- Invitation Status
- Posting Speed
- Multiple posts per day
- 1-3 posts per day
- One post per day
- 1-3 posts per week
- Writing Levels
- Intermediate
- Adept
- Advanced
- Adaptable
- Preferred Character Gender
- Primarily Prefer Male
- Genres
- High Fantasy (things dealing with magical worlds, often with multiple races think final fantasy and its many varying incarnations), Dark Fantasy (fantasy dealing generally with darker themes such as monsters and demons), Action, Supernatural
@Sevvus of course *chuckles*. It's very rare that you'll encounter a GM who will not let his players resubmit a character sheet after they have cleaned it up for errors and the like.
and see, that;s another reason why i believe that the history section is so important. A history section, if done right, is supposed to explain every aspect that you have shown about your character in the CS beforehand. SO, if your character is seen wielding a bunch of weapons that normally you wouldn't expect to see fit together on one person;s arsenal, it will seem odd, until you learn that said character comes from a family of weapon masters and that pretty much his entire childhood was spent training to become the perfect living weapon, but that as a result he had next to no social interaction and is thus socially crippled, incapable of making connections to other human beings on an emotional and psychological level. An explanation like that suddenly makes the fact that this character can wield so many different weapon so proficiently. Oh, and that;s another thing to keep in mind that is very important when creating a character, time resource management. Every skill that your character has at his disposal required time for him to learn, and all the time spent learning the skills he has was time not spent learning other skills. so a character who spent most of his life learning how to fight and use magic would, conversely, usually not have much social skills, or be very much lacking in survival skills that would allow them to live on their own (skills like cooking, managing a budget wisely, doing household cleaning, etc.), or would be bad at studying in school because they are used to learning everything through hands-on experience, etc. Now, some player like to try and 'cheat' this system by creating really old characters ("well, because he's lived so many years, he's had time to become good at everything!") but i can tell you;re not an idiot despite being new to RP so I know i don;t have to worry about that with you. The one piece of advice i can give yo though, and this is something I try to use with my own characters as well, is to keep him as close to 0 as possible. By which i mean, if you look at your character, and examine each and every one of his positive attributes (all of his weapon and magic skill, all of his strengths in school, or social settings, or physical bonuses over normal humans like immunity to poisons or ability to fly or anything like that) as a +1, you should try and give him enough negative attributes (fear of heights, being a racist, not knowing how to live without depending on someone else, being mute, having a strong weakness to sunlight, really, the list goes on forever), which count as -1, so as to bring him back down as close to 0 as possible. this will ensure that you have created a balanced character that, even if he is really powerful, his weaknesses and personal failings still don't make him seem overpowered.
With your character, it;s true that he and his race are very powerful, and now that you have explained in more detail how his race works (something i think you should add into and expand upon in his history section) his seemingly random weapon skills and magic abilities make more sense, though I personally still think he should have something of a more obvious general weakness that could be taken advantage of in battle, such as being very arrogant and too confident in his abilities for example, which would make him likely to fall into traps, or a weakness against a specific type of magic. I know his core crystal is kind of 'hit his weak point for massive damage' thing, but i usually find those a bit too obvious for my likings, simply because if the weakpoint is too weak, it;s almost guaranteed that no one will be able to hit it unless you;re willing to have your character be killed off/removed from the rp for a while (It's like with human characters, where our weak points are clearly our heart and brain, but those are pretty much insta-kills so no one lets you hit them in rp fights). for your guy I think that a good way to bring him back down towards 0 would be to take advantage of his really long life. Time can be a good thing, letting you learn lots of skills and meet many new people, but it can also be a bad thing, letting you see many horrors, and experience incredible pain emotionally, physically, and psychologically. I think a good way to offset your character's very strong '+1's would be to take advantage of his long life to tell a story of how he was constantly betrayed, used, and abused in his life, and as a result he has crippling trust issues that would last throughout the entirety of the roleplay. Or maybe he has seen so much war and slaughter that his mind has become somewhat warped and he believes that the purpose of all life is to end other lives or sth like that. Or maybe he has seen so many people die simply from the fact that their race aren't as long lived or resilient as his own, so he's gotten a nihilistic view on the world and other people, considering it pointless to grow close to anyone since they would all die eventually anyways, and he doesn't want to have to bury anymore loved ones (this would actually explain well why he doesn't have his matta stone yet after 2000 years). Really, anything will work, and it doesn't even have to be one big thing, it could be a bunch of small things that have all piled on over the years, the creative possibilities are nearly endless.
