Post by Akaiddo on Mar 2, 2010 19:46:55 GMT -5
Hey everyone,
Recently in my narcissistic hypocritical self-driven evaluation of role-playing in PlaneShift, i came to the conclusion that there are incredible amounts of Mary-Sue, or Anti-Mary-Sue characters.
"Mary Sue" is a term used to describe characters who seem rather generic, causing the universe in which they are placed to be mundane, broing, and predictable.
Anti-mary-Sues are where efforts to make a character individual are taken a little too far, or seem to all go in a similar direction.
For example, one month, the community begins to notice a Mary-Sue trend in that almost all characters seem to all worship an ingame deity of a good persuasion. The next month, they will likely begin to notice a blatantly opposite trend as too many try to go against the norm in order to be individual. Evil deities and Atheism reign over the game, and balance is once again lost.
Getting a balance between the two is incredibly difficult. One must take into account what is happening in the world around them, and keep their character consistent to the changes, but not follow trends, or attempt to completely go in the face of trends either.
Another connected issue to this phenomena is the tendancy of over-trust in characters, a willingness to make it blatantly obvious, in character, to the rest of the ingame universe that YOU HAS ISSUES.
In an attempt at role-playing a character that is different to the norm, most role-players begin to role-play characters with a variety of psychological problems, or choose Chaotic Neutral as an alignment to allow for sway either way, as well as becoming religiously neutral.
This is a topic I want to discuss in depth to help the community we associate with get out of these vicious cycles. Characters should follow statistics but not be bland.
Comments?
Recently in my narcissistic hypocritical self-driven evaluation of role-playing in PlaneShift, i came to the conclusion that there are incredible amounts of Mary-Sue, or Anti-Mary-Sue characters.
"Mary Sue" is a term used to describe characters who seem rather generic, causing the universe in which they are placed to be mundane, broing, and predictable.
Anti-mary-Sues are where efforts to make a character individual are taken a little too far, or seem to all go in a similar direction.
For example, one month, the community begins to notice a Mary-Sue trend in that almost all characters seem to all worship an ingame deity of a good persuasion. The next month, they will likely begin to notice a blatantly opposite trend as too many try to go against the norm in order to be individual. Evil deities and Atheism reign over the game, and balance is once again lost.
Getting a balance between the two is incredibly difficult. One must take into account what is happening in the world around them, and keep their character consistent to the changes, but not follow trends, or attempt to completely go in the face of trends either.
Another connected issue to this phenomena is the tendancy of over-trust in characters, a willingness to make it blatantly obvious, in character, to the rest of the ingame universe that YOU HAS ISSUES.
In an attempt at role-playing a character that is different to the norm, most role-players begin to role-play characters with a variety of psychological problems, or choose Chaotic Neutral as an alignment to allow for sway either way, as well as becoming religiously neutral.
This is a topic I want to discuss in depth to help the community we associate with get out of these vicious cycles. Characters should follow statistics but not be bland.
Comments?
