I strayed into the character bank...

[Allos]

...and would you like to know what I noticed? Almost every character listed has something in common with the others. Prominent things being:

-The char.'s parents are dead(The char. may believe his/her parents to be alive)

-The char. trained to become the ultimate assassin/ninja/hunter/ranger/etc.

-The character has an outlandish name


Coincidence?

[Skuda]

just think, If you were hopping abord a big pioneering ship that might never come back and you didn't have parents or other family members, would you go?

now, just to make this suit the FKL:

http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/spam.gif

[Allos]

I guess the point here is that one character seems exactly like the others....

[Bradicus]

Everyone wants to be bad-ass http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_cry.gif

[HUnewearl_Meira]

Rhy'Din on AOL used to be worse.

If you ever happened by a catalog of individual characters' histories, you'd find that the vast majority of them had any combination of the following attributes--


Orphan
Raped
Muscle-bound / Sil'fer-boobs
Is an Elf
Is a Vampire
May very well be an Elf AND a Vampire
Bisexual
Powerful warrior
A general life of tragedy
Last remaining member of the royal family of some bizarre, far off alien culture.
Has a long-lost relative somewhere


Many of these descriptions were true even in the case of characters that were blatant rip-offs of characters from popular video games and TV shows.

...

Like the time one of many Sephiroth characters came into my own character's place of business, with his date, which as I recall, was one of the male characters from Pokemon.

Seems like I've always been the one to come up with something more original... Though admittedly, I've had characters that meet some of the above mentioned critiera, they generally had other attributes that really made them stand out in a crowd.

Then there's characters like VanGarrett... Who's really just kind of a normal guy, standing around in a crowd of superheroes...

[geewj]

That's cause no one wants to read storys where the scrawny guy and flat girl to to their family reunion where they have the time of their life.

[Sef]

Hey! That's not true!...Oh wait.

[Allos]

On 2004-05-03 14:00, Prof_Frink wrote:
That's cause no one wants to read storys where the scrawny guy and flat girl to to their family reunion where they have the time of their life.




And that's why we have Lifetime: Television for Idiots.

[HUnewearl_Meira]

On 2004-05-03 14:00, Prof_Frink wrote:
That's cause no one wants to read storys where the scrawny guy and flat girl to to their family reunion where they have the time of their life.



You'd be surprised at how much potential that plotline has, actually.

[Nai_Calus]

Let's see, my characters:

Ian-Kun X:

- Has an outlandish fake name, and an improbable 'real' name. (Really, do YOU know anyone named Nai?)
- Commits the cardinal sin of being a relative of an NPC.
- Will end up helping to save the world/defeat the evil terrorizing thing. Twice.
- Doesn't train, obsess about fighting or even give a wet slap about any of it. He's just in it to look for information on what exactly happened to his dead uncle.
- Was raised by said uncle after his mother died giving birth to him and his father rejected him.
- Is half-human half-newman,
- Does not have any sort of supernatural powers.
- Is something of a genius and is utterly unconcerned with it.
- Lives alone with his Rati, Fluffy, and a small Mil Lily named Bob.
- Does not get any sort of girl.

Fairly stereotypical, somewhat non-stereotypical. Here's another:

Helios:

- Has a vaguely probable fake name, has a vaguely improbable real name(Really, how many people do YOU know named Ephram?).
- Commits the even more cardinal sin of BEING an NPC.
- Is dead.
- Is an uber-brilliant technical genius, and doesn't care.
- Likes nature.
- Is a smart-ass. And a nice, sensitive, caring guy.
- Is gay. And is too busy to care.
- Was abused as a child.

More stereotypes. XP

Eri:

- Does not have a fake name, has a semi-plausible real name which is unfortunately a bad pun.
- Has absolutely nothing remarkable about her whatsoever outside of just happening to wind up on the team that ends up defeating Dark Falz.

Eri has small boobs, glasses, both her parents are alive, she sees them regularily, she has no angst, no tragic past and is basically perfectly normal and boring. XD

[HUnewearl_Meira]

Now see, the lesson here is, if you're going to make your character have something desperately wrong with them, you need to make it something truly unique and otherwise special.

Like my RAmarl, Kataclyn.

But we'll all find out about Kataclyn in detail, later on.

