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Author Topic: So...What should I do?  (Read 15223 times)

Ulphus

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #45 on: 09 Jun 2010, 20:16 »

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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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Silver Night

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #46 on: 09 Jun 2010, 20:18 »

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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.

Ashar Kor-Azor

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #47 on: 09 Jun 2010, 20:20 »

[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.
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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?
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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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.
« Last Edit: 09 Jun 2010, 22:14 by Ciarente »
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Ashar Kor-Azor

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #48 on: 09 Jun 2010, 20:35 »

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.

Saede Riordan

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #49 on: 09 Jun 2010, 21:08 »

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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Ashar Kor-Azor

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #50 on: 09 Jun 2010, 22:01 »

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.

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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. 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, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
« Last Edit: 09 Jun 2010, 22:04 by Ashar Kor-Azor »
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Ulphus

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #51 on: 09 Jun 2010, 22:33 »

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.

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Saede Riordan

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #52 on: 09 Jun 2010, 22:56 »

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.
« Last Edit: 09 Jun 2010, 23:07 by Nikita Alterana »
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Havohej

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #53 on: 10 Jun 2010, 04:10 »

*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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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #54 on: 10 Jun 2010, 05:02 »

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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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #55 on: 10 Jun 2010, 05:58 »

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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GoGo Yubari

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #56 on: 10 Jun 2010, 06:10 »

Quote from: GoGo Yubari
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.

Quote from: Nikita Alterana
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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GoGo Yubari

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #57 on: 10 Jun 2010, 06:16 »

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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Ashar Kor-Azor

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #58 on: 10 Jun 2010, 10:42 »

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,

Quote
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.
« Last Edit: 10 Jun 2010, 13:05 by Ashar Kor-Azor »
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Saede Riordan

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Re: So...What should I do?
« Reply #59 on: 10 Jun 2010, 11:18 »

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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