG OOC, might not being doing it to go 'Ur wrong' they might be doing it because they would like to RP with you, but they would have to change their characters for it to work.
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Yeah, I fall pretty much on the hard-PF side of the line. Everything my character can do and has experienced (technologically or setting-wise, not relationships, of course) I've tried to extrapolate from Eve PF.
So, if my character interacts with you, it's going to be "oh, look, another crazy", which has been his impression to this point.
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Well the thing is, your however senario is exactly why she won't go in the pod, there was an accident when she was growing up that left her floating alone in the dark in a fuel tank for three days before being rescued. She isn't special per say because of how she does things, she is damaged goods.
Well the pod exists for several reasons:
1. it functions as a sensory deprivation tank, which doesn't work with my character for some reason, she is always aware of her body, which plays more off her issue with being in the pod.
2. The pod functions as a neural link to control the ship by, I still have the neural link, it takes a lot of mental willpower to be able to control both the body and the ship concurrently but I manage well enough.
3. To clone you upon death. I have built a backup burn scanner into my brainstem, using information I've gained through my consulting work on Project 514, I also I have a pod, that I can jump into if the need to leave the ship arises, but for everyday things, I don't need to be in it. my pods are also personally modified to be well lit inside, and gravimetrically stabilized, instead of using ferrofluid in the dark.
I've been over most of this stuff, and I accept and acknowledge and have addressed all the issues with it, its not the idea per say as it is what to do about the people who don't accept it, which from the feeling I get from most of the posters, is just to do my own thing and let them be elitist asshats elseware.
I prefer freeform and dynamic RP as opposed to anything that's scripted or already has a pre-decided outcome.
I am however with Vik on this one, and while a lot of Eve's PF is pretty open ended and free to be indulged and expanded upon there are certain things that are there, are fact, and can't be changed.
I also share the same sentiments as Silver, so please don't take the following as flaming when I say that being a capsuleer is one of those things. The technology, how it works, how the cloning process works and the neural scanning process works is all hard written into PF and is what makes a capsuleer who they are.
Personally I've got no issue with people fiddling with PF a little for creative reasons, but some people (read pretty much everyone who cares about PF) will take exception to the fact that you're pretty much re-writing PF as you go.
Please don't take this as flaming (it's honestly not, i'm trying to offer you some insight into why people might be treating you with hostility because of your roleplay), I'd like to address your three points from the standpoint of someone who's been digging through Eve's PF for a little over two thirds of a decade.
Again, this isn't intended as flaming, it's more intended as a way for me to perhaps shed some light on why you're getting the "lol, fucking nutcase" treatment.
1. it functions as a sensory deprivation tank, which doesn't work with my character for some reason, she is always aware of her body, which plays more off her issue with being in the pod.
The pod functions as COMPLETE sensory deprivation, it's designed basically to create an out of body experience and make the pilot feel as if they're not using a human body any more. It's there fundamentally to remove the delays of reflex action, and keeps you bio-electrically linked to your ship's core systems to ensure that your ship responds as fast as you can possibly think.
Not being connected to a capsule and immersed, and controlling both your body and ship at the same time basically negates the need for a capsule. To bring to light just one of many contradictions and strange concepts, I can't understand what your character would "see" when she was piloting in this respect, as she'd still have control over her body and her sight, yet she'd be receiving a neural intercept from the link to display the images from her camera drone.
2. The pod functions as a neural link to control the ship by, I still have the neural link, it takes a lot of mental willpower to be able to control both the body and the ship concurrently but I manage well enough.
In this case, the willpower your character would have would probably put her on the verge of being able to perform telekinesis. Out of hundreds of trillions of people in New Eden, there are a couple of million people who can be capsuleers.
They first have to have the correct genetic makeup, then they have to have a solid enough mental state to be able to cope with the stress of being neural linked. When linked, a capsuleer's mind is in complete control of a ship's core systems. We're talking trillions of calculations per second, petabytes of data being shunted through the neural link as the ship's systems communicate digitally with the capsuleer's brain.
The Neural link is in the place it is at the base of the skull for a reason. It's designed as a hard wired bio-electrical intercept that effectively hijacks the capsuleer's central nervous system where it leaves the brain close to the medulla oblongata. The capsuleer is effectively in a state of complete physical paralysis while piloting, but has intricate mental control over their craft.
99.999% of New Eden's population can't handle this influx of data, the vast majority of them either dying, or suffering the effects of the "wetgrave", also known as a mind lock, where the state of paralysis remains once they're unhooked from the neural jack. Capsuleers have that extra sliver of "neural bandwidth", lets call it that for simplicity, that lets them do what they do.
Effectively, by claiming to have full control over both your ship and body at the same time, you're claiming to have double the mental capacity of a capsuleer. That's something that's never been heard of, your character would be one of a kind, and a god among demi-gods. Not even the most successful sovereign leaders can claim that.
3. To clone you upon death. I have built a backup burn scanner into my brainstem, using information I've gained through my consulting work on Project 514, I also I have a pod, that I can jump into if the need to leave the ship arises, but for everyday things, I don't need to be in it. my pods are also personally modified to be well lit inside, and gravimetrically stabilized, instead of using ferrofluid in the dark.
The burn scanner is something that's detailed quite heavily in several pieces of prime fiction. If I can find links to them I'll dig them up and post them here. In a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you want a pun), the technology comes from the Jovian Directorate. It was first handed to Ishukone many years ago in a trade deal, and was so sought after than Ishukone rose from being the bastard child runt corporation of the Caldari State to being one of the largest and most successful corporations in the Liberal bloc.
To this day, the tech is so advanced that it's still not an exact science. There are still fuckups, and capsuleers who're tried and tested, and fully qualified occasionally still end up mind locked. The premise is simple. The burn scanner watches for a breach in the hull of the capsule, monitoring its state thousands of times a second to make sure that the process is instant. On detecting a breach, the burner fires, and creates a neural backup of the capsuleer's brain in its exact state at that precise point in time. (Imagine a computer locking up hard, and then a piece of external software making a note of the on/off status of every single transistor of the hundreds of millions that are on the die of the CPU, and pulling a hard copy of the contents of the system's RAM.) That's projected to your cloning facility for download into your waiting clone.
The equipment is bulky, heavy and extremely sensitive, being able to be triggered by slight changes in pressure. Walking around with it on wouldn't be advised. That's why it's fitted to the capsule to give it the most stable platform possible to operate from. The videos for Incarna show us that it's also not just a case of "jumping into" a capsule. It's a process that takes time and a lot of technological know-how. It's easy enough to get in and out of, but it's not like jumping in the bath.
As for a pod being well lit, and stabilised with artificial gravity, there's little point to it given the control a vessel has over your nervous system. With regards to it not being filled with fluid, even the concept of this really doesn't make sense. Fluid pressure will always overcome gas pressure. A liquid in general terms cannot be compressed (some will argue that it can, by microns, and this is true, however we're talking in general laymens terms), while a gas can. This means that hydraulic (liquid) pressure is always more stable than pneumatic (gas) pressure, hence the prevalent use of hydraulics over pneumatics in heavy industry. Hell, sometimes people even use "air over oil" systems, with the liquid force of the oil giving the actuation and the gas pressure giving a damping effect.
Now take this fact into space, where we meet temperature and pressure differences that can vary in the best case by thousands of degrees and the situation gets very ugly for the sensitivity of the neural burner.
As for how cloning will work with DUST's ground troops, that's yet to be seen. I've heard talk that it's going to be based around pre-mission soft scan backups to retain memory and skills, rather than mobile neural burning equipment. Hell, they could even do a wierd take on Avatar and use clones remotely controlled from the war-barge if they wanted to. A lot of it is up in the air right now.
So in closing, as I've said, this isn't attempted as me flaming you, please don't consider it as that. This is just me taking a look at where PF meets and clashes technologically with what you've written, from the perspective of a qualified and experienced Engineer out of game.
I can accept that some things are perfectly fine to hand wave and hell, I love to see people getting creative with their RP, but there is a line with how much we can bend the rules of prime fiction and it's best not to tread the far side of it if you want your character to be treat in any other way than being a bit crackers. I think that a lot of people have considered you as crossing that line, and that's where the hostility stems from.
What needs to be remembered is that RP is about immersion, and heavily contradicting prime fiction with your character means that a lot of people will simply treat you as crackers, because it breaks their immersion and dilutes or completely dissolves their RP experience.
As for the end of your posted quote, sure... some people might come across to you as elitist asshats. I hope that I haven't, I've tried to be as direct and to the point as I can about why people might see your character as a complete breach of prime fiction, and might negatively respond to you.
As for my own character, Yeah... he'd interact with Nikita without an issue, purely because of the fact he's met some serious nutjobs in his time and can just shake his head at it.
He'd think that Nikita was an absolute delusional nutjob or a serious booster abuser, but that wouldn't stop him from being pleasant and interacting with her. I value and enjoy RP just as much as the next person, so if someone wants to be creative with it, I'm not going to hold it against them and deny they even exist.
Besides, we all go a little mad sometimes. ;)
General note : I've given my opinion and perception of PF in this response, it's not gospel, it's my interpretation of how I see the technology from prime fiction working. If you don't agree with me, please don't shit up this thread with your arguments against it. This is Nikita's thread not mine, and my perception of PF is not the subject here, it was only added in an attempt to assist the player her in understanding where I was coming from and why people might be treating him or her with hostility.
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Nikita, as you can see, I think most folks understand that of course you have the right to play however you see fit. Nobody can enforce any sort of "rules" upon you, nor should we, which makes all the input really just suggestions and guidelines. People who suggest that you are "bad" and "stupid", or imply it as closely as they can without calling you that, probably shouldn't.
On the other hand, you should understand that a character design such as you've outlined runs counter to the fictional universe that most of us understand (along the lines of Verone's extensive interpretation and explanation). So when that happens, we can do one of two things: change how we view this fictional universe, possibly introducing incoherence or at least inconsistency, or simply choose not to interact with your character as such (I include treating her like a nutcase here).
Really, you need to decide whether your commitment to your interpretation is strong enough to overcome this sort of community pressure. If you want to run with that, by all means, do so! :) But if you want to adapt her somewhat to have more consistency with the widely-accepted information on the EVE universe, we can certainly help you do that.
Either way, as long as you're having fun and nobody's violating the ToS in their interactions with you, that's all that really matters. :)
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Hmm. Others have raised good and relevant points, with me pretty much agreeing. I just want to ask one question and it's not sarcastic, snide-licious, but just genuinely interested in seeking understanding.