[Outrider]

Ha ha! Meira, you used to do Rhy'Din? Man, that was some crazy stuff back on AOL. My favorite room name I saw for Rhy'Din had to be... RhyDin Rape Alley.

I was doing mostly non Rhy'Din roleplay for a while on AOL, but my last year was spent in a Rhy'Din-esque area (not sure if it was technically Rhy'Din in the first place). My friend and I just threw in 5th-Dimensional characters akin to Mr. MXYZPTLK from DC comics. Despite the fact that we were pretty much Gods, we still abided by word limit rules and intelligently presented random theories from comic books... and people let us get away with it. It was the greatest.

But yeah, I sometimes went out of my way to make sure my characters had no cliched background at all. Out of all the characters I've made for different games and such, most of them are just Joe Adventurer who was either presented the oppurtunity to do something good (or bad) for the world/community/whatever or needed a quick buck. And the funny thing is that in some cases they would be incredibly generic, whicn in turn made them incredibly different from all the other characters.

As for Outrider on PSO:

Just some guy who decided to join up with the Hunter's Guild after Pioneer 1 blew up. No troubled past, no secret powers, etc.

EDIT: Oh, and he does have an outlandish name... but I've basically explained that away as he's a 20-something year old guy and is fighting monsters and it's probably just his attempt to add some superhero aspect to the job.. I know if I were him, I'd want to try and come up with a cool code-name for myself. (Or maybe it's NOT a code-name...?) Besides, I usually name all my main characters either Outrider or Greg... or in one special case... Greg Outrider. Yes, I'm that unoriginal.


Oh yeah - Just wanted to mention one of my favorite ridiculous role-playing characters... My friend is on a Star Wars RP Forum, and one of the characters there is a FORCE VAMPIRE. He's a vampire... and he uses the force. I had to sit down when I learned of that one.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Outrider on 2004-05-03 16:16 ]</font>

[HUnewearl_Meira]

One of the big reasons why I never really went back to the RP scene on AOL was the continuing degrade in continuity... Both in world and rules. Back in my day, if you wanted to smack someone, you had to roll a 2d20 and hope you roll better than 14. The rules were accepted universally, and there was some organization, dangit! Over time the rules were built upon, and everything was nice and good.

Then people started coming in from Yahoo! and other web chats... And worse yet, the FFGF got absorbed into the Games channel, which pretty much instantly made things fall apart... I mean, there actually used to be SET GUIDELINES for the Rhy'Din world and such... It used to be... If there was an RP chat, then it was generally accepted as Rhy'Din. You may not realize this but the Red Dragon Inn and the Stars' End Bar used to be part of the same continuity. Now their inhabitants don't seem to have any knowledge of Rhy'Din at all. Every room has become its own RP. It's become too diluted, and the rules are gone, because people have come in with these stupidly complex "SIMMing" rules. You may not realize this if you came into it too late, but for quite a while SIMMers and RPers hated eachothers' guts, because in-character interaction had a 100% failure rate, and constantly resulted in out-of-character arguments over how the game should be played. It was precisely for this sort of reason that a few buddies of mine and I wanted to develop software that would set up a framework that'd keep people following an established set of rules. That never did pan out, though. Interestingly, the concept we were working on was basically an MMORPG, years before Everquest came out.

Still, my life became more social, and I was drawn away. I began to make a return once or twice, but in my absence, Rhy'Din had fallen. It was no longer as it once was, when one could assume that a room entered was part of Rhy'Din. All documentation on Rhy'Din was gone from AOL. The Red Dragon Inn and the Stars' End Bar had become separate worlds of their own, neither of which recognized Rhy'Din, anymore. Rhy'Din was what held it all together, and now, it's fallen apart. It's a shame, really. For a few years there, we had something really good.

Heh... I used to be involved with a girl that had been there, almost from the start. When she started RPing, the Red Dragon Inn was the only RP chatroom. Member rooms didn't exist in any manner, nor did Private chats. She also created one of the most popular and otherwise famous Rhy'Din chats ever-- The room, RhydinSinglesBar. That room used to go for months at a time without emptying out.

It wasn't long after we met, that her character and my character ended up with a nightclub-- "RydinNightClubRPG" was the room name. My character ended up running it, for the most part... She had a nasty habit of switching characters around every month or two.