So yeah, I say you shouldn't be afraid to really sit down, look at your character sheet, and think to yourself 'ok, so how do i write a history section that is comprehensive enough to explain how all of these points I've listed up here flow together naturally?' and if that history section ends up being realllyyy long? well, good, he;s been alive for 2000 years, it makes sense that he'd have more than a few stories to tell ^_^ (though, of course, you shouldn't feel forced to put down more than is necessary either). and if you ever worry about writing too much and making your CS take up too much space, just write [ spoiler ] -insert message here [ /spoiler ] (without the spaces in the brackets) and it will hide all that text under a spoiler button and reduce the length of your sheet so as to not clutter up the OOC, like so:
and see, that;s another reason why i believe that the history section is so important. A history section, if done right, is supposed to explain every aspect that you have shown about your character in the CS beforehand. SO, if your character is seen wielding a bunch of weapons that normally you wouldn't expect to see fit together on one person;s arsenal, it will seem odd, until you learn that said character comes from a family of weapon masters and that pretty much his entire childhood was spent training to become the perfect living weapon, but that as a result he had next to no social interaction and is thus socially crippled, incapable of making connections to other human beings on an emotional and psychological level. An explanation like that suddenly makes the fact that this character can wield so many different weapon so proficiently. Oh, and that;s another thing to keep in mind that is very important when creating a character, time resource management. Every skill that your character has at his disposal required time for him to learn, and all the time spent learning the skills he has was time not spent learning other skills. so a character who spent most of his life learning how to fight and use magic would, conversely, usually not have much social skills, or be very much lacking in survival skills that would allow them to live on their own (skills like cooking, managing a budget wisely, doing household cleaning, etc.), or would be bad at studying in school because they are used to learning everything through hands-on experience, etc. Now, some player like to try and 'cheat' this system by creating really old characters ("well, because he's lived so many years, he's had time to become good at everything!") but i can tell you;re not an idiot despite being new to RP so I know i don;t have to worry about that with you. The one piece of advice i can give yo though, and this is something I try to use with my own characters as well, is to keep him as close to 0 as possible. By which i mean, if you look at your character, and examine each and every one of his positive attributes (all of his weapon and magic skill, all of his strengths in school, or social settings, or physical bonuses over normal humans like immunity to poisons or ability to fly or anything like that) as a +1, you should try and give him enough negative attributes (fear of heights, being a racist, not knowing how to live without depending on someone else, being mute, having a strong weakness to sunlight, really, the list goes on forever), which count as -1, so as to bring him back down as close to 0 as possible. this will ensure that you have created a balanced character that, even if he is really powerful, his weaknesses and personal failings still don't make him seem overpowered.
With your character, it;s true that he and his race are very powerful, and now that you have explained in more detail how his race works (something i think you should add into and expand upon in his history section) his seemingly random weapon skills and magic abilities make more sense, though I personally still think he should have something of a more obvious general weakness that could be taken advantage of in battle, such as being very arrogant and too confident in his abilities for example, which would make him likely to fall into traps, or a weakness against a specific type of magic. I know his core crystal is kind of 'hit his weak point for massive damage' thing, but i usually find those a bit too obvious for my likings, simply because if the weakpoint is too weak, it;s almost guaranteed that no one will be able to hit it unless you;re willing to have your character be killed off/removed from the rp for a while (It's like with human characters, where our weak points are clearly our heart and brain, but those are pretty much insta-kills so no one lets you hit them in rp fights). for your guy I think that a good way to bring him back down towards 0 would be to take advantage of his really long life. Time can be a good thing, letting you learn lots of skills and meet many new people, but it can also be a bad thing, letting you see many horrors, and experience incredible pain emotionally, physically, and psychologically. I think a good way to offset your character's very strong '+1's would be to take advantage of his long life to tell a story of how he was constantly betrayed, used, and abused in his life, and as a result he has crippling trust issues that would last throughout the entirety of the roleplay. Or maybe he has seen so much war and slaughter that his mind has become somewhat warped and he believes that the purpose of all life is to end other lives or sth like that. Or maybe he has seen so many people die simply from the fact that their race aren't as long lived or resilient as his own, so he's gotten a nihilistic view on the world and other people, considering it pointless to grow close to anyone since they would all die eventually anyways, and he doesn't want to have to bury anymore loved ones (this would actually explain well why he doesn't have his matta stone yet after 2000 years). Really, anything will work, and it doesn't even have to be one big thing, it could be a bunch of small things that have all piled on over the years, the creative possibilities are nearly endless.
So yeah, I say you shouldn't be afraid to really sit down, look at your character sheet, and think to yourself 'ok, so how do i write a history section that is comprehensive enough to explain how all of these points I've listed up here flow together naturally?' and if that history section ends up being realllyyy long? well, good, he;s been alive for 2000 years, it makes sense that he'd have more than a few stories to tell ^_^ (though, of course, you shouldn't feel forced to put down more than is necessary either). and if you ever worry about writing too much and making your CS take up too much space, just write [ spoiler ] -insert message here [ /spoiler ] (without the spaces in the brackets) and it will hide all that text under a spoiler button and reduce the length of your sheet so as to not clutter up the OOC, like so:
We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other guy
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
CHORUS
Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry,
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching but you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it
And if you ask me how I'm feeling
Don't tell me you're too blind to see (CHORUS)
CHORUSCHORUS
(Ooh give you up)
(Ooh give you up)
(Ooh) never gonna give, never gonna give
(give you up)
(Ooh) never gonna give, never gonna give
(give you up)
We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching but you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it (TO FRONT)
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment's what I'm thinking of
You wouldn't get this from any other guy
I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
CHORUS
Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry,
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you
We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching but you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it
And if you ask me how I'm feeling
Don't tell me you're too blind to see (CHORUS)
CHORUSCHORUS
(Ooh give you up)
(Ooh give you up)
(Ooh) never gonna give, never gonna give
(give you up)
(Ooh) never gonna give, never gonna give
(give you up)
We've known each other for so long
Your heart's been aching but you're too shy to say it
Inside we both know what's been going on
We know the game and we're gonna play it (TO FRONT)