As per Verone's post, the PF is pretty well established (I'm not sure that I agree entirely 100% with all of Verone's ideas/propositions, but he certainly is on the right track). It gives us the basic starting point for all our characters. You can go in a million different directions from there.
Why choose to be so different as to go against the PF? Why is it so important? Why does your character need to control her ships' in this manner? You can be special in a million different ways, introducing whatever peculiarities you want into your character via myriad different options, without breaking the PF so blatantly. It's an MMO and we have to play with others after all.
Hence, while I don't think what you're doing is "wrong" in some cosmic sense ("all is allowed, nothing is forbidden" and all that..), I simply don't see why you would choose this.
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I've discussed this in detail with a few people, and I have heard, and have responded to these arguments before.
1. it functions as a sensory deprivation tank, which doesn't work with my character for some reason, she is always aware of her body, which plays more off her issue with being in the pod.
The pod functions as COMPLETE sensory deprivation, it's designed basically to create an out of body experience and make the pilot feel as if they're not using a human body any more. It's there fundamentally to remove the delays of reflex action, and keeps you bio-electrically linked to your ship's core systems to ensure that your ship responds as fast as you can possibly think.
Not being connected to a capsule and immersed, and controlling both your body and ship at the same time basically negates the need for a capsule. To bring to light just one of many contradictions and strange concepts, I can't understand what your character would "see" when she was piloting in this respect, as she'd still have control over her body and her sight, yet she'd be receiving a neural intercept from the link to display the images from her camera drone.
The problem though, arises because the pod fails, to function as sensory deprivation, Nikita has actually gone and had her neural jacks rebuilt four times in an attempt to fix this, but she is always aware that she is in the tank, she is always aware that she is floating, in the dark, which causes her issues. The ship doesn't feel real to her, her brain refuses to accept that the ship is her 'body' and the sensory block fails. She panics and can't handle being in the tank.
2. The pod functions as a neural link to control the ship by, I still have the neural link, it takes a lot of mental willpower to be able to control both the body and the ship concurrently but I manage well enough.
In this case, the willpower your character would have would probably put her on the verge of being able to perform telekinesis. Out of hundreds of trillions of people in New Eden, there are a couple of million people who can be capsuleers.
They first have to have the correct genetic makeup, then they have to have a solid enough mental state to be able to cope with the stress of being neural linked. When linked, a capsuleer's mind is in complete control of a ship's core systems. We're talking trillions of calculations per second, petabytes of data being shunted through the neural link as the ship's systems communicate digitally with the capsuleer's brain.
The Neural link is in the place it is at the base of the skull for a reason. It's designed as a hard wired bio-electrical intercept that effectively hijacks the capsuleer's central nervous system where it leaves the brain close to the medulla oblongata. The capsuleer is effectively in a state of complete physical paralysis while piloting, but has intricate mental control over their craft.
99.999% of New Eden's population can't handle this influx of data, the vast majority of them either dying, or suffering the effects of the "wetgrave", also known as a mind lock, where the state of paralysis remains once they're unhooked from the neural jack. Capsuleers have that extra sliver of "neural bandwidth", lets call it that for simplicity, that lets them do what they do.
Effectively, by claiming to have full control over both your ship and body at the same time, you're claiming to have double the mental capacity of a capsuleer. That's something that's never been heard of, your character would be one of a kind, and a god among demi-gods. Not even the most successful sovereign leaders can claim that.
There is actually an answer to this, and its not that she has a retarded amount of willpower, its that she's circumvented the need for it. She's rebuilt the neural relays and core computing protocols, so that her brain ceases to be the central processing unit for the ship, and is just a top domain level user. Instead of having absolute and complete control over the ship, the core computer, which I had already stated she had massively upgraded, is in direct autonomous control of the ship. She then uses the neural link to inject commands for the ship to follow. This is augmented with physical controls to reduce any latency in the connections.
This effectively means she doesn't need to perform billions upon billions of mental operations per second, the computer handles that, and she simply injects commands into it (which, truth be told, is closer to eve gameplay then the prime fiction)
It is still difficult to do stuff with both her body and the ship at the same time, but the amount of willpower required is much closer to that of a normal capsular.
3. To clone you upon death. I have built a backup burn scanner into my brainstem, using information I've gained through my consulting work on Project 514, I also I have a pod, that I can jump into if the need to leave the ship arises, but for everyday things, I don't need to be in it. my pods are also personally modified to be well lit inside, and gravimetrically stabilized, instead of using ferrofluid in the dark.
The burn scanner is something that's detailed quite heavily in several pieces of prime fiction. If I can find links to them I'll dig them up and post them here. In a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you want a pun), the technology comes from the Jovian Directorate. It was first handed to Ishukone many years ago in a trade deal, and was so sought after than Ishukone rose from being the bastard child runt corporation of the Caldari State to being one of the largest and most successful corporations in the Liberal bloc.
To this day, the tech is so advanced that it's still not an exact science. There are still fuckups, and capsuleers who're tried and tested, and fully qualified occasionally still end up mind locked. The premise is simple. The burn scanner watches for a breach in the hull of the capsule, monitoring its state thousands of times a second to make sure that the process is instant. On detecting a breach, the burner fires, and creates a neural backup of the capsuleer's brain in its exact state at that precise point in time. (Imagine a computer locking up hard, and then a piece of external software making a note of the on/off status of every single transistor of the hundreds of millions that are on the die of the CPU, and pulling a hard copy of the contents of the system's RAM.) That's projected to your cloning facility for download into your waiting clone.
The equipment is bulky, heavy and extremely sensitive, being able to be triggered by slight changes in pressure. Walking around with it on wouldn't be advised. That's why it's fitted to the capsule to give it the most stable platform possible to operate from. The videos for Incarna show us that it's also not just a case of "jumping into" a capsule. It's a process that takes time and a lot of technological know-how. It's easy enough to get in and out of, but it's not like jumping in the bath.
As for a pod being well lit, and stabilised with artificial gravity, there's little point to it given the control a vessel has over your nervous system. With regards to it not being filled with fluid, even the concept of this really doesn't make sense. Fluid pressure will always overcome gas pressure. A liquid in general terms cannot be compressed (some will argue that it can, by microns, and this is true, however we're talking in general laymens terms), while a gas can. This means that hydraulic (liquid) pressure is always more stable than pneumatic (gas) pressure, hence the prevalent use of hydraulics over pneumatics in heavy industry. Hell, sometimes people even use "air over oil" systems, with the liquid force of the oil giving the actuation and the gas pressure giving a damping effect.
Now take this fact into space, where we meet temperature and pressure differences that can vary in the best case by thousands of degrees and the situation gets very ugly for the sensitivity of the neural burner.
As for how cloning will work with DUST's ground troops, that's yet to be seen. I've heard talk that it's going to be based around pre-mission soft scan backups to retain memory and skills, rather than mobile neural burning equipment. Hell, they could even do a wierd take on Avatar and use clones remotely controlled from the war-barge if they wanted to. A lot of it is up in the air right now.
I'll be honest with this, I have looked into the Prime Fiction, and I am just guessing as to how they did it, so yes, this arguement is valid to some extent, if it turns out the tech has gotten to the point where it can be miniaturized and stuck in someone's head, well I'll take that as permission to do it the way I am, but we really can't know one way or another until that happens.
As for the pod, gravity is not gas pressure, gravity is mass pressure, if the outside of the pod is exerting between 1.5 and 2 gees of force on her body to hold it in place in the pod, she is going to be anchored there just as securely as if she was floating in pod goo.
But what it does mean, is that there is no load unload time for getting into and out of the pod, it simply opens up, she jumps in, the gravity generators activate and she's held in the center of the pod.
Now that I've made my counter arguments, I'm going to do something strange, and say that for the most part, you are completely right, and I fully understand where you are coming from.
But I don't like it, I don't want my character to be stuck in a pod, a major point of her as a character, and something I really liked about the way I wrote her, is that she does manual work, she tinkers, she fixes things herself, she wanders around her ship, and stares at the stars out the bridge windows.
I don't really know how to fix her, but I agree, there are things that need to be fixed.
So how do I do it without breaking fiction? How do I make the character I want, without making one that no one wants to interact with?
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Androids are mentioned in PF.
Camera drones also mentioned.
When "Nikita" is doing all the "does manual work, she tinkers, she fixes things herself, she wanders around her ship, and stares at the stars out the bridge windows"
How about...
Android body, with camera drone telemetry link to the "real" Nikita who is in her pod/pod-substitute-technology-thing.
That way, when "you" are wandering around, it's actually a remote-controlled android, controlled via the pod interface?
Hey, it could even be a flesh & blood remote controlled body. A Nikita clone, with a TransCranialMicroController and other devices fitted to replace the brain and provide the remote control?
how about that?
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Hey, it could even be a flesh & blood remote controlled body. A Nikita clone, with a TransCranialMicroController and other devices fitted to replace the brain and provide the remote control?
...now that's a cool idea.
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Seriously, this just doesn't have to be that freaking complicated.
If Nikita's not doing combat operations (I presume from the descriptions so far that she's not a combat pilot), just say she's unplugged. She's got raging claustrophobia that she just can't get over/get fixed or she has no desire to do either, so she wants to be in a pod as little as possible. She's not connected to her ship by any means other than perhaps a skulljack clipped into a datapad link. She has a mundane or automated crew, just like the majority of the NPC ships do.
In that state, she can wander around aboard ship and tinker and look at stars all she wants.
She may or may not suffer warp sickness.
She will be less awesome at piloting her ship than someone who's in a pod. Really. Just look at all those NPC ships that get blown up every day. Being less awesome, however, doesn't mean she can't learn how to be sneakier in order to compensate for her handicaps.
If her ship gets blown up, say she gets to an escape pod in time. If that gets blown up, then she's dead. She doesn't have a memory burner in her skull or even worn as a stylish hat. She may have a 'suicide closet' aboard her escape pod. Using the closet may not be a smooth a process as employing the neural burner fitted inside a capsuleering pod: she may suffer interesting side effects once she comes out the other end.
If she doesn't have a suicide closet -- if she's had the foresight to get a soft copy done when she's not in a panicked-running-for-the-closet-while-tripping-over-dying/malfunctioning-crew state, those memories can be inserted into a clone. She'll have memory gaps, of course, how long depending upon when the copy was done.
But not being in a pod, not being fully integrated with a ship if one is a combat pilot? Eh.
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But not being in a pod, not being fully integrated with a ship if one is a combat pilot? Eh.
Too bad the InOps corp recruitment ad states: "I fully intend to have regular jaunts into lowsec, 0.0, and highsec wardecs, if you are not prepared to be involved in combat, and lots of it, then this is probably not the corp for you."
