A neglected litterbox

[rpanonmod]

Rundown: rpanons is an anonymous community for role-play related topics. This place serves as a forum for game discussions, canon discussions, RP solicitations (ATP, game ads, open memes), and advice. The occasional off topic comment is inevitable, but please keep heated social and political topics to their respective communities. Posting them here will only get them frozen. Subsequent threads made to bypass a freeze will then be deleted.

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Comments

CHARACTER ADVICE

[rpanonmod]

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

What's the best way to write sign language?

[(Anonymous)]

I've usually seen as something like this:

Character A signed slowly so Character B could follow as they asked What kind of ice cream do you like?

Or possibly if they're with someone who doesn't know Sign, might show the character starting to sign, then realizing they won't be understood, and have them whip out a notepad or phone to type in instead.

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

as someone who plays a character that signs, i usually do like above anon suggested and just italicize what they're saying, so in brackets it'd be like


[action meta action] This is what they're saying.


prose is a little trickier bc we're used to seeing "" to indicate speaking, so sometimes i'll just put the 'words' in a seperate line like:


Character is doing a particular action.

They said a thing.

And then had feelings about it.

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

Use a lot of emotions and expressions! As someone who is Deaf and studied ASL for a bit, Sign Language is typically very expressive. If you wanted to be a little more in depth beyond that, look up how to sign particular words and describe the hand movements. Describe gestures! Don't say "they waved their hand" how did they wave their hand? Did they flick their wrist or make a large circular motion?

If they're signing in proximity to other people consider this thought, signers take up a lot of space. Are they being secretive? They might want to sign "smaller" motions. Are they excited? Maybe they're moving really fast!

major Zero Time Dilemma spoilers

[(Anonymous)]

Major enough that I've whited them out:

> <

Thank you!

the spoilers are in this comment instead

[(Anonymous)]

well that didn't work

the preview showed them whited out, i promise. let me just






so I'm considering picking up Sean, but I can't think of any easy way around the Q/Sean name thing. it's too big a spoiler for me to feel like it's fair to call him Sean consistently, but short of playing him in a memloss game or Forest Covered, I can't figure out any plausible way around it and was hoping people might have suggestions.

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

any advice on playing characters from another country/culture?

as a more specific example, i'm feeling like i have a character's personality/voice in decent standing, but they were born and raised in modern taiwan and i'm not even from the same continent. i'm working on looking up things like common idioms, customs, and societal values, but i worry i might fall through on something or that i'll do the character a disservice.

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

This might be hard to do with a language that you don't know (assuming that you don't read Taiwanese), but I always find it very useful to study Wikipedia articles in the target country's language.

Also - only use idioms/language if you are a hundred percent sure of it. Rather use cursive than butchering a language because you want your character to show that they speak it.

Keep in mind that even within a country there can be a wide variety of different societal values and views, and that most countries have a number of different ethnicities living in them - often depends on the area, so check that one.

It's very helpful to find stories from expats both from your own country living in the target country and from the target country living in your home country, because they will look at the differences from completely different angles which can be quite enlightening. (On that note, it is important to remember that diaspora communities typically don't reflect the home country's culture all that well because they 1. branched off at some point and missed the subsequent developments and 2. often only represent a specific part of their home country's society - Iranians in Sweden are typically from secular academic backgrounds, which doesn't represent the country as a whole. So don't infer too much from diaspora behaviour/culture for the actual country's culture. This is also true for idioms/language!)

Most of all though communicate clearly that you are doing your best but don't know the character's country of origin personally and be willing to accept help if it is offered.

Re: CHARACTER ADVICE

[(Anonymous)]

Youtube documentaries. Like the travel ones and maybe issues for the country. Try to sample a wide range so there isn't a lot of bias. Also look up, and make a list of, idioms you can translate over to flavor tags with. Otherwise general history should suffice. I'd gloss over anything that got too specific in tags just to save yourself the trouble.

[(Anonymous)]

sort of OC curiousity more than anything

have a character i'm v. much a fan of, has art for him, comes from a WH40k setting, etc, so i've wanted to try and put him in games as of late

was curious about if anyone had tips for motives for loner characters to tag out, or otherwise good ways to play that kind of character and not just sit on the people who tag me and ride them into the sunset

mixed metaphor but you get what i mean hopefully

autistic character

[(Anonymous)]

Alright so I have a canonically autistic character and I have zero interest in being too warm under the blanket statements the blue hell site makes about characters on the spectrum. I have aspergers but never considered myself autistic or in need of special aide.

The character I'm playing right now is Symmetra. How I want to play her is she isn't obvious in how she stims or goes against the grain. Something upsets her she's a cold fury not because she doesn't know how to articulate but because nuance outside certain parameters is hard to parse. Not inconceivable. So she's frustrated and icy. Growing up, giving a task lined up to her interests would be a haven imo.

Basically I want to know how anyone else might approach this.

Re: autistic character

[(Anonymous)]

Stop thinking OMG WRITING AN AUTISTIC CHARACTER and write her the same way you'd write any other character: as they appear in canon. If you have to throw in a ton of extra headcanons or handwring about it then either the canon's doing a shitty job of portraying autism and an accurate portrayal would probably be OOC anyway, or there's not enough there to app.

Re: autistic character

[(Anonymous)]

Don't treat her being on the spectrum as if it's some sort of checklist, she personally doesn't seem to care about if she is or isn't either way from the comic. She's also rather obviously fairly self-sufficient and in my opinion probably isn't very far along on the autism spectrum. She may use experimenting building things with hard light or practicing dance as a form of self-care/centering when in need of it.

