HOW'S THE GAME

[paradisamods]

It's time for another round of Game Discussion, also known as

HOW'S THE GAME?

Here we come together to discuss the game, its plots, the settings, and just about anything we can think of that we'd like to talk about, expand upon, improve, change, etc.

This is not an HMD for players and their characters; this should be about the game's function as a whole and not the people in it. If there is something you feel is absolutely necessary to address that involves a specific person, please IM a mod first to discuss it. We can be reached at valawie (Valerie) or never die ftw (Ashley).

Anonymous will be on for this round. Sock journals are still allowed.

Please feel free to bring up any game-related topic you'd like to discuss. All topics will be linked in the main post.

➜ HOW'S THE STAFF
➜ PLOTTING 101
➜ SOFT REBOOT
➜ APPLICATION CHANGES
➜ ENTRY TAGS
➜ ORIGINAL CHARACTERS

Comments

[superheroine]

Yeah. I'm not too worried about quality control, I'm just wary about the inevitability of DWRP's hateboner for OCs raining down on us and any potential OC players. Like, that shouldn't stop us from polling and potentially implementing it, by any means, but people can have such a negative attitude about it. I'd just worry about encountering resistance for everything: PB choices, fandom OCs and existing casts, how much is too much, the inevitable "mary sue" being slung around, how powerful is too powerful, blah de blah de blah. I'd like to believe people are mature about this in Paradisa but OCs are like this weird touchy subject for the DWRP subculture.

(After all these years, this is the first subject I'm like "omg what will people think?")

[frisky]

Yeah, I was going to say, if somehow a rainbow-haired purple-eyed demigod makes the castle explode and we let that happen to begin with? Then heck, we sure as hell weren't doing our jobs to begin with.

I honestly do not understand how people can be so against original characters if they have that promise of quality control behind it (and of course, reporting any abuse outside us approving an app). I would have expected these to be allowed before game imports! But I guess we'll end up seeing how any potential polling goes. :|a

[superheroine]

Yeah. It's been polled like twice in Paradisa's history, and in the past I've been like "no OCs because I don't wanna deal with the apps/wank" but I think I've just hit a point in Paradisa's "life" where lots of the things we used to stand by firmly just seem so arbitrary. Has anyone ever made a compelling argument on the differences between canon characters and OC characters and why one should be allowed over the other beyond fears of it being abused?

Like, we all know players in the community who highlander their fandom characters as if they were their own, and we all know canons that are inconsistent as fuck or that jump the shark or retcon things. I mean, fuck, Damian Wayne has been written by literally dozens of people in his canon, and even his creator can't keep basic details like the circumstances of his birth straight. How is that any more reliably consistent than a single RPer's writings? Why is one version of canon more valid than another, beyond the fact that one reinforces your interpretation more than the other?

Or like… characters with little canon, whose writers build up huge amounts of head canon… I bet that in the years I played Bad Girl, I put more thought into her motivations and personality and whatever than her creators ever did, because to me she was a character and to them she was a boss battle. Can we realistically say she wasn't 90% OC? I mean, I doubt she'd be accepted by today's standards as a canon character, but not once in 2+ years did anyone ever tell me I was playing a "Canon OC" or even get any crit on her. Yet the Bad Girl I thought up is seen as legitimate, whereas a Bad Girl-esque OC… wouldn't be? I dunno, man.

[nothingtobelieve]

I think one of the big issues people hit upon with OCs is that there is one single person in charge of the 'canon' and no way for anyone else to fact-check it. I mean, DC comics continuity might be inconsistent, and someone could question the choices the player makes as to what to use and what not to, but at the end of the day, anyone who wants to can look into the canon and see where those choices come from.

Headcanon for canon characters is a trickier subject. I have absolutely seen people who abused it, and people who were taken to task for it. Whether people get called on it or not, I suspect, is largely dependent on how well the character is known and how well the person blends their headcanon into actual canon. If you make good choices, no one minds, but people will call out bad ones.

How often this would actually be an issue vs. the amount of concern people have over the possibility of it happening, I don't really know. I've been in games that had OCs, and my experience with them has been that you could really tell they were OCs. If that had to do with the quality of the players, or the burden of having to develop and keep a character consistent without anything to review, I can't say, but in the end, the issue wasn't so much abuse of the OC concept as it was a lack of creating an engaging character. But I suppose that's a burden the player themselves have to handle.

[superheroine]

All fair points. I think you boiled it down to a particularly salient point, though; it's always just going to come down to how strong a writer someone is, and fandom characters are much easier for most people to write simply because it takes away the difficulty that is character-building. It means someone has done all the rough-draft hashing out for you, it means someone has figured out motivations and stuff for you, it means you have a built-in group of people who know about your character already and even have a vested interest in playing with them. Most people in RP get by just fine without doing any super deep introspective thinking about their characters, too, as most of it is laid out by canon or they don't intend to play out anything too focused on character development or whatever, because it's about having fun today instead of building a long-term story –– and that's okay! Most people play just to have fun with friends and not many people see RP as a measure of writing prowess. Fandom characters are great because it unites people on interests and fronts and basically allows people to get invested in other characters a lot faster, whereas even the best-written OCs sort of need time to get to know them because you can't just google them and see if they sound interesting for your character to get to know. And if you're not such a srs business writer with srs plans or whatever, you're just having fun with your vampire OC, and no one really digs your OC because a) you can't hook them and b) they're biased to begin with, then you're in even more trouble.

And I guess that's another concern.

I don't want to say "hell yeah OCs come join us" and then we get like, 1 or 2 and people write them off almost immediately just because they're OCs and not even give them a chance. That's super discouraging.

[frisky]

It's really discouraging to know that, while some OCs have a bad rap due to a lot of people being weak, trope-y writers who use recycled "unique" aspects to make up for a lack of their character not being interesting in the first place, that they write off the possibility that they might end up having fun with just another character.

Literally every argument that I have been hearing against ocs have been covered in my little guideline thing there. While we as staff can't control who tags whom, we can control whether or not things get abused or if the character is just bland and inconsistent. But it's really unfair to someone who plays an original character to not be threaded with just because they are an oc. That's like people saying "I don't want to thread with someone from a stupid font-changing webcomic because it's annoying" or "That version of X is stupid because it's the Y adaptation". A lot of interesting CR I've got over the years were from canons I had literally no interest in. Reservations should be put to the side if the writing quality is good enough and the willingness to be flexible with input is there.

[superheroine]

Yeah. I hear you on it, really. And I want to believe people here wouldn't be dicks about it, but I dunno. Fandom is just such a staple of this part of DWRP that I have no idea how people would react.

Test drive meme in a few days? Haha.

[nothingtobelieve]

If it helps, I don't think anyone here is really saying 'OCs are terrible, I will refuse to engage these players' or anything. Just outlining the reasons OCs aren't often embraced. And on my end... I've tagged OCs, I'm definitely willing to give them a chance. It's just that my past experience with them has not been stellar. Obviously, not all writers are the same, so there's no predicting what type of characters would app in. And I do have faith in the mods to judge apps well, but after awhile you just get into tricky territory.