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But I don't like it, I don't want my character to be stuck in a pod, a major point of her as a character, and something I really liked about the way I wrote her, is that she does manual work, she tinkers, she fixes things herself, she wanders around her ship, and stares at the stars out the bridge windows.
I don't really know how to fix her, but I agree, there are things that need to be fixed.
So how do I do it without breaking fiction? How do I make the character I want, without making one that no one wants to interact with?
Do you not want her stuck in a pod because you want her to tinker/wander the ship/etc?
You might decide how much you are willing to compromise your ideas for your character in order to get wider opportunities for interaction. On the other hand, it is possible that we can come up with stuff that doesn't compromise her as much as you might fear.
Just as an example, it isn't an uncommon thing to want to be able to have a character walks around a ship outside the pod when the ship is in space. There are less absolute solutions than the character not using a pod, though.
I guess I'm trying to see if these things that myself and others would feel were difficult to reconcile with the way we RP are a central part of the character, or whether you created them to facilitate other things you liked about the character?
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Seriously, this just doesn't have to be that freaking complicated.
If Nikita's not doing combat operations (I presume from the descriptions so far that she's not a combat pilot), just say she's unplugged. She's got raging claustrophobia that she just can't get over/get fixed or she has no desire to do either, so she wants to be in a pod as little as possible. She's not connected to her ship by any means other than perhaps a skulljack clipped into a datapad link. She has a mundane or automated crew, just like the majority of the NPC ships do.
In that state, she can wander around aboard ship and tinker and look at stars all she wants.
She may or may not suffer warp sickness.
She will be less awesome at piloting her ship than someone who's in a pod. Really. Just look at all those NPC ships that get blown up every day. Being less awesome, however, doesn't mean she can't learn how to be sneakier in order to compensate for her handicaps.
This.
If this is just a case not wanting to be plugged in and roaming around the ship in fashion reminiscent of more convential SciFi, this is the obvious solution. No aggravating the PF-minded involved. But well, if it is something else as well.. then it's different. But if it's as stated by Nik earlier, this is the most elegant solution.
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I have to ask something here. This is not trolling, this is not a flame this is just a question.
Are you asking because you are looking for a way to adjust your RP to better be accepted by your peers, or are you asking so that you can find out what peoples' disagreements are in order to justify your decision you've already made?
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But I don't like it, I don't want my character to be stuck in a pod, a major point of her as a character, and something I really liked about the way I wrote her, is that she does manual work, she tinkers, she fixes things herself, she wanders around her ship, and stares at the stars out the bridge windows.
I don't really know how to fix her, but I agree, there are things that need to be fixed.
So how do I do it without breaking fiction? How do I make the character I want, without making one that no one wants to interact with?
What's to stop her doing manual work, but piloting from the capsule?
She could be sat in dock doing manual work all day if she wanted, or she could come out of the capsule while in safe space, and walk around aboard her ship, watch the stars from the windows of her tactical bridge, chill out, relax, have some fun or get greasy in the engineering decks. There's nothing to stop her doing that.
There's nothing at all to say that she can't do each and every one of those things, without having to sacrifice prime fiction and being in control of a ship via a capsule when she needs to pilot.
That's where every bit of your logic fails for me, and it just seems like wanting to pilot with out a capsule is from some strange need to break the mould.
If that's the case, then there are thousands of ways to break the mould without completely contravening prime fiction. :)
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As for the pod, gravity is not gas pressure, gravity is mass pressure,
This wasn't what I was claiming or getting at, at all. You completely misinterpreted my point.
Regardless, your post is pretty much the set of answers I expected. It's pretty obvious that you don't want to change your character, despite it punching massive holes in Prime Fiction.
All I can say is that I suggest you read far more of the fiction, and dig in really deep if you ever decide to create an alt or another character.
As for interaction, I'm certainly not going to try and beat you down despite what people have pointed out. I doubt that most people will try to. It's your choice if you want to make life RPing more difficult for yourself for the sake of problems that can be solved with a little reading into PF and taking some advice from people who've been there and done it so to speak.
My advice is that if you don't want to change your character, which it seems is the case despite this thread, then ignore the people who blatantly blank you or try to troll you in character. Problem is, there's more than likely going to be a lot of people saying "wow, what a basket case" when they come into contact with you IC.
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But not being in a pod, not being fully integrated with a ship if one is a combat pilot? Eh.
Too bad the InOps corp recruitment ad states: "I fully intend to have regular jaunts into lowsec, 0.0, and highsec wardecs, if you are not prepared to be involved in combat, and lots of it, then this is probably not the corp for you."
See above comment about tripping over panicking/malfunctioning/exploding crew members.
Thanks for reading that recruitment ad. I failed to do so. :P
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Verone writes here the sort of stuff I would be proud to write on the subject if I could summon the patience anymore.
I will only say this. It's not a flame, it is a fact.
When I blow up your ship, a capsule will come out, and you will be controlling it. This pod will probably attempt to accelerate to 130m/s, which in your well-lit and empty pod, would turn you into chunky salsa. A single kinetic round or missile will have a similar effect. You will be perma-dead at this point, as your magical onboard brainscan equipment will also be dashed into similar bits, transforming the salsa into a delicious crunchy variety.
Then I will pop the pod and grab the frozen corpse.
If you were to attempt to explain to me that the things I know to be true about what I saw and what I do on a regular basis are wrong simply because you wrote a way around them, I may not be inclined to keep the channel open.
This is only one example, and for some reason I can imagine you in the act of formulating a reason why this would not be. That's ok, but unnecessary.
You have the RIGHT to RP any way you like. The rest of us, however, are not bound in any way to accept your explanations, and anyone refusing to do so is in the RIGHT as well. A demand that players ignore PF to suit your story is something you can ask, but the list of good RPers who are likely to do so will probably be low, which seems to be the case for you already.
A retorting list of ways that you have written your way around such rules isn't that likely to change that many minds on this matter.
DO what you WANT.
But so will we.
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This thread needs to fucking watch it. A lot of vets are being less than useful here. I'm seeing pears in the immediate future - stewed pears, cooking beneath the surface of some dark, syrup-thick morass in a cauldron.
It's not in the details, guys. We're asked for advice on what to do next - where to go from here.
This is the character development forum section. Pack the PF discussion in for ten seconds and think of character traits moar. That whole first page was a preamble about how we're not all jerks, or absolutely magical hemming and hawing about prime fiction line-toeing or the lack thereof based on the science of a culture with thousands of years more time to develop than anything we've seen.
It's kind of like my D6 Star Wars GM buddy said, though...I suppose some paraphrasing and reframing of the remarks for EVE would bring about something like this: in the end, the tech-talk is about your comfort level with the degree to which your thought-framework for all this shit is internally consistent. That's all well and good, but it does not help this community member with her question. She has not been privy to seven, or even two, years of intense and painstaking geekery on certain other forums where we toiled to make sense of the dross and capriciousness CCP's writers would put before us; she will not possibly glean their benefits in the space of this thread - at least, not without being sort of turned off by it all and ending up disinclined to see things our way. This is because WE developed our near-consensus slowly in a fashion that made it ours, and she did not. Our feelings of ownership are not shared here, and may never be.
Our knowledge of how far back this structure of justifications goes, how deep it is submerged below the surface of what is presently visible at face value (which is itself not shared due to a terrific lack of usefully summarial materials which present arguments rather than simply contradicting people, in the sense that a contradiction is an argument minus supporting points and evidence, roughly), and so on do not come through in the space available. The newcomers just see the iceberg's cap as it floats above the rather fluid perceptions we have of the past to jut into the present view in the form of our forthright recitations of some personally written gospel, and then we all maybe get in a shitfight-by-proxy. When we don't, we do something worse: we become extremely polite about saying things as brutal as 'I'm not going to hang with you because the background you have constructed for your fake identity, which may not be representative of your entertainment value or your capacity to bring something to the table during collaborative roleplaying, does not jive with my preferred take on things and would distract me from scratching my usual nerd itch.'
This is not the best way to go about spreading the consensus. Hell, in a game with this badly fragmented a demographic of players that share this playstyle, it's downright disruptive.
Anyway. A quick point.
Hey, it could even be a flesh & blood remote controlled body. A Nikita clone, with a TransCranialMicroController and other devices fitted to replace the brain and provide the remote control?
...now that's a cool idea.
Jump.
Clones.
Yoshito style.
Aside from that -
Nikita, if you're still reading this thread, number one deal is that it's almost never worth the sense of having sunk a cost - drowned it, really - when you dump or cease to be able to enjoy having a specific character because of peer responses.
I advise you to consider your options. They are related to what would make you happiest with the situation as follows, from most irksome to least in my experience:
1) Potentially the suckiest option: decide that being keelhauled by peer pressure and blocking every other player you meet in the community because of their playstyle is too irritating and start over, wherein you either biomass a char with umpteen skillpoints or throw out the story with the bathwater. Yeah, its been done before as a story culmination as Scagga suggests, and it's something that works best when the player is unhappy with the prospect of ending their character to a pretty significant extent, or happy with the prospect of doing so. It worked for Nooey, in particular.
2) Potentially the second-most problematic option in the long run for someone who has just gained access to a bunch of roleplayer hotspots featuring fellow backstory sponges: tell 'em all to get fucked, and put up with the troubling lack of playmates by working on your social networking until you find some. I'll be around, anyway. Us cyberpunk folks be down.
3) The more challenging options, but those that have produced the most reward in people I've observed, begin here: Slowly, and with great attention to detail paid to character consistency - and most importantly, on your terms, join the larger consensus. BUT. Do it in the way that half the fucking contributors to this thread have done it: contribute something to the thought system which adds to the broader group. I suppose this is my favorite option and sort of a nice topic, so I'm going to ramble on about it for a while.
Anyway. Growth of background material.
(Now, the following are just sort of off-the-cuff and from memory, so forgive me if I didn't hit on all your major accomplishments or whatever, but.)
Verone did it by dint of his exploration of pirate politics and his engineering wankery. It was amusing to say the least, and occasionally insightful :P
Kaleigh did it by exploring the rather fertile ground of broader Gallentean culture.
Vieve did it by having all this shit come up with carnivorous, closet-inhabiting plants, and relationships, and soap operas with guns, and older women who tore up political bullshit.
Graelyn did it by framing a broad platform for the liberal-progressive insider in his faction, which is a massive old-boy-network.
Silver did it by slow expansion first of Caldari concepts generally using interpolation from PF and then by taking part in the Sansha lore explosion, some of which created very fond memories between my ears relating to mildly-charged arguments on the Summit and in other channels where he would attempt to cleverly justify and spin Nation shit back before anyone had HEARD of Soter's little operation, and I would make him uncomfortable.
