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[Silas Vitalia]

We see a lot of these every once and a while, Pod pilots waking with amnesia, no memories, etc.

This often requires a cargo bay full of hand-wavium but I think such things should never get in the way of good storytelling. If you've got a compelling amnesia character that's just fine with me.

What makes for successful amnesia characters? What makes for poor ones? Is this most often a way to explain a character-sale?

Scherezad has some amnesia and memory issues, how have you been navigating these treacherous waters?

[lallara zhuul]

When talking about amnesia characters outside of EVE... they've never proven to be a good way of telling the story. The eventual 'I was a bad guy and without my baggage turned into a good guy, will I be a good guy now that my memory is restored'-schtick just does not work.

Well, not for a story that is ongoing, it usually just ends it.

It's pretty much jumping the shark in any characters story.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Cloning failures for Capsuleers supposedly have some pretty bad statistical chances, according to some PF I saw long ago but cannot recall the source. (I know, that's about as credible as making it up myself.) So it would seem to me that since cloning the memories is what's going on when you get podded anyways, it seems like a perfectly legitimate issue.

When you're copying people's memories hundreds of times a day, even thousands of times a day for some stations... eventually someone is going to get a bad apple. S**t happens.

As for how people play it out, I haven't met very many amnesic characters. I played one in a different game, but it wasn't a 'former bad guy'. It was a 'former normal person' who just forgot who he is and had to rediscover things.

[Morwen Lagann]

I've used it once before, but not in EVE.

Some friends and I elected to use it as a way to get past a particularly mind-breaking traumatic experience without requiring a complete retcon of the event - rather than go back and rework a few weeks/months of RP, we just had someone slip on some wet rocks and hit their head, and everyone else just didn't talk about ~stuff~.

While I don't really care for how overused it often is, it can sometimes be an interesting mechanism for exploring a character's personality and psyche.

[Vieve]

Scherezad has some amnesia and memory issues, how have you been navigating these treacherous waters?

I haven't so much as navigated those waters as drowned in them (and occasionally wondered why I didn't just let the shark that character was jumping have a snack).  Here are two examples.  All of them are bad ones, and I wouldn't recommend them for anyone.


a) Vieve was murdered in a station side apartment by another player's character.  She wasn't expecting to be murdered, because the murderer was one of the few people she genuinely trusted. The murderer, who had some experience in murdering people in stations, was smart enough to remove enough key pieces of incriminating evidence (including her corpse) from the apartment to make it look like she'd simply disappeared.  Again.   Pieces of her corpse didn't turn up for nearly two RL weeks after that.

She did not have a jump clone at the time.

She did have a medical clone, which had last been updated four RL weeks prior to her murder.  I have always played with the assumption that the brain recording obtained during podding always gets stored on a fluid router connected server, where a copy resides until the clone revival process is proven successful or deemed a complete failure.   If one pays for a better clone, that price includes the backup and incremental storage (last viable one only, replaced by next viable copy) of these brain recordings.

When Vieve's mother was notified of her murder, some legal wrangling ensued¹, then Vieve was revived with her memories from six weeks before.  She was left to piece together what had happened in that missing time by piecing together the notes in her appointment calendar and conducting interviews of the people referenced in that appointment calendar ... at least the ones who were willing or available to talk to her.  Strangely, both her estranged husband and her alleged fiance (alleged, because the only evidence of Jonny's proposal she had were notes about needing to find a ceremony site and someone to perform the ceremony) were both among those who weren't available.

The experience taught her that jump clones were Good Things To Have.


b) I never intended to create Sabi, Vieve's older sister.  She had died in backstory a few years before Vieve became a capsuleer and I'd intended to keep her dead.  Blame Julianus Soter for fishing her out of that backstory and dropping her into Paix Azur as an OOC surprise to me/IC surprise to Vieve.  Or actually, don't blame him.  His OOC scheming resulted in some entertaining play for a fair number of people.

I think this might be the point where some of y'all might ask "why did you go along with this"?  Go back and read the last sentence of the previous paragraph.  That's why.

