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[Saede Riordan]

I'm not sure if its because I'm newish to RP, because Nikita is a complex character, or what, but this irritates me regardless and I'd like some help at how to fix things.

Basically, Nikita is smart, crazy, and roguish. I try to blend all three together into an interesting and frighteningly odd character, with her brilliance offset by her extreme non sequitor, and coming across as the sort of person you'd really want to keep away from sharp objects but know they probably have a lab in their basement full of knives and scalpels. However, she doesn't come across that way, instead she just comes across as inconsistent, fluctuating between utterly crazy (not "mentally unique" but still functunal, just outright mad) annoyingly coy, trollish, and cynical with everyone, and a well adjusted scientist type. This strikes me as, from the outside, looking very Mary Sue-ish, which I want to avoid at all costs. I've tried to tie all three aspects together with my recent igs posts where she calmly and rationally refers to humans as livestock, but I still don't know if it all comes across as it should.

So if I could get some tips on how to improve my RP in this regard, I would definitely appreciate them.

(and yes, I'm aware humans don't actually have 48 chromosomes, and I actually hadn't intended to mess up like that, but the damage was done before I noticed it, and I went with it. I've come up with a decent explanation for it IC, that the extra two are genetic engineering relics that are activated in people with Jovian active DNA and capsuleer genes, possibly by design to stop the advanced jovians from interfering with the baseline humans. It was either handwaving, or going hurr durr I'm an idiot IC and dumping what could be a really fun RP arc cause of my own lack of knowledge. besides, that's not what I want to discuss here)

[Vieve]

Basically, Nikita is smart, crazy, and roguish. I try to blend all three together into an interesting and frighteningly odd character, with her brilliance offset by her extreme non sequitor, and coming across as the sort of person you'd really want to keep away from sharp objects but know they probably have a lab in their basement full of knives and scalpels.

Quick suggestion from the peanut gallery: figure out where Nikita's current collection of sane-to-crazy switch(es) are*.  I'm assuming you know where some of them are already.  Heck, you may have even figured out why those switches are there.  They may already have a consistent general theme or be tied to a particular trauma/goal undertaken to figure out or alleviate that trauma.  Resolve to try to make sure that any switches Nikita picks up in future fall into that general theme or are tied to that particular trauma/goal. Voila, semblance of character consistency!

Step two of the quick suggestion:  don't tell us about the collection.  Nobody really needs to know about it but you or the members of your private-level playgroup.  Yep, not even me.  Especially not me.  I like figuring out this stuff on my own, you see.

(*I'll admit that when I read the recent IGS posts, my thoughts were 'Nikita's a mad scientist?  Eh?  Did I miss a memo? I thought she was just a science experiment gone horribly wrong ... no, wait.  There was the thing with all the stuff I heard about months ago, but I thought that was all electronics and sensors and computer/infomorph science, not biology or genetic engineering.  Huh.  Guess you learn something every day.  Yep, Celeste is not going to be getting near any of this. Mmmm, coffee.')

[Arnulf Ogunkoya]

Smart, crazy and rogueish. Hmmmmm.

Have you read the Millenium trilogy at all (The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo and it's sequels)? I ask because Lisbeth Salander is a good match for that description.

[Saede Riordan]

Smart, crazy and rogueish. Hmmmmm.

Have you read the Millenium trilogy at all (The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo and it's sequels)? I ask because Lisbeth Salander is a good match for that description.

I've heard of them, and my mum has recommended them, I'll check it out.

[DosTuMai]

If you're going for nuts, read up on mental health problems. I've played Malkavian in V:tM for years, but it's really hard to translate all the subtleties into text RP.
Best advice I can give is learn new things and apply them to your character.

[Louella Dougans]

Pick one thing, develop it.
Or
jack of all trades, master of none.

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

You're getting a lot of good suggestions from folks about how to develop your character, so I'm going to address the implied question in your OP: "how do I get people to want to RP with my character"?

This took me a surprising amount of time to actually internalize, but the key to successful RP is to involve other people.  And the best way, in my opinion, to involve other people is to play into their RP.  We all love the RP ideas we come up with, and we all love the characters we develop, and we all want people to say "Oooh, that's an interesting story".  Start an RP relationship - and I'm referring to a RP connection between two characters, not a romantic relationship - by looking for places where your character can contribute to other people's RP.  If you can help make other folks' RP successful, they'll be inclined to do the same for you.

Contacting folks OOCly about this is always a good idea, because it gives you an opportunity to develop at least a rough shape to the RP you're going to be doing.  I haven't historically done a bunch of this in Eve, but in other MMOs I've had great luck talking to interesting people and saying "I want to get involved in your RP.  Is there something I can do?"  Be willing to put yourself out a bit for this, the effort will be repaid.

In one game I played recently, I went so far as to find a popular RP forum and posted "I'm a new player interested in playing some sort of villain, and I want to get involved in RP.  I'm willing to tailor my character to suit your story.  PM me and we'll talk."  That was pretty successful, and I ended up getting a character that was involved in RP and well suited to the game world pretty quickly.

[DosTuMai]

[stuff]

I agree with the above statement.