And so on. All these shifty, opinionated bastards, at one time or another, did something that was out there and raised up a sand bar close to the shores of our little island of knowledge. With careful work, they took their wacky shit and added to the game for the rest of us.
You can help by integrating your subject matter of choice, if you like. You can, if you want, write something thoughtful and exploratory and expansive that makes some of this black magic you're currently practicing in the eyes of your fellows not only plainly valid (through careful contextual positioning in the PF), but also viable as a character trope for others to follow - we have too few information-warfare centric characters as it is.
This is because one of the unwritten rules of EVE roleplay is, the better written or presented and more carefully and versimilitudinously (christ, that word is scary) rationalized (read: entertaining for nerds) an outlandish or seemingly ill-fitting concept is, the more broadly it will be accepted.
Basically, if you share your story well, we'll forget all about the fact that it has shit in there that's like, where the fuck did THAT come from?
You know how I know? 'Cause I've done it.
But I would suggest that you try to come to terms with the idea that some things are either less than necessary or won't make the cut when you bring your character to it's next stable state.
For example, a lot of shit I threw together on my own before I came to test it in roleplay was found, sooner or later, to have little purpose.
Who gave a damn that my character was possessed of an extensive theological education? Much of the cluster was secular, and most capsuleers are on GalNet so much they may as well have a library in their heads anytime they like.
The military training was also slowly pushed way to the back in my roleplay; it was just some less-than-uncommon violence shit. Even the poorest egger can hire a fuckton of marines.
The disease I had my character develop for the sake of altering her was eventually treated and cured (in an ongoing storyline, maintaining the consistency of the character despite the groaning weight of her many improbable traits) for two reasons - first, it became less than fun to have a sick character be sick all the fucking time, and second, it served little purpose outside of being some predictable function of my roleplay. I cut it out of my main with a dull knife.
And the more out-there stuff, the stuff I'm keeping quiet about? I haven't retconned that because I figured that 1) it'd be a challenge to find a way to integrate the weird stuff as well as possible, and 2) retconning is shit, and so is starting over or abandoning one's work. It's just stuff that my character keeps quiet about because it's to my character's benefit to keep quiet about these things.
Ask yourself precisely what purpose all your character traits serve, Nikita. ALL of them.
As it is, the function of a couple of them is to start arguments. This makes them potentially worth assessing or potentially worth keeping, preferably (in my view) in slow, dynamic arcs that shift your character to new positions, which also helps maintain a semblance of life.
While some arguments should be started, others are foregone conclusions and bore-fests. While some traits serve to consistently amuse you, some serve to make things more repetitive, more predictable, more cookie cutter. In some cases, more unpleasant.
You really want to have to play someone who is fucking crazy some of the time, for example? Who is possessed of significant deviations in capacity? Who is prone to wear the same look everywhere they go, or has inexplicable failures to learn to deal with certain environments commonly dealt with by most people in their demographic? Go right ahead. But you're getting potentially all the roleplay you could ever want now; there is literally ALWAYS roleplay available to you once you know about this forum at ANY time you log into the game.
How many closely-spaced hours of repetition do you think those traits, the ones that at first amused you and kept the character interesting or outlandish for you, will manage to keep you entertained for now?
Anything examined too closely will lose its meaning; one can become jaded to anything that is waved in one's face with sufficient regularity. You're not gonna think that much of mexican standoffs as a novel or interesting plot device if you're always getting into them, without fail.
Also, every last one of the bizarre qualities you're getting shit about can be the subject of countless hours of quality roleplay as you plumb the depths of why it is so outlandish, how to polish the core concepts put forth in it to the point where it is well accepted because it is A-material fiction, and what it implies for New Eden at large once re-contextualized properly.
Some things to think on, anyhow.
Holy shit I went on in this poast.
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But I don't like it, I don't want my character to be stuck in a pod, a major point of her as a character, and something I really liked about the way I wrote her, is that she does manual work, she tinkers, she fixes things herself, she wanders around her ship, and stares at the stars out the bridge windows.
I don't really know how to fix her, but I agree, there are things that need to be fixed.
So how do I do it without breaking fiction? How do I make the character I want, without making one that no one wants to interact with?
Just saw this.
Ashar regularly makes appearances on her ship while in the pod through the use of holoprojection technology and sophisticated drone equipment.
The explanation for why she does it is something like Sherlock Holmes with his pipe; it can help her think.
The how is relatively simple as well; she'll run a piece of software over some tiny scrap of the massive processing power of the ship's CPU to handle the holoprojection's movements and mannerisms, and when she doesn't need to pay attention to the camera feed, she'll upload a captured vidfeed from the projection drone and nearby cameras to her visual input through ship systems.
Dockside, she'll be down with tinkering with shit often enough.
An example would be something like this - with thirty hisec waypoints planned, Ashar gets bored sitting in a pod. She loads up her holoprojection on deck number whatever; a holoprojection drone or system activates in the appropriate room and a fraction of ship processing power takes care of animating it just enough to make it understandable to the crew. A few speakers near the holoprojectors or a good PA system and she can talk to her subordinates; up to the minute recording near her location and she can see, hear, and so forth. If she looks out porthole #783456, so does a small camera drone.
...And the burning scanner in your neck can be a recording device that continually shunts neural data into a databank located in a safe location, saving memories and therefore a kind of personality continuity onto disk akin to the Jovian in Theodicy.
Best to ALSO have the genuine article in-pod, but it's not your only failsafe.
Anyway, I suppose we all have ideas, but I'm going to bed now.
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versimilitudinously
Fucking what? :lol:
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versimilitudinously
Fucking what? :lol:
Ha-ha, made you look, made you read that textwall.
I was sleepy and I stand by my construction. ALSO YOU'RE A PIRATE.
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ALSO YOU'RE A PIRATE.
STAY TUEND FOR ALL DIS AND MOAR IN TEH 10 O'CLOCK NEWZ
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PIRATS DON'T HAVE NOOSE, WHAT'RE YOU ON ABOUT?
Incidentally, I was gonna call you and Nikita both comma-crazy and then I made that textwall.
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Alright how bout this: I'm keeping the robot crew, there is no reason that you can't replace your crew with sufficiently competent androids and drones.
However, instead of doing to whole duality thing, I build my pod like this: There are two modes of operation, hard, and soft. Soft is white lit internally, with a chair and holographic displays, control of the ship is done via controls, and augmented via neural link, the front of the pod is open to the bridge, allowing me easy access in and out of the pod.
When I enter combat and the ship registers my presence in the pod, the chair retracts into the floor, the pod slams shut, and a series of gravity emitters engage, first lifting me into the center of the room, then squeezing my body into place, the neural link hardfires and I take direct control of the ship, the interior flashes red during this operation then shifts to blue once it has completed.
When I'm out of the pod, I can jack into the ship via softlink and walk around, the neural link automatically downloads and backs up new data as it comes in, negating the need for a full burn scanner as it updates the data in real time, there is still the potential for minor memory loss, particularly of things that I forgot before installing it, in a normal person, the knowledge is simply buried, however, since that data was never activated and updated, the neural link doesn't see it and download it.
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Alright how bout this: I'm keeping the robot crew, there is no reason that you can't replace your crew with sufficiently competent androids and drones.
However, instead of doing to whole duality thing, I build my pod like this: There are two modes of operation, hard, and soft. Soft is white lit internally, with a chair and holographic displays, control of the ship is done via controls, and augmented via neural link, the front of the pod is open to the bridge, allowing me easy access in and out of the pod.
When I enter combat and the ship registers my presence in the pod, the chair retracts into the floor, the pod slams shut, and a series of gravity emitters engage, first lifting me into the center of the room, then squeezing my body into place, the neural link hardfires and I take direct control of the ship, the interior flashes red during this operation then shifts to blue once it has completed.
When I'm out of the pod, I can jack into the ship via softlink and walk around, the neural link automatically downloads and backs up new data as it comes in, negating the need for a full burn scanner as it updates the data in real time, there is still the potential for minor memory loss, particularly of things that I forgot before installing it, in a normal person, the knowledge is simply buried, however, since that data was never activated and updated, the neural link doesn't see it and download it.
You can come up with any number of fabulous (or less fabulous) IC-seeming solutions. I doubt it will effect the critical appraisal of many people, however. You're tampering with some of the very basic assumptions in Eve.
I still don't really see why you want this rather elaborate solution. I don't mean why in the sense where the answer would be "because I want to", but I'm rather interested in the why do you want to?
If it's really about wanting to tinker and be active on the ship as you wrote earlier, then the obvious answer is not to pilot the ship via a capsule. This is a perfectly legit choice, but you will of course have to expect the IC consequences. Having your cake and trying to eat it seems somewhat iffy to me.
Going via the path of least resistance seems like a very small compromise here for me and I just don't see the value of choosing otherwise (ie. choosing a very contrived solution which will seem questionable to many). Hence, why I'd like to understand why this is so important to you.
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Alright how bout this: I'm keeping the robot crew, there is no reason that you can't replace your crew with sufficiently competent androids and drones.
However, instead of doing to whole duality thing, I build my pod like this: There are two modes of operation, hard, and soft. Soft is white lit internally, with a chair and holographic displays, control of the ship is done via controls, and augmented via neural link, the front of the pod is open to the bridge, allowing me easy access in and out of the pod.
When I enter combat and the ship registers my presence in the pod, the chair retracts into the floor, the pod slams shut, and a series of gravity emitters engage, first lifting me into the center of the room, then squeezing my body into place, the neural link hardfires and I take direct control of the ship, the interior flashes red during this operation then shifts to blue once it has completed.
When I'm out of the pod, I can jack into the ship via softlink and walk around, the neural link automatically downloads and backs up new data as it comes in, negating the need for a full burn scanner as it updates the data in real time, there is still the potential for minor memory loss, particularly of things that I forgot before installing it, in a normal person, the knowledge is simply buried, however, since that data was never activated and updated, the neural link doesn't see it and download it.
You can come up with any number of fabulous (or less fabulous) IC-seeming solutions. I doubt it will effect the critical appraisal of many people, however. You're tampering with some of the very basic assumptions in Eve.
I still don't really see why you want this rather elaborate solution. I don't mean why in the sense where the answer would be "because I want to", but I'm rather interested in the why do you want to?
If it's really about wanting to tinker and be active on the ship as you wrote earlier, then the obvious answer is not to pilot the ship via a capsule. This is a perfectly legit choice, but you will of course have to expect the IC consequences. Having your cake and trying to eat it seems somewhat iffy to me.