Otherwise:

She's task/goal oriented and very good at spatial relations, planning things ahead of time and likely does a lot of research before taking action in a complicated situation. IE: she's the one who does research in to where to eat, times to go to certain things to avoid the most crowds, and gets reservations to whatever possible when on vacations. She's a planner.

Things or people acting outside of what she's able to predict is likely frustrating (people being late all the time, etc.) and can have her go in to "cold mode".

Being bad with people and having low empathy doesn't mean that she can't be friendly either, she likely is the sort to observe people/groups for a time to understand the dynamics before jumping in to a party/making overt motions at friendship.

She's fairly entitled as well, she doesn't understand why people would stay in "poor" conditions when they're offered something she sees as better. She is also likely a bit naieve, in that she firmly believes that Vishkar is good/right and others are bad.

It's been noted by the creators that she's not necessarily a good character, and may have ulterior motives of some sort. She's not evil, but she is likely very "ends justify the means".

If going by D&D alignments she's pretty Lawful Neutral.

[(Anonymous)]

Coming from playing another woman who is canonically on the spectrum here, so this is a more general thing responding to what you titled your request in the subject line.

In general: Treat your character like you would any other character, studying their motivations, mannerisms, behaviour, ideals, etc etc. as that of an unique individual.

I've found knowing about my autistic woman's diagnosis helpful mostly

- because it allows me to understand how she sees the world better, which in turn makes some mannerisms, behaviours and how she approaches interpersonal relationships have an actual pattern to work with. Essentially, you know how typically a step of analyzing a character is a layman's psychological analysis? That's where this is located.

- to understand her history. While nobody is absolutely typical, knowing that her development probably didn't follow a neurotypical pattern but that of someone with a specific kind of autism allows for extrapolation about how they probably reacted to and read certain situations in their lives, and it also explains reactions/readings of others / allows assumptions about those.

- to properly estimate the impact that not being in the character's own environment but in an RP environment will have. An autistic character will likely have more issues, and issues that impact their functionality more, with being in a strange new environment than others. Their reactions may also be different to that of a neurotypical one. For this, it is good to check their canon for things like explicit or implicit support networks, routines, reactions to the lack of either, stress compensation mechanisms, and so on. In some ways, this can all be done without figuring in that they're autistic, but knowing about that just alerts you to a lot of things to take into consideration that you might not look at otherwise.

Webcomic characters?

[(Anonymous)]

This is less specific advice, but is there a general rule-of-thumb for playing characters from a webcomic (story driven ones, like Cucumber Quest rather than a gag-a-day comic), in terms of whether or not it's something that's OK to do? On one hand, it's not like there weren't 500 Homestuck characters in rpland, but it also kind of feels like playing someone else's OC. Am I just overthinking this, or is this a medium better left alone?

Re: Webcomic characters?

[(Anonymous)]

We're all playing somebody else's OC.

Just treat them like another character. If they have a personality, a backstory and motives, you're fine.

Shuuya Kano - Kagerou Project

[(Anonymous)]

I'm finding it hard to pin him down. Any advice would be appreciated. I adore the character but I'm finding that writting him out is difficult.

Final Fantasy XII

[(Anonymous)]

I want to play some of the characters so badly, but I go blank when it comes to their way of speech.

Especially Basch and Ashelia.

Can someone give me any advice or information on the way they talk?

Re: Final Fantasy XII

[(Anonymous)]

Olde English type of commentary?

Re: Final Fantasy XII

[(Anonymous)]

there's... nothing really weird about it? it's just a partial Elizabethan English style of speech you usually see in period pieces. go watch The Lion in Winter or something, it's really not hard.

Re: Final Fantasy XII

[(Anonymous)]

I usually find it best to pull up a script, find lines that specific character says, and figure out the rules for how they specifically speak. As the other anons said it's basically fake ye olde British English, but if you go to alternate sources for the right cant you might fall into the trap of throwing in words which sound right for the style, but aren't actually stuff the character would say.

Like how ere is a shortening of before, so, "We must hasten! The towers have fallen and the enemy will advance ere long!" sounds legit, but nobody in Ivalice uses ere. They all use before. Use of 'tis seems to be predominantly restricted to either nobles or people who've spent a great deal of time at court. Having Fran chirp out, "'tis late!" would be wrong. You get the idea.

Besides that, Basch might have a dramatic way of delivering his lines but he's pretty damn direct in general, as befitting a soldier. So basically he's very, "We gotta haul ass to Ondore's side and kick in the teeth of the Judge." Except dressed up so it's like, "We must hasten. The Marquis will fall soon if we do not, and he will surely need our steel against the Judge Magister." Flowery presentation, direct lines.

Ashe is kind of the same as well. There's major differences but it comes down to personality, and you asked for speaking style and not personality.

Selkie - Fire Emblem: Fates

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone have any advice? Admittedly I'm still playing through Birthright but she's been an absolutely amazing character to me and I'd love to try my hand at her.

Like am I missing anything by trying to do so before going through Conquest and Revelations or any of the other DLC stuff?

Translated Characters

[supermanda]

I am wanting to pick up a character from its manga canon, but I have a hard time really grasping the true voice of the character through the manga's translation.

Has anyone else gone through this? The same happens with some anime, as well, but I'll often turn to the English dub portrayal if it seems to match up with the original version.

Re: Translated Characters

[(Anonymous)]

Does the manga have any fan translations out there? I know that especially for big series or series where their first translation was a godawful Mixx type translation, there are some fansites with self-done manga translations out there. Granted, fan translations are VERY hit or miss (some are good, some are more of the "just according to keikaku (keikaku means plan)" type) but it's definitely an avenue to pursue.