no, i think personality and history sections definitely have their place, but i wish they'd be downplayed more. right now personality sections are considered the main part of every app, but imo they should be placed more in the background and used to reinforce what's written in the samples section. i wish things like bulleted lists were acceptable in lieu of an essay.
what i would like to do personally for an app would be to sort of mash the two sections together. give a brief overview (and i mean brief) of the character's general personality just as kind of an introduction, and then write out their role in canon in a timeline format, expanding on specific important events and how they affected the character/how the character reacted when necessary. entranceway kind of has this system in place, but they're still looking for an essay. barf.
you could argue that that's going to cause problems for people with huge canons (bleach comes to mind immediately), but the advantage of doing it in a timeline format is that you can downplay or even cut out all of the minor events and keep your focus specifically on the moments in canon that are relevant to understanding your character. you don't need to write a big huge description of everything that happens in canon. just explain the important parts.
i think what's important is to be able to see that the player understands the canon and understands how canon events affected their character, and i don't think that writing huge essays are the best way to go about doing it. i've modded games before, and it often seemed like so much of what was written in people's personality sections was unnecessary, because people try to cover all bases of their characters by drawing on specific events, but they know it's a personality section and not a history section so they don't really extrapolate on the events themselves and instead give a vague "in certain scenarios" description instead. i want a way to cut out the fluff and focus on what's actually relevant.
ayrt
what i would like to do personally for an app would be to sort of mash the two sections together. give a brief overview (and i mean brief) of the character's general personality just as kind of an introduction, and then write out their role in canon in a timeline format, expanding on specific important events and how they affected the character/how the character reacted when necessary. entranceway kind of has this system in place, but they're still looking for an essay. barf.
you could argue that that's going to cause problems for people with huge canons (bleach comes to mind immediately), but the advantage of doing it in a timeline format is that you can downplay or even cut out all of the minor events and keep your focus specifically on the moments in canon that are relevant to understanding your character. you don't need to write a big huge description of everything that happens in canon. just explain the important parts.
i think what's important is to be able to see that the player understands the canon and understands how canon events affected their character, and i don't think that writing huge essays are the best way to go about doing it. i've modded games before, and it often seemed like so much of what was written in people's personality sections was unnecessary, because people try to cover all bases of their characters by drawing on specific events, but they know it's a personality section and not a history section so they don't really extrapolate on the events themselves and instead give a vague "in certain scenarios" description instead. i want a way to cut out the fluff and focus on what's actually relevant.