Going via the path of least resistance seems like a very small compromise here for me and I just don't see the value of choosing otherwise (ie. choosing a very contrived solution which will seem questionable to many). Hence, why I'd like to understand why this is so important to you.
I'm pretty much with GoGo here.
Capsuleer flight is fundamental to Eve's prime fiction. It's what the entire game's backstory is founded around and its not something that should be changed.
There's a million and one ways your character could still do all the things she wants to do that you've listed, without having to sacrifice being a capsuleer like everyone else.
I can understand that people like to have character perks, and be a little individual, but I can't understand why you feel the need for your character to be so drastically different and contrary to prime fiction.
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I drew a comic about this once.
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*is actually a cylon
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Nikita,
What is the point of altering the pod?
Love, a bunch of roleplayers who are confused by your messing about with one high-tech system out of several thousand available ones to underline that your character is technically inclined.
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Love, a bunch of roleplayers who are confused by your messing about with one high-tech system out of several thousand available ones to underline that your character is technically inclined.
/me reads the sentence a few times.
... wat?
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There are two really critical things I want to achieve:
1. The lack of crew, from what I've heard from a lot of people, this isn't that big of a deal, so I'm not going to worry about it too terribly.
2. The ability to quickly and easily get in and out of my pod, so that I can wander my ship, work on stuff, etc. I don't want to have an Android holo-body, I want to actually do it.
If there is an alternative fluid that my pod could be filled, or even if you used the same fluid and manipulate it somehow to drop the time involved in getting in and out of it, I'll even take that.
I do still think that the softlink that I can use to control the ship while doing mundane things in safe areas is fine. And your the one who suggested the neural collar thing, to replace the scanner with.
Why do I want my character like this? Why don't I? Why do you play your character like you do?
I like her like this, I made her like this, yes, I could just go the easy way out and cave in to what everyone is telling me, but I wouldn't have fun playing her like that. I removes her individuality, it removes her conflicts, it means there is no damn reason for me to play her at all.
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[mod] Specifically referred to as against the culture of the boards in the FAQ (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?action=page;id=4) [/mod]
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Why do I want my character like this? Why don't I? Why do you play your character like you do?
I like her like this, I made her like this, yes, I could just go the easy way out and cave in to what everyone is telling me, but I wouldn't have fun playing her like that. I removes her individuality, it removes her conflicts, it means there is no damn reason for me to play her at all.
No, from where I'm standing, it solves her conflicts. Indeed, makes her a bit of an "uber-character".
Your character has issues with getting submerged, a phobia of some sort. Her avoiding the wet-grave of a pod by controlling her ship like a conventional captain is not avoiding the conflict. She sacrifices the efficiency of pod control because of her fears. That's cool, edgy and in tune with the spirit of the game. You contriving a super-pod that allows her to ignore that is avoiding the conflict by nullifying its effects and trivializing its influence on your character's narrative. In fact, if you will do that, there is no point in making your character afraid of or incapable of using a pod, if she really won't be afraid of the pod at all.
Now, for another example to demonstrate what I mean, imagine that in a hypothetical Eve movie (or hell, book) you could start out with a character like that and have her overcome her fears towards the end to triumph over the baddies of the week. It might even be pretty interesting and compelling narrative. However, think about it. If in that movie our heroine just circumvents her fears with some technobabble gimmick at the convenient time it will feel pretty damn cheap, contrived and yes, Mary Sue-like to the viewers. The audience will boo, no matter how much the writer tries to tell us that the character is just so brilliant and how it really does make sense in the setting.
Alternatively, there could be a scene where the captain, her ship under fire and its hull buckling, walks over to the edge of the bridge that leads to the the capsule, looks at the dark liquid within and sees herself reflected, distorted all Funhouse-like. She's afraid, but to save her ship she has to take the plunge. She's deathly afraid, paralyzed even. That's not contrived. That's not skirting the issue.
Now you can come back to me to argue the circumstances of your character, how I got it wrong or how she's special, but I'm not talking about the specifics, nor even your character, but rather you-as-the-author and the principle of the thing.
That's addressing the conflict part and I see there's more to it... but
If you need a 'speshul' pod to retain her individuality, urdoinitrong.
Sardonic as that comment is, I do think that it somewhat covers the rest.
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I think this thread is very important and I give a lot of credit to everyone who has made rather substantial efforts to approach the OP's dilemma in an honest, helpful manner. This last post by GoGo sums up my feelings on the issue very well. I'll try to add something to this discussion in light of that, and I hope this doesn't come off as rude. I'm merely trying to give you my honest and complete feelings.
Nikita has the makings of a great character with a great conflict at the heart of her story. The pod pilot who couldn't, wouldn't get in a pod. The capsuleer whose own mind half wet-graves her out of phobia whenever she tries. How such a character suffers under that problem and eventually comes to face and defeat the fears that cause it would be interesting to me. Where does the fear come from? Why hasn't she been able to overcome it yet? How did it affect her before she became a pilot? Why become a capsuleer in the first place, knowing the pod was involved? What was the training like? How does it affect her performance in spaceflight (in your gameplay)? I would like to know that story and even be a part of it, to address the heart of the original post.
Yet GoGo hits the nail on the head -- these workarounds have solved the problem that make the character interesting. The conflict is gone and I don't really care about the character any longer because she's not in distress. She has effectively overcome both the fear and the peril of flying without a pod. It is no longer "man vs. self", the most interesting narrative conflict imo, but "man vs. eh whatever". In fact, when Ken interacted with Nikita (very tenuously in an IGS thread) and this subject came up, the only response he had to an explanation of these "super-pod" systems was that they must have been very expensive and he shortly decided to pay that eccentric pilot much less attention in the future.
If, refusing to get in that dark, wet, oppressive pod, Nikita opted to fly ships like a traditional captain with some advanced neural augmentations and capsuleer rights and comms access, I'd buy it. I would wonder why she takes that needless danger. I'd wonder what sort of situation would bring her to get in that pod anyway, despite the phobia. I'd wonder if she would be willing to get in if it meant cranking up the hacker/cyberpunk abilities to 11 (a la "Damn! I can only break this cypher if I go for full mind-machine interface with the ship CPU... And there's only one way to do that." *gulp*). If you played it to the hilt and killed her off if she ever got popped and podded flying in that "mode", I'd owe you much respect.
Ultimately, this could be a very interesting, unique character painted on the backdrop of the EVE universe. She's flawed and handicapped, like all the best characters in any medium, but finds a way through despite it all. That's a classic story about what makes human beings awesome, and we love to hear it told over and over again. We love to see how that success is achieved. What you've shown us is a story that is already over. You've hooked yourself on this pre-emptive deus ex machina that robs Nikita of all that potential storyline goodness by punching a hole in the PF and yanking this messy solution through it.
It's not really that you exceed the bounds of technology in the PF that bothers me, but that you've done it in a few paragraphs before any of us get to know you. Start from the beginning (from day zero), bring the pieces together slowly over time as you play the game and pursue RP storylines, create this strange and wondrous technological solution to your character's gravest flaws, make that solution itself perpetually incomplete/flawed, do all that in line with your chosen cyberpunk flavorings and you will have done an amazing thing.
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My most-RPed character (it's not Silver) is claustrophobic. She deals with it by never piloting.
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My most-RPed character (it's not Silver) is claustrophobic. She deals with it by never piloting.
And nightmares, don't forget the nightmares...
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My most-RPed character (it's not Silver) is claustrophobic. She deals with it by never piloting.
And nightmares, don't forget the nightmares...
Among other things :X
But I mean, specifically in the piloting thing.
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[mod]Please do not respond to provocative comments with escalation.[/mod]
Miz, a short while ago you were in conflict with quite a lot of the people you encountered in antagonistic roleplay to a point where communicating with you was problematic. This tone reminds me of the tone you had before.
There are two really critical things I want to achieve:
Excellent that you list them. This helps us with criticism that is actually constructive.
1. The lack of crew, from what I've heard from a lot of people, this isn't that big of a deal, so I'm not going to worry about it too terribly.
A lot of people do this to go around dealing with guilt-by-proxy for when they lose ships. Are you going for this because it is unpleasant that people die in this little world we have in our heads when your characters fuck up? When you do? When you lose a ship?
If not, I'd sure like to know why, because it IS a big deal to not have crew. A huge deal. It bespeaks wanting less consequence, primarily. People won't truck with that because they feel it is central to have consequence, but the more acceptable ways of getting around 'it' (where 'it' herein is the risk moreso than anything else) to some extent include:
-Piloting zero-crew ships, primarily,
-Having very expensive and somewhat more effective escape technology on your own vessels, which you sort of handwave into making you a less effective fighter somehow, and
-Offering crew members the capacity to back themselves up mentally as part of their employment contracts, so even if their lives end, something of them can rejoin their families or go on in the world or whatever.
You'll notice all these things have consequences; you'll notice all these things are not perfect for the purpose of fulfilling your wants. Why should they be? Why should your character get everything she wants? Why isn't a bit of sobering risk and responsibility a good thing?
2. The ability to quickly and easily get in and out of my pod, so that I can wander my ship, work on stuff, etc. I don't want to have an Android holo-body, I want to actually do it.
Where is it explicitly stated that the process of getting out of your pod is necessarily endlessly slow? Or all pods, for that matter? I'm a pretty experienced roleplayer, and I would have about zero problems with someone having a sixty second egress/ingress procedure for the capsule, even if it was maintained that this was true in one of the scientific articles, or if a dev said it, without quite a fucking lot of context for why it was necessarily thus. A ten second one. A five second one. We're playing characters in a pretty advanced world - you want to claim your character dumps a million isk or whatever into developing a mechanism to allow for such things on every new ship, a mechanism tailored to her? Fine by me. You want to claim her bodies are engineered for it? Wunderbar.
What most people will have a problem with is that your vessel will be capable of operating at more than a shadow of its full capacities without a pilot in the pod. Note that the pilot in the pod of your vessels does not have to be you; capsuleers can be passengers.
Note that it will make sense to plenty of individuals that your ship may navigate, perhaps on emergency systems, when there is no pilot in it. One does not engineer a hundred million isk vessel without a backup control system should the pilot go and experience mindlock; most any vessel's gonna have some kind of black box or backup bridge allowing the on-board crew to have a shot at getting it home. If most capsuleers choose to tear it out because they figure it's useless to them once they go into mindlock (which is short-sighted, as a cure might someday be found for their condition), well, you can be the exception.
If there is an alternative fluid that my pod could be filled, or even if you used the same fluid and manipulate it somehow to drop the time involved in getting in and out of it, I'll even take that.
