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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Topic: So...What should I do? (Read 15260 times)