I didn't want to go with an "undercover FedNav Intelligence officer who was so patriotic she let her own family believe she was dead so she could do the dirty work required in order to ensure the good citizens of the Federation could sleep safe at night" angle, because that would have been quick, easy, and would have required more suspension of disbelief than I was willing to put anyone through.  In backstory, Sabi was a FedNav capsuleer, and a test pilot for its Weapons Systems research.  I believed I needed an explanation as to why a former test pilot only had noob capsuleer skills.

I think this might be the point where some of y'all wonder if I'm nuts for being concerned about this stuff.  The answer to that is 'yes, absolutely barking mad, thank you'.

This is why I went with this amnesia trope:  "On the eve of her graduation from a FNA conventional military officer's program, a plain and ordinarily very serious young woman from a well off family got so wasted that she wound up charging a cosmetically enhanced clone (because her crazy dilletante younger sister had always been so pretty that she'd gotten away with everything) and soft neural scan to the household credit account.  When she sobered up, she contacted her father, who forgave her and told her that he'd take care of the charge before her mother found out about it.   Flash forward a decade and change later, and that clone wakes up on a cot in the back room of an abandoned hydroponics facility with the cluster's worst tequila hangover and a military-grade portable comm terminal.   And ... the facility's on Caldari Prime.  Which is occupied.  By the State.  Or Caldari who call themselves Provists.   And she's dead and buried in the family orchard in Mies, only, she's very much not.  That she'd been a test pilot, which is funny, because she'd thought she was going to get assigned a spot in Intelligence because she wasn't that good a pilot.  And she'd what?  She'd been a capsuleer?  But she'd only been borderline for that program, and her parents were dead set against it, and ... why exactly was her sister a capsuleer and a combat pilot working for State interests?  Was this some kind of a sick joke?"  et cetera et cetera things get worse et cetera assumptions get made et cetera more things get worse before they get really bad et cetera.

¹By sheer coincidence, I was lucky enough that Vieve was murdered in a Federal Administration station at the same time that people in another Federal Administration station were experiencing a mysterious food-borne illness.  It seemed quite reasonable that Celeste (then by all appearances a very loyal Federation citizen, former Senate employee, et cetera) would barter keeping her mouth shut about a capsuleer also getting dead by Federal Administration incompetence in exchange for the power of attorney over her daughter's medical clone. While Vieve was was married at the time, her estranged husband was also number one on the list of murder suspects.

[Saede Riordan]

Amnesia can be done very very well, it can also open a massive can of worms.

The actual act itself of your character having amnesia isn't in itself 'bad RP' its not a bad storyline. I personally think its very difficult to do well, but in and of itself, its not a problem.  When it becomes a problem is when its turned into one. It comes down to how much drama the character creates out of their amnesia. Its something that can easily be used for that 'woe is me everyone pay attention to me and my plight' sort of roleplay that tends to leave people grinding their teeth. In essence, I'd say the difference between Schere's character and some of the worse examples of amnesia RP, is that Schere doesn't whine about it. She's happy, and polite, and upbeat, which just makes her condition all the more heartbreaking.

As for 'lost time' from softcloning, I generally just roll back the characters memory from the last time she was podded/JCed, and leave them to try to figure out what happened that led to their death, but for the most part, I generally stay away from the sort of RP that would require a softclone anyway. If its not agreed upon beforehand, and can cause huge problems if someone tries to force the other player to go along with the RP. (DON'T DO THIS) The softclone timelosses tend to be easier to manage for the player since they have a nice fixed point for where the character's memories stop, and the characters tend to spend more time actually trying to figure out what happened and move the story forward, and less whining about the unfairness of their plight.

[Lyn Farel]

Amnesia is a tool for a story plot.

Some tools are more dangerous and/or delicate to use than other tools.

As any tool it mostly depends on what the user makes of it, and in what context.

[Louella Dougans]

Cloning failures for Capsuleers supposedly have some pretty bad statistical chances, according to some PF I saw long ago but cannot recall the source.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Cloning

The best clones, made from certified human cadavers in perfect condition, are able to retain up to 99.99% of memory

was it this? or something else?


for amnesia, i think it can be useful sometimes, however, I think it's very hard to do well. I don't know that many people would know anyone who does have amnesia, so I don't know how realistic any portrayals are.

for player characters in EVE though, i feel it has a slight tendency to devalue any rp with that character, may even make people less interested in investing in good RP with that character in future, if they have a nagging suspicion that it could all just vanish as if it never happened.