Probably best.
I do still think that the softlink that I can use to control the ship while doing mundane things in safe areas is fine.
It's not. Crew's okay for some things. People have gotten away with 'I power down my vessels when I log out,' though. Think on that for a bit - I can already see useful implications.
And your the one who suggested the neural collar thing, to replace the scanner with.
Hoo boy. If you mean my idea here, not replace. Add to; partially circumvent, possibly, but I mentioned it precisely because you did not explain why you were trying to circumvent it. It was a shot in the dark.
Why do I want my character like this? Why don't I? Why do you play your character like you do?
I like her like this, I made her like this, yes, I could just go the easy way out and cave in to what everyone is telling me, but I wouldn't have fun playing her like that. I removes her individuality, it removes her conflicts, it means there is no damn reason for me to play her at all.
See, the questions are kind of useful, Nikita.
I suppose I'll preface this next bit by saying that for the length of most of this community's existence in the game, EVE has been prone to housing roleplay communities that build characters that are intensely personal. Because we all mostly adhere to certain shared limitations, it takes less sweeping individual variations to create more marked individuality.
If you come from a roleplaying environment where it takes changing the core of your character template as drastically as you have, which include changes so drastic as to have significant implications for the whole of the setting, which I am prepared to say you have done, you might feel inclined to claim such things necessary.
I would offer you the idea that they're not.
I would offer you the idea that characters need only vary in what they do and think, how they act, and how they tend to choose to act to be seen as different, not in how outlandish their background might be.
Anyway.
I made my character the way I made it for specific reasons; my character was built to get into the most social groups within the capsuleer community it could. I picked the race deliberately, I wrote what I wrote of its social standing, its political outlook, and its history deliberately. I did it because there is obviously only one bloodline that is the top of the food chain in exclusivity.
I play my character the way I do because it meets certain needs for me to have a lot of fun playing it that way (barring these fun little mood swings lately).
It sounds to me like your wants can be summarized as:
1) Something that sticks out and does not seem to be a sheep, or part of the usual patterns, and
2) Something very technically involved, perhaps with the ideas and aesthetic tendencies of a lot of cyberpunk genre fiction.
Put in some more if you want, but that's what I see. That's fine.
But. Most of the things you list as wants are things I perceive to be the wants of someone who is looking to avoid, say, what everyone else is served when they roll up a character. They're not just 'I want to be noticeably unique!' No, they're also 'I want to not have to deal with these silly limitations. They're for squares, man. Squares.'
NO, ASHAR, THAT'S NOT TRUE! AND YOU'RE FAT.
I'm on a regimen, and if it's not the case, you would do well to outline it as such. Right now, it's very easy to see your no-crew thing as consequence dodging, and to see it as dodging a much bigger consequence than the one you're trying to balance it with, namely the mental difficulties or operational limitations or whatever else has been created by all your character's wacky little shifts away from the norm. Preventing subordinates from dying completely is WAY BIG to most folks. It's Not What Capsuleers Are. It's a zebra that thinks it can be a horsie because it makes similar sounds when it runs around the savanna.
It might be helpful to mention that the players who typically get away with - say - claiming not to be a capsuleer or deviate from the norms that define a capsuleer generally get community acceptance because they're doing it to entertain everyone they encounter while maintaining an equivalent or lower level of power available to their character through mechanical and interactive means.
That is to say, the stuff they could do or have done to others as a character does not exceed the stuff they could do or have done as a player. Ciarente's 'Camille Roth' character, for example, is entertaining and not a capsuleer because she brings something to the table, storytelling-wise, without claiming to have access to something other people don't - say, shit-tons of willpower that is to normal capsuleer capacities what they are to baseline capacities, or (not one, but several) extremely illegal and extremely potent artificial intelligences well inside the cluster that put her capacities far above those of the rest of her demographic.
Your wants in terms of individuality are served best by picking something that doesn't make you utterly fucking alien to the class of people you're supposed to be rubbing shoulders with at an equivalent level. But there are some allowable degrees of inequality. What are they? Well.
Verone is the CEO of a large and somewhat powerful group of people with interesting degrees of moral plasticity, let's call it.
Evanda Char is a character with lots of political and diplomatic leverage and a powerful group of people behind her CEO.
Kitara Darkmoon is a longtime associate of my character, one who has formed certain bonds and knows my operational procedures well.
Matariki Rain is someone who's able to invite my character to places wherein my character is vulnerable. So is Ciarente Roth, so is Shalee Lianne.
Nikilaiki Ruutaraha is a character heavily invested in psychological, cybernetic, information warfare, and other lively story arcs with me and has an emotional attachment to my character.
All these characters are played by people who actively navigate the community's opinion of what's a bit much, what's acceptable, and what doesn't fit well with the concepts and feelings highlighted by our common experience playing the game.
I'd accept an implied imbalance in power from all of these characters, some for mechanical reasons (the CEOs can send their people at me) and some for ones related wholly to the quality of the story they tell when they violate the consensus to some degree.
This is what differentiates them from what in other circles are referred to as 'Mary Sues.' When these characters give mine a reason to be sucpicious or outright try to harm me using capacities their players have carved out through establishing strong positions, I react appropriately. When someone I don't know comes by and says, I have me so much willpower that I could corner any given mind-clash league, I usually tell 'em to give me a reason to want that in my world.
That's it, in the end. You've given us little reason to want these alterations to be a part of the setting, and furthermore, you've cited few reasons for why they meet YOUR wants in a fashion that a variety of alternative solutions do not.
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And a brief response inspired by some stuff in Gogo's and Ken's posts -
Nikita has the makings of a damned good character, but it's not because her ships have no crew (which rids her of a conflict AND of a point of commonality with most pilots) or because she's mental (which gets boring because it is exceptionally common; almost everyone you run into soon takes on the appearance of possible mental deterioration of some sort, or failing that is plainly psychotic, delusional, or full of shit memes and irrational bullshit. The end result of making someone crazy is they get MORE predictable; it injects MORE control or lack of choice into their responses, more limitations into how they react.
Add to this a sober analysis of how effective psychiatry can be today and some of the implications of both the New Eden timeline and their technology and there is little reason to think Nikita wouldn't be able to find a cure or cure herself of her troubles very quickly, or that most capsuleers wouldn't be able to. These people can fake memories; they can separate memory data from inherent mental qualities. They can create implants to assist in specific skills. They can transfer knowledge from 'one size fits all' thinking caps into skulls. Why can't they cure your insanity? Well, only because you choose not to have it cured, which is the sort of choice a brain that functions well enough to get its owner access to ships and capsule tech and all the rest doesn't often make.
The conflict is not man against man so much as it is man against common sense because of a crippling injury that could be fixed in a month of something like physical therapy. It's pretty watery stuff.
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Okay, thanks again for the criticism, and I really do want to reach a conclusion that both I and the community at large will accept, I'm sorry if it seems as if I'm being stuborn, I really am reading your posts and taking them into account.
First off, I think I have a decent compromise, so stay with me a bit longer.
These are the things I need to have with my character, they are absolutely NOT OPTIONAL
1. Longevity. This character has 30 million sp, and is my main character, I have neither the time nor the inclination to restart from scratch, and I don't want to stop roleplaying either, so any solution has to not have the possibility of getting her killed.
2. Playability and performance. I fly with a lot of people who don't give a damn about story, and call roleplayers and I quote "Roleplaying faggots who think they are fucking wizards or some shit" as vulgar as they are though, they are some of my best friends, and I fly with them a lot. also do quite a bit of stuff that isn't RP related at all. So however my character is, it can't effect my general gameplay.
Now, then with that stuff in mind, we have this:
Nikita had a crew, but she fell in love with her pilot. When the ship was destroyed and the pilot was wounded it broke her heart, and made her realize how much blood was on her hands. That pilot is currently in Nikita's private care, in a persistant vegatative state. Because the pilot is still sort of alive, she cannot let her go, and refuses to put a crew in harms way, using androids, industrial bots, automated systems, and worker drones instead.
Its not the pod that Nikita is afraid of, its the feeling of loosing her body, she went close to wetgrave at one point and is afraid of loosing herself. To avoid this, she avoids fully interfacing with the ship, retaining a sort of softlink, and controlling her ship from within her pod via a fully body holographic interface, except under the most stressful situations, when she must force herself to use the hardlink.
She also has the neural datalink scanner, allowing her some semblence of protection when she is out of the pod, this is not a replacement for the burn scanner, but it provides enough protection for her to feel safe doing manual work on her ship.
She's replaced the pod fluid with a low density magnetically foldable ferroliquid, more expensive, but it allows her to use the holo-interface, since it affords her more range of motion, as well as allowing her to get in and out of her pod faster, however, if the pod comes under fire, or if she engages the hardlink, the ferrofluid aligns and stiffens instantly, holding her in place. If I really really need to show this ingame, which I don't think I do, but IF I do, I can be represented by buying a clone one grade higher then I currently need.
So....thoughts?
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Okay.
Proposal above.
Set conventions this violates for no reason pertaining to the two requirements listed above or the need to make the character sufficiently unique that I can see:
-Still (possibly, some of it isn't very clear) allows your character to do something akin to a superpower, namely, being able to control her ship from outside the pod. If this isn't so, set us straight.
-Avoids use of live crew.
More specifically:
These are the things I need to have with my character, they are absolutely NOT OPTIONAL
1. Longevity. This character has 30 million sp, and is my main character, I have neither the time nor the inclination to restart from scratch, and I don't want to stop roleplaying either, so any solution has to not have the possibility of getting her killed.
2. Playability and performance. I fly with a lot of people who don't give a damn about story, and call roleplayers and I quote "Roleplaying faggots who think they are fucking wizards or some shit" as vulgar as they are though, they are some of my best friends, and I fly with them a lot. also do quite a bit of stuff that isn't RP related at all. So however my character is, it can't effect my general gameplay.
I don't think anyone suggested that you had to give these things up except maybe Scagga, and he's just a silly bastard sometimes.
Nikita had a crew, but she fell in love with her pilot. When the ship was destroyed and the pilot was wounded it broke her heart, and made her realize how much blood was on her hands. That pilot is currently in Nikita's private care, in a persistant vegatative state. Because the pilot is still sort of alive, she cannot let her go, and refuses to put a crew in harms way, using androids, industrial bots, automated systems, and worker drones instead.
First, lack of practicality. If one reads a chronicle entitled the Greatest Joke (http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/default.asp?cid=23-10-06), one finds in legally available and stable artificial general intelligences a severe set of limitations pertaining to their use in complex environments and in competition with the human capacity for intuition and insight.
