The 'flavor' greetings are just people trying to be special.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Christ, I thought
I was curmudgeon enough for everybody.
The flavor greetings are just people trying to inject flavor. It's only when they get stupid or stupidly overused that it gets kinda ><
Anyway.
Ashar's Opinionated Bio Bullshit:
Do share information you want others to know. Everyone has a GalNet footprint, and GalNet is a lot thicker than our internet, a lot deeper. This google doesn't forget.
Don't put shit in there that's restricted information, though. I don't want to just be handed all your secrets. If you're gonna do that, at least write me an enjoyable story. If you make it long, I probably won't get through it and your secrets will be 'safer' from people outside your smallish group of regular playmates, who will probably read up on you extensively and thus gain an appropriate level of insight into your character's life.
Do consider providing essential facts. Very few are strictly necessary. Lately I've had a hankering for little things like height and degree of corpulence/anorexia, so I can emote better in relation to all these people of unspecified shortness and chub or intentionally run into someone's twelve-inch, spike-filled eyebrow piercing and make blood shoot everywhere. IF you don't provide these things, be prepared to tell people the relevant facts a lot. You'll be asked.
Don't just give one unit type for something like height. Or weight, if you're the sort that finds it relevant. I want the torque of your goddamn robot arm and the size of your new 'augmented' chest provided in units I can comprehend at a glance; if it's complicated but necessary, most people will fuck it up otherwise. Having your audience fail to grasp a fact central enough to go in your bio is to be avoided.
Do put things into your bio that people repeatedly ask of you, IC or OOC. It's wise.
Don't stick a slew of weird-ass formatting in there if you're trying to impress people. It's a bit more impressive to read that in a link where you're not running into a character limit and can actually think about composition - or how about some nice website design? It can be real easy, you know - just open a blogspot account or get on Gmail and publish a document. If you're going to share information with me, you can skip the weird ASCII characters fucking everywhere that look like you just went through a character map and cobbled together the WIERDEST shit - at least hold off until you can find a way to develop some useful information interspersed with your abuse of punctuation and symbolsets. A simple [characteristic goes here] before a colon will do for starters.
Do have a sense of humor about the thing. OOC info, ASCII art, links to your OOG and OOC art page full of comics, all that shit can go in there and no harm done. Not everything is required to relate to roleplaying. We like jokes and pictures same as the next man.
Don't get incensed at people who miss resources you claim are crucial to understanding your character if you fail to link them somewhere readily accessible - your bio, for example. Got a story or blog post or news item that defines your character, that is required reading for people who want to have meaningful interaction when they get past acquaintance level? GUESS WHERE THAT SHOULD GO.
Don't tell us your character's life story in paragraph form. It always looks fucking weird and is usually far too compressed. If your character can be summed up well enough to roleplay with in a paragraph composed of public information strung together from simple research someone else might conduct in-character themselves, maybe we'd like to be given the opportunity to meet them without the temptation of reading up on your little miracle of elegance and simplicity and having to ACT like we're encountering a novel personality for once...Oh, and especially don't do it in the first person. "I'm Jack, let me write all about my childhood for a few sentences" always comes off like you're reading the diary of some mentally damaged individual who intermittently forgets who he is if you try to consider the information presented in bios in IC terms.
Some people do. Throw them a bone.
Do keep the information blurb, or the novel, or whatnot that summarizes what people would find from taking a hard look at your character's track record SOMEWHERE. A notepad or a blog post or a private google doc, perhaps?
Do give us some indication of whether you're reachable if you tend to turn autoreject on/are one to have a lot of people to talk to. This is an environment of dynamic attitudes - some folks, especially newer ones, can't tell if you're merely busy in fleet or something, or if you're blocking the passers-by at random today or just too cool to talk to the plebs in general. As rude as it is to ninja-convo someone into an unneeded podding, it's arguably pretty fucking silly not to say 'I'm a bit hard to reach today, kids, but evemail makes everyone happy,' or whatnot.
Also!
Do consider that your bio is a PR public face. Misleading people with it
for the sake of better roleplay might be useful or entertaining for everyone involved, or it might not. This is potentially a very handy lie receptacle or soapbox. Leverage it.
That's all I could think of, I guess.
Author
Topic: IG bios (Read 11437 times)