[Jev North]

Schere works so well because she's not a character with amnesia (and a host of other problems) but a character struggling against amnesia (and a host of other problems.) Amnesiacs can work fine so long as their handicap is a story hook rather than a shortcut, or a feature of a complete character rather than the defining feature of a character.

[Gottii]

Schere works so well because she's not a character with amnesia (and a host of other problems) but a character struggling against amnesia (and a host of other problems.) Amnesiacs can work fine so long as their handicap is a story hook rather than a shortcut, or a feature of a complete character rather than the defining feature of a character.

 

Great post.  Great point.

[Esna Pitoojee]

Schere works so well because she's not a character with amnesia (and a host of other problems) but a character struggling against amnesia (and a host of other problems.) Amnesiacs can work fine so long as their handicap is a story hook rather than a shortcut, or a feature of a complete character rather than the defining feature of a character.

 

Great post.  Great point.

This.

I think I've been soured by how amnesia is often used as a tool, not a long-term component of a story; in particular, how it is treated solely as the retroactive loss of specific memories limited to a given time period. To me, the simplification of an immensely complex medical condition with serious psychological ramifications down to "yeah, well the couple _______ are a blank" really feels like an easy cop-out.

The one time Esna was forced into a softclone with severe memory loss (about 2 weeks' worth) he spent three days curled up on his bed getting his thoughts in order... and then developed a life-consuming obsession with finding and destroying the person responsible. That phase took some further pretty heavy RP to break him out of, and he's still dealing with the aftershocks of it.

[Ava Starfire]

Soon, Ava will remember that she is, in fact, suffering from amnesia, and is actually the true Empress!

But yeah, would think its hard to do well... never thought about it!

[Victoria Stecker]

I had a case of accidental character amnesia once. Vicky did something that I later wished hadn't happened. I then got distracted by other stuff, forgot about the event entirely OOC, vicky naturally forgot about it IC, and it might as well have not happened (until someone annoyingly reminded me OOC).

It wasn't any sort of character hook, it was just "Oops, forgot that ever happened."

Actually, IIRC, Stecker does have a bit of that in her back story (that was never fleshed out IC because it never came up), a couple year stretch prior to becoming a capsuleer that she doesn't remember. Lol, I forgot I had actually made an interesting character and backstory.

The only instances of amnesia that I can remember in EVE RP have mostly been so that someone could retcon something without actually retconning it - it still happened but the character forgot so they can now go on with life without the impact of the previous event.

[Sakura Nihil]

This trope kills me, and makes me twitch every time I see it used haphazardly.  EVE RP is not Days of our Lives, the last time I checked.

I understand how it could come about for a capsuleer, especially with regards to the cloning process if an inferior clone is used.  In fact, I recall a pretty decent Chronicle in an EON magazine about it (around EON #10, I think?), but the number of times I've seen it over the years of casual RP makes me .  If someone doesn't want to generate a personal and family history, they should take a page from characters like Synthia, who effectively use the trope... while not using the trope, if that makes sense.

From the iteractions I've seen / had with her, see seemed to be a blank slate that joined the Summit, and over time has evolved into a distinct character.  The hallmarks of an amnesia trope are there, like a lack of personal history driving her to goals¹ and having the present impact her course in life a lot more than normal.  However, instead of chalking it up to amnesia it's instead due to her... unique background.  I think that's kind of the way to play it - another thought might be give a character an excessively normal life, basically giving them very little influence in any direction in early life.  Then, when they're first exposed to the pod, letting those early days be extremely influential in their future development.

I am le tired, just some thoughts.



¹ Like "pirates killing my family when I was eight!", or "escaping from slavers to the Republic when I was young" would drive an Avenging sort of trope.

[Gottii]

There was once this great character arc for an EVE character using amnesia, but I forgot how it went.