Second, shortsightedness. If she don't like blood on her hands or people being at risk, what happens when she blows up a ship with a slave crew? Is she never going to go into combat? It's bunk. I'll outline an easier approach below.
Its not the pod that Nikita is afraid of, its the feeling of losing her body, she went close to wetgraving at one point and is afraid of losing herself. To avoid this, she avoids fully interfacing with the ship, retaining a sort of softlink, and controlling her ship from within her pod via a fully body holographic interface, except under the most stressful situations, when she must force herself to use the hardlink.
I don't know what this holographic interface means. You might think to define it better.
However, first, wetgraving has been presented in prime fiction as rather unpredictable and inescapable. You don't come close, insofar as we know, and you don't have a near miss. If Nikita's one of the first such cases, the likelihood of her being taken by force into custody and experimented on is extremely high because she is the missing link between the Jovian genetic predisposition to the capsule that makes all of them capable of using it and the baseline inconsistency in its use, which comes with mindlock risks.
The Empires would potentially burn planets to ashes for that kind of tech. Regions have changed sovereignty and nations have been reduced in capacity because of someone facing off with the Jovians before, and the deciding factors included how many capsule-fitted vessels the Jovians could bring onto the field.
She also has the neural datalink scanner, allowing her some semblence of protection when she is out of the pod, this is not a replacement for the burn scanner, but it provides enough protection for her to feel safe doing manual work on her ship.
This is pretty darn alright stuff here.
She's replaced the pod fluid with a low density magnetically foldable ferroliquid, more expensive, but it allows her to use the holo-interface, since it affords her more range of motion, as well as allowing her to get in and out of her pod faster, however, if the pod comes under fire, or if she engages the hardlink, the ferrofluid aligns and stiffens instantly, holding her in place. If I really really need to show this ingame, which I don't think I do, but IF I do, I can be represented by buying a clone one grade higher then I currently need.
I don't think you need to do the clone grade thing really? I don't think anyone's decision on whether or not your character's fine by them will depend on a screenshot of your medbay window and skillpoint summary :P
As for the other bit, that's mainly for your comfort. Currently, I get a newly activated clone 'into' a capsule in under two minutes' time when someone pods me, max. How long does it take you? That sort of technical detail is largely something done for the sake of an individual's comfort, meaning it likely does not matter what is said so long as all the details rub no hard conventions the wrong way.
However, let me outline an alternative that attempts to include as much of your current history as possible.
Nikita Alterana is a somewhat delusional prodigy. She does not have endless will; she does not have access to super-complex and illegal artificial intelligences that are inexplicably friendly and obedient. Whatever she went through marked her with strong disinclinations to put crew at risk and an aversion through the pod. It is, however, likely private information shared only by her confidants.
Her capacities as a programmer and her tendency to alter cybernetics and man/machine interfaces, her interests in the elimination of points of favor, and perhaps a disinclination in interrupting the flow of consciousness have impacted her use of commonly utilized capsuleer technologies.
She does employ crew; that is, crew contracts exist for people on her vessels. She is sorely affected by grief or the risk of loss, sufficiently to do one of the following:
-Be extremely risk averse to the point of working to do everything in her power to prevent loss of life on her vessels, and/or
-Heavily medicating herself to prevent the shock from setting in, possibly because said shock would destroy her ability to function for a period of time, and/or
-Maintaining herself in some sort of delusional state where she THINKS her crew is made up of a bunch of expensive robots that she has to retrieve and maintain.
Oh, and. There are a number of mental issues she has developed as a result of some very traumatic or stressed experiences. These experiences involve some pretty well tailored delusions, perhaps instilled in her mind by some previous controlling influence, affiliate, memetic virus, whatever. Someone tried to shape her, maybe, or her identity was put under a stress that shifted its shape to fit circumstances. Working through the illusory reality these delusions work to create and rejoining the real world, however slowly or quickly, would make for a pretty interesting arc without erasing Nikita's sense of self. It's certainly something going on in a room I'd like to be a fly on the wall of.
She has a lack of respect for the law, and as such has tried to create a slew of illegal AIs. She has funny ideas about their degree of power; over time, she might begin to have a more realistic view about this ("Why did this AI not do what I expected of it? Perhaps it is weak?") and perhaps find a safe or legal way to store them, put them down, develop them further, whatever.
She maintains a number of experimental cybernetics. Some of these attempt to upload a real-time feed of her experiences to a database that maintains either a copy or a running iteration of her consciousness; in this way, she does not end with bodily death. She maintains a standard burning scanner in her pod. Perhaps she thinks she does not, but nevertheless, she does. (What other modifications are made to her pod are largely irrelevant to us here, it just needs to do all the things a pod can do and not exceed them significantly.)
She had some issues with the pod; as it is, she has a means (therapy, pills, chocolate, willpower, rage, desperation, mental conditioning, heroin, I don't care) to get into it with nothing worse than severe discomfort. This might develop into something worse later, but it's really not profitable to (for example) claim you're not in a pod if you ever win in PvP, let alone get podded.
Her proclivity for tinkering with various things is perfectly acceptable and need not be troubled.
Tell me if that pleases your fancy.
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Nikita had a crew, but she fell in love with her pilot. When the ship was destroyed and the pilot was wounded it broke her heart, and made her realize how much blood was on her hands.
It feels like either she should stop flying, or she should find a way to put people in harms way even if with regret. Either by pretending they're not really people, or by becoming ever-so-slightly psychopathic, or by deciding that something is important enough to her that she will put ships and crews at risk.
It's definitely an issue Ulf has struggled with. It makes him very risk-averse, but he still puts ships at risk because there are things that are important enough to him.
If you can't bring yourself to put people at risk, then fly frigates (commonly thought to be crewless other than a pod) or fly really really carefully.
It feels like you want to be all angstful without having any of that angst actually impact on your character's day to day activities. In which case the only way we have to tell that your character is all angstful is that you tell us. It's a common trope that authors shouldn't tell us what's going on, they should show us. If I can't see any difference between the way you behave and the way someone without those issues behave, then it feels like a bit of a have really.
Ulf
"A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are built for." - John A. Shedd, 1928
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They don't really fit what I want to play, I don't want to play a delusional character, and go around with people telling me I'm delusional.
As for the lack of practicality of having an AI crew, I'm fulling willing to accept that. Also, its not that she is worried about blood on her hands, its more specific, its blood of her friends, blood of people that are there because of her. I'm thinking after the accident, she spent a good deal of time refusing to fly a ship because of the possibility of getting the crew killed, during this time she worked on creating automatons to do the work for her, probably programmed with limited, virtual copies of her own mind, running recursive loops to simulate higher functions or some such. Even if they are highly illegal, I have no doubt that AI drones could be built in EVE, it really isn't that much of a stretch and its one of the things I really want to stick with.
As for mindlock is mindlock there is no approaching it, could it be that she is simply scared of the mindlock then, hence the pod mods, allowing her to retain her quasi connection to her body. Perhaps she knew someone who was wetgraved, or some such.
As for the specifics of the pod mods, the holo interface is basically a set of rings fitted to the inside of the pod wall, that project 3d and 2d displays and images directly into the pod goo, Nikita interacts with them by a soft mindlink, and with hand, and feet movements, sort of dancing within the pod. This obviously lowers her performance, she CAN go hardlink, but she is afraid of it.
For time to get into a new pod after being killed, I'd say it would take her only a bit more time, she would probably prepare a few spare pods at her clone station ahead of time, the paperwork to get into them might take a bit longer though.
Baiscallly, I have no issues playing a character with problems, I want to in fact, but there is such thing as taking it too far, which I feel your suggestion does. I want her to actually have the AI crew, thats something I'm really not interested in changing. It could be as simple as she knows she'd get her crews killed and knows she could turn completetely cold and inhumane, and is fighting to retain some measure of her humanity in the face of her actions, and her way of avoiding that is by avoiding being around people she could hurt. I'm also thinking she definitely blames herself for the accident.
Or what about that because of her work with the Cartel, she refuses to have a crew, because having people around her might make her more reluctant to act in the morally callused way needed, she needs to remain detached, and that means either staying in the pod, that she hates, or not having a crew.
Also Ashar, why haven't you been in eve? I haven't seen you there in like a week.
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*a lot of stuff seeming inconsistent with the thread title "So... What should I do?"*
Is this thread about a less experienced RPer asking for advice on how to make their character concept more accessible, or about someone waving their "Screw PF, Just make stuff up!" flag defiantly in the face of the community like the WBC at a Pride rally? Because from where I sit, the tone of your posts is changing from frustrated open-mindedness to "No, YOU'RE wrong for following PF at all; I don't want to have anything to do with that, my way is totally better!!!11".
And I have to say, it's very Mary Sue. There's only ONE discernable character flaw: omg she has a conscience, NO capsuleer has a conscience, what the heck is going on here, I never! And from this single "flaw" you've created a lot of "this character is the best at x, y and z/smartest/most genious/beautiful and unique snowflake.
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People do seem to have an issue with the AI crew.
So have Nikita tinker with http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/AIMEDs
Personnel controlling the units is in prepared escape pods. Hibernating when not needed.
Limited contact with crew, no actual physical contact. And major drop in risk for the real crew.
Get an AIMED from contracts per ship with crew, so non RP peeps (and us IC) can have fun wondering what's up.
(Note: this is not what Chell uses.)
Benefits I can see.
1. More likely to have an experienced (veteran) crew as they gain experience in time.
2. Crew perfectly willing to risk at least the "limb" to keep the ship going.
3. Others?
Downsides.
1. Veterans might be more likely to get into trouble when on stations. (Veteran crew will in time demand increased pay)
2. Getting truly loyal crew might be an issue. (Because they are already in escape pods, odds of someone panicking and bailing out too soon are good.)
3. Others?
Not really a downside, but might be worth a thought. Crew rotation: Using this effectively means employing a large amount of people and keeping them on payroll for extended periods 24/7. not only the crew aboard current vessel but also crew on stand by on the backup clone station for the next ship.
Not to mention getting the crew from destroyed ship back to mission readiness after a loss. Also should someone get to your crew for intel...
Would that work as a compromise on the crew issue? I'll think about the other stuff a little later.
PS. ECM might be a nasty shock the first time...
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They don't really fit what I want to play, I don't want to play a delusional character, and go around with people telling me I'm delusional.
Hell, I play delusional characters that people believe are sane. And, yeah, a few sane characters who know they'd sound delusional if they told their version of truth about things, so they tend to keep their damn mouths shut -- but that's all beside the point.
Here's a question that I'm not sure has been asked: why does Nikita's flying style need to come up at all in your RP? Yeah, I know, it's a little late to put all this back in your toybox since you've started this thread, but humor me.