I've discovered as of late, that my character was actually fairly well-known, possibly because of the night club, which would be incredibly busy on some nights (I eventually figured out that if I open the chat before a certain time in the evening, then I'd be trying to get people to leave at like, 5 AM). Of course, the screen name I used then, and still have to this day was...

JubeAcino.



EDIT: Oh yeah, and Outrider, if you want to talk about outlandish and improbable names... I once met a guy on PSO whose name in real life actually is "Hunter". That's why I'm not terribly concerned with outlandish names.

Furthermore...

If your character comes from a different culture, on a different planet, are you going to name him, "Bob" or "Dave" or perhaps, "Jake"? Heck no, you're not going to name him something normal, you're gonna name him like, "Tarblakkar" or "Ko-Bula'ha" or "Hhhhhh-h", because these are common names in his culture, not yours.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HUnewearl_Meira on 2004-05-03 16:43 ]</font>

[Outrider]

Well, I still can't imagine Outrider being a real name.

See, I started my online role-playing with Nyrthellan's Woods on AOL. It was Keyword: NWN, and it was all AD&D based. So when I first strayed into public AOL RP (A Resident Evil 2 RP room) my friends and I figured it carried the D&D rules.

We were wrong, of course.

Aside from RPing with a few people I met in the RE2 room, I mostly stayed at NWN. Once that started dying down, I moved into more and more RP rooms on a more regular basis.

I do remember the time when simmers and dice-users would argue, but I stopped RPing for a while, and came back at a time when hardly anyone remembered using dice. I was never taught Rhy'Din dice, but to be fair, I rarely got into battles. I was a relative newb, anyway.

During the age of simming, though... that's when I had the God-like character. I realize that it's really a breach in rules (in my mind at least), but the character originally started as testament to how screwed up non-organized online RP was.

So, my friend and I screwed around with these characters for a while, but eventually I just quit.

My least favorite thing from the simming days was this: Let's say I just attacked somebody with an action that is suitable to their requested word count. They counter by saying:

::fades::

Gragh! You can't sim out of an attack with one-word actions, especially when you require multiple-word attacks!

Heh, some people would have ten-word battle requirements and thought it was tough. Heck, before AOL increased the post limit for each line in a chat room, my entrance alone was 27 lines... AND I typed it out each time from memory, throwing in little bits and pieces of variation.

[Solstis]

Let me see:

Solstis:

Has no parents (lab experiment)

Was Never Raped

Is middling

Is quarter newman (for a spin)

Could be a vampire if I was doing a joke fic

Has no sexuality due to my laziness

Vaguely powerful, though he never does anything

Yeah, I gots me some tragedy

Not an alien, but created to help the revolution vs. Coral's gov't.

Yeah, Solstis has his long-lost "brother"

Might be a wee bit cliche, and the info I put in the bank is way off his current version.

I'm up to Solstis v 3.0 by now (Platinum edition http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif)

[Bradicus]

To me, this kind of stock character bee ess is what makes King books so unique. Almost every hero feels like a real person. Why? Because they like to sit about and watch TV, they will wet themselves when faced with something fearsome, they are not trained to be killing machines (for the most part) and they just generally act human.

[KodiaX987]

Let's see my character breakdown...

Kod Gregoire Nainsev
Both parents dead from non-violent causes (i.e.: cancer, old age and the like) Kod is 40 after all.
Made his "real name" to make up for the unrealistic outlandish name KodiaX987.
Is the highly disliked member of a group of Hunters' Guild managers.
Commits suicide after he gets framed during his last mission.
I guess Kod's the stereotypical tragic hero: good to the bone but it just wasn't enough. o.O


Shrike "The Shurikane" Nainsev
Is the crossbreed between android and Delsaber.
Has the power to tap into both computer and organic systems.
Always frustrated.
Created by Kod.
Gets 0wned. Repeatedly.
So that makes Shuri the stereotypical Sephiroth-esque jaded-angst-filled character.


Elise Marquis (AKA, Insa-Elenor)
Is the crossbreed between android and La Dimenian.
Has the power to stretch her legs.
Always seeks to be known as the best.
Slightly aloof.
Shows many human psychological characteristics, notably the ability to sleep.
I think we have one unique character here!


