Numetal/Retromux
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re: special snowflake characters
There are two north stars for Mushing
- Don’t be boring
- Don’t be a dick
If you can’t figure out how to do 1 without doing 2 then you’re going to get mocked.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Pavel skill issue, get specialer
I need TWO trenchcoats!
and 4 katanas?
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@Ashkuri said in Numetal/Retromux:
- Don’t be boring
- Don’t be a dick
If you can’t figure out how to do 1 without doing 2 then you’re going to get mocked.
It might be more clear to say don’t be a bore. It’s okay to be boring sometimes. Or even to play a character who is largely static and stock.
“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar WildeThere are non-boring characters who are bores. They’re not really interactive for you, but they do prevent you from pursuing other interactions. That’s probably ‘Main Character Syndrome’ in a nutshell.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:
It might be more clear to say don’t be a bore. It’s okay to be boring sometimes. Or even to play a character who is largely static and stock.
I feel like this is a very important point. I love to play “stock” characters like Stormtroopers, Clone Troopers, Children of the Light, Academy-fresh pilots, and other “boring” characters, and then not playing them as bores.
On the other hand, I’ve met players who can take an absolute special snowflake of a character, but the way that they play them is utterly boring and uninteresting.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike A simple recipe can be delicious with only a few well prepared ingredients, while gourmet ingredients can lead to inedible glop if you are unskilled.
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@Roadspike I can think of a lot of setting/themes that might just be best if the set up is just pick a stock character template, tweak it or let a script tweak it randomly for you, and roll. Starship Troopers springs to mind for some reason. I would do it for imaginary MU #124, “Call of Cthulhu On The Love Boat”.
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Genuinely one of my favorite things to do, especially on games with supernatural elements, is to make the bog standard human who knows nothing… and just let the experience shape them.
I also know STs like when people buy in (or at least I do when I ST) and there’s so much more fun buy-in from ‘human who has never encountered actual scary things’ than ‘stoic master of martial arts who has seen everything and is affected by nothing’
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@Gashlycrumb I think that there’s a place for that, certainly, but I also don’t want to take away the ability of players to create something truly unique – so long as it fits well within the setting and themes of the game. If everyone on a Clone Wars game played Clone Troopers and no one played the Jedi or the Mandalorian trainers or the stuck-up-soon-to-be-Imperials, it would be a much less exciting game.
But I would love it if there was some way to teach people to use their unique ingredients to make something tasty, rather than inedible glop, as @labsunlimited put it.
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@Roadspike I agree with you there. I am very much for letting people play what they want (so long it fits the world, within established narrative boundaries for the game, eg probably Elrond Half-elven didn’t fall into a spacial anomaly and end up on the Enterprise even though falling into spacial anomalies is indeed a thing in Trek). Still, having the option to make a ‘stock’ character without putting much effort into the chargen would probably be a big boon for a lot of games.
It seems likely to me that actually making everybody play Troopers and having all the Jedi and Mandalorian trainers be NPCs might be more fun, and maybe really refreshing compared to having it the other way 'round.