Is Nikita defined by her flying style, so in order to interact with her, everyone needs to know about that flying style? Or is Nikita's flying style defined by her nature; in which case, people don't need to know about it in order to interact with her as a person, similar to how they don't need to know what music she likes or drink she prefers?
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Now you can come back to me to argue the circumstances of your character, how I got it wrong or how she's special, but I'm not talking about the specifics, nor even your character, but rather you-as-the-author and the principle of the thing.
Also, its not that she is worried about blood on her hands, its more specific, its blood of her friends, blood of people that are there because of her. I'm thinking after the accident, she spent a good deal of time refusing to fly a ship because of the possibility of getting the crew killed, during this time she worked on creating automatons to do the work for her, probably programmed with limited, virtual copies of her own mind, running recursive loops to simulate higher functions or some such. Even if they are highly illegal, I have no doubt that AI drones could be built in EVE, it really isn't that much of a stretch and its one of the things I really want to stick with.
See, I'm not really interested in why your character-as-a-fictional-construct is worried about blood on her hands. I'm more interested about why you-as-the-player is concerned with the idea of your character's crew members dying. That's because I don't see this problem being fixed on the in-character level.
As far as I'm concerned, there are a few core PF assumptions in the game and capsule control plus crews in ships bigger than frigates are among those. When the PF has bothered to address these issues at all, it has come up with things like Sansha's zombies and not fully automated robotic crew members. These things all speak about the kind of setting Eve is.
So, on the in-character level, which your answers about your character's issues address, there really is no way to solve this issue. That's because at least to my subjective experience you are not really talking about a character that can fit the setting. Harsh, but that's me trying to offer tough love.
The tail is wagging the dog now. You can only solve this on the player level. You don't have to justify your character, but instead you have to manage your character as its creator. From where I'm standing, this means you have to accept changes. That's why questions like "why do you want your character to not be inside the capsule" and "why do you want to have your character avoid crew casualties" are important. They reveal what you as the player want and when that is known we can offer a solution that satisfies your need, but conforms to the flavor of the setting.
Before we can talk on that level, all we're doing is having you contrive more explanations for how to do something which many consider to be unacceptable. In any case, I'm coming close to my wit's end here and I'm starting to feel like I'm repeating myself. That said, you don't really have to subject yourself to this at all if you don't want to and I do actually salute your continued interest in this discussion.
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Is Nikita defined by her flying style, so in order to interact with her, everyone needs to know about that flying style? Or is Nikita's flying style defined by her nature; in which case, people don't need to know about it in order to interact with her as a person, similar to how they don't need to know what music she likes or drink she prefers?
I think that's a very valid idea to bring up. I mean, unless you really want to portray your character as the crème de la crème of piloting/combat, nobody will care if your character doesn't use a capsule to pilot the ship.
What I mean by that is that while people (inc. me) are saying that you in some manner have to accept that your character is somewhat handicapped if she stays outside the capsule, I don't think many expect you to play the game one handed to represent that.
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They don't really fit what I want to play, I don't want to play a delusional character, and go around with people telling me I'm delusional.
ARGH.
Ow. I think I had an aneurism there. Let me clarify.
First,
For time to get into a new pod after being killed, I'd say it would take her only a bit more time, she would probably prepare a few spare pods at her clone station ahead of time, the paperwork to get into them might take a bit longer though.
This is something you didn't need to post a response to. You seem to miss that I made the statement you responded to here rhetorically to say, it already takes me a pretty short time to get into a pod.
Now.
Nikita, the point of having your character be delusional now is to facilitate its becoming sane quickly without it losing its backstory. It is done precisely so that people will STOP calling you delusional, and fast - because you will have an opportunity to have your character stop ACTING in a fashion that is currently being chalked up as delusional.
"I used to have some funny ideas because someone built them into my brain," for me is better than "Oh, those things you heard? They were NEVER true."
Your choice is to keep nothing of this character's background, or keep something in whatever continuum you cobble together, but since you seem to want to alter your character's backstory, you have a few choices.
Either your character is a liar and a fraud for the sake of its own ego, or your character was crazy and is getting better and will at some point in the near future get all the way well in this world of powerful curative techniques. Note I do not say therapeutic techniques. This is because the character I am proposing will be cured. Your character, in my proposal will be sane, soon, at a theater near you, so get dressed.
If you decide to give it a whirl - and that's all I'm suggesting, because honest to God I don't think anyone would really care in the end if you tried five different things before you settled in, you're pretty new, I say make it fit with your cyberpunk bit by going a bit Johnny Mnemonic and saying, "some people fucked with my head, tried to make me into their toy, their marionette. I'm not standing for it - let's see what's under a few peels of the onion." And then shed a select set of character beliefs and affirmations that you've come to find the whole community don't like.
Because your character traits are things you tell people about, and things that they see when you show them (through emotes, through compiled character history) what it can do. If my character says something crazy that it can't live up to, it's crazy; if my character goes and fixes it's head and does not say crazy things much anymore, it's not crazy.
Look, Nikita, either you find a way to maintain your character's backstory with some degree of continuity and only a soft mindwipe (+respek, honestly, is about appropriate - people think this is a bit better), or you throw a bunch of shit away/throw a bunch of opportunities away because people found you uncomfortable to hang with (both options plainly available to you).
The science is about comfort. You want to claim something works one way or another? You're just prodding at people's comfort levels; they'll accept or refuse based on how comfortable they are experiencing your argument. The best argument in this situation is a good yarn. Leave the science out of it; leave the details out of it and decide if you want to peruse a course of action that allows your character to maintain something of its former story - something like a huge chunk of it in my example, I might add - or if you want to throw everything away despite established, public history because of your involvement with the first live events in years.
If I were you, I'd keep everything I could with minimal retcon.
This leaves shit like 'it was all a dream,' which is low tier, 'it was all me being nuts and I got my head fixed now, all better,' which is mid-tier, or 'an enemy from my past/one of my AI pets/daddy, who is way screwed up, was working to maintain leverage and power over/play with/destroy from the inside a person who was seen as a malfunctioning weapon/lab experiment gone awry/unassailable target. That person was me. Let me tell you a story about it,' which is pretty darn high tier if you do it well.
If giving yourself a vehicle to maintain character backstory while going through with drastic changes is too appalling, you're more attached to the qualities your character than you are to the quality of your roleplay - you want good roleplay after character values like 'not certain kinds of insane insane.' This resolves badly with Nikita having mental issues already - why some but not others? Why not have them be resolved and in doing so have her join the ranks of characters that fit with the consensus on all the really sore points?
EVE Online comes packaged with a dark environment that renders most of the well-played characters prone to going through some insanity once in a while. Why not get yours out of the way early on? Because it's icky? You're already a capsuleer. No orifice is safe from the charms of your basic and essential life support equipment; no member of your social class and economic bracket has a kill count under a hundred thousand after a comparatively short time in space - or, for that matter, less than a few tens of thousands of employees, whether they're mostly station-side personnel or shipboard crew.
And frankly, just...give yourself a crew that's mostly constructs - limited artificial intelligences and a lot of robotics (as opposed to robots), and something like ten percent people. If you really must, make them all sit in crash webbing on self-contained stations that turn into escape pods or something most of the time, or clones, or trueslaves, or something expendable; have the odds of losing crew lives be something like one in twenty over a six month period. Making the chance of losing your people low is a bit easier to swallow than dodging loss; you kind of just need to bite the bullet there and find a way to deal with it - if only because at some point, you'll make friends with a character someone's gonna kill off, or an event will occur where a bunch of people will die, or you'll get blown up with a bunch of passengers in your hold.
There simply isn't a point in being MORE of a blubbering psycho when grief and loss rear their heads; grief and loss are inevitable in this environment.
The mortality rate in the setting is still a hundred percent until proven otherwise.
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I think I understand, and I think I know where I want to go from here.
Look for my topic in the IGS, things should start to become clear.
Also, Ashar, if you want to discuss this before I post it, feel free to send me a convo ingame
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*a lot of stuff seeming inconsistent with the thread title "So... What should I do?"*
Is this thread about a less experienced RPer asking for advice on how to make their character concept more accessible, or about someone waving their "Screw PF, Just make stuff up!" flag defiantly in the face of the community like the WBC at a Pride rally? Because from where I sit, the tone of your posts is changing from frustrated open-mindedness to "No, YOU'RE wrong for following PF at all; I don't want to have anything to do with that, my way is totally better!!!11".
And I have to say, it's very Mary Sue. There's only ONE discernable character flaw: omg she has a conscience, NO capsuleer has a conscience, what the heck is going on here, I never! And from this single "flaw" you've created a lot of "this character is the best at x, y and z/smartest/most genious/beautiful and unique snowflake.
My post, here quoted was reported. Soon, one of the other Backstage staffers will PM the person who reported my post regarding their decision on what to do with it. For everyone else's benefit, it was determined that my post, while aggressive in tone, did not cross any of Backstage's lines. However, I was asked to clarify... fair enough.
Before I do so, though, I would like to take the opportunity to point out that if any of you see a mod or admin make a post that seems to break this forum's rules, REPORT IT! Currently there are five staffers here. If you report one, that leaves four and it only takes one of them to moderate a post. If some ridiculously bad chain of events leads to a number of legitimate reports being made against a staffer (and the report against my post WAS legitimate, just not found to be of actionable severity), we'll deal with the situation when it arises but I think it's safe to say that person wouldn't be a mod very long.
With that out of the way, to clarify my point:
I pointed out what I see as being mary-sue about the character (one flaw, which is actually a "good trait" under normal circumstances, and a lot of super awesome bonus features). Some of you will have played in systems that had "Merits" and "Flaws". Merits cost a certain amount of 'points' at chargen and 'flaws' had a negative cost.. a 2pt flaw and a 2pt merit would cancel each other out so that you still had your full point budget. The character described by the OP has a 1-point flaw (and that's being generous) to counteract several multiple-point merits. The OP also says she's been careful not to create a mary-sue. I disagree.
I also disagree with the way the OP took an argumentative/defensive turn somewhere along the way after a couple of people gave a comforting back-pat so to speak in the form of "There's no 'wrong' way to roleplay" (which IS true, mind), when the thread started out as asking for advice on how to make the character more palatable to interact with for other players.
Based on the OP's last post, it seems she's gotten something of what she was looking for out of this thread, and that's good. I don't read the IGS regularly at the moment, but I hope the discussion's generated good roleplay opportunities. Lastly, I enjoyed reading several of the posts here; Verone's "from the perspective of a RL engineer" was especially good.