Zinackst Ilica
Has a mass of blue hair that would be unbearable in real life.
Can perform telepathy at will.
Doesn't seem to have a clue of the dangers around her.
Great company, sucky at fighting.
Typical Aeris-esque clone here. Dammit!

[Bradicus]

I wonder if i would fit into a fanfic...

Me
- Brady (Brad) Leatherdale (Irish...?)
- generally lazy, but keeps a good grade afloat
- can hit things with other things
- has crappy glasses that scratch up at the sight of something sharp
- tends to insult people he likes
- would run like hell at the sight of a Booma
- would most likely leave a damsel to the dragon
- did i mention that i can hit things?

i don't think that i would survive in a PSO-like world http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif

[Sef]

Wow. You practically described me too! Just...I might save them damsels.

[Mixfortune]

There are little to no archetypes remaining.
Almost anything can be seen as similar to some book, story, video game, movie, television show, cereal box, you name it.

But, consider for a moment that a good deal of these characters are already filling out the position of "defeated Dark Falz and Olga Flow" as part of their resume. Maybe not all the characters are going to end up like that in the beginning (most fics don't begin with the defeat of Falz), but it almost inevitably ends up that way. They have to be strong enough to make such a task "feasible".

Now, whether or not the character is bad-ass or not is irrelevant, since that has all been done either way as well.

For those who are supporting characters, there's not much difference there either. Almost any general description of a character that allows for writers to include them in their fics and artwork would most likely be general enough that it fits a general type of person. Who would have thought?

Yes, there are a good deal of "bad-ass god pwners", but there are a lot of other archetype copies as well, whether it was intentional or not.

[Allos]

On 2004-05-03 18:54, Bradicus wrote:
I wonder if i would fit into a fanfic...

Me
- Brady (Brad) Leatherdale (Irish...?)
- generally lazy, but keeps a good grade afloat
- can hit things with other things
- has crappy glasses that scratch up at the sight of something sharp
- tends to insult people he likes
- would run like hell at the sight of a Booma
- would most likely leave a damsel to the dragon
- did i mention that i can hit things?

i don't think that i would survive in a PSO-like world http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif



I'd survive because I'm now officially immune to all STDs! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif

[Dhylec]

this can been a nice discussion topic in off-topic..
instead of in fkl

[Solstis]

http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/spam.gif

Time to hijack this baby (rubs his hands rogether)!

I finally finished a fic http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif! WOOT!

[Bradicus]

On 2004-05-04 12:33, Allos wrote:


On 2004-05-03 18:54, Bradicus wrote:
I wonder if i would fit into a fanfic...

Me
- Brady (Brad) Leatherdale (Irish...?)
- generally lazy, but keeps a good grade afloat
- can hit things with other things
- has crappy glasses that scratch up at the sight of something sharp
- tends to insult people he likes
- would run like hell at the sight of a Booma
- would most likely leave a damsel to the dragon
- did i mention that i can hit things?

i don't think that i would survive in a PSO-like world http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif



I'd survive because I'm now officially immune to all STDs! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif


Ah, but no one is immune to love

[Allos]

On 2004-05-05 14:21, Bradicus wrote:


On 2004-05-04 12:33, Allos wrote:


On 2004-05-03 18:54, Bradicus wrote:
I wonder if i would fit into a fanfic...

Me
- Brady (Brad) Leatherdale (Irish...?)
- generally lazy, but keeps a good grade afloat
- can hit things with other things
- has crappy glasses that scratch up at the sight of something sharp
- tends to insult people he likes
- would run like hell at the sight of a Booma
- would most likely leave a damsel to the dragon
- did i mention that i can hit things?

i don't think that i would survive in a PSO-like world http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_disapprove.gif



I'd survive because I'm now officially immune to all STDs! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wacko.gif


Ah, but no one is immune to love



You and I found that out a looooong time ago baby!

[Bradicus]

You and I found that out a looooong time ago baby!


What can i say?
I just have all the right moves http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif

[Allos]

On 2004-05-05 16:10, Bradicus wrote:


You and I found that out a looooong time ago baby!


What can i say?
I just have all the right moves http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif



Unlike Kiz...