rpanons | At first I glances

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i really want to play one of my OCs in a game but there is no way to make a tormented half-angel not look ridiculously shitty even though i am confident in my own ability to write her

because at the end of the day people will still go "omg look at that tormented half-angel what a shitty character" even if i was literally channeling the ghost of william fucking shakespeare

let's be real though man

that does sound pretty shitty

i know ):

maybe you should try describing her in a way that isn't "tormented half-angel" and work from there. the minute you start dumbing your character down is when everyone else has already done it.

yeah but then it'll be too hard for other anons to understand and they will declare that no1curr.

you can't expect actual discussions on the anon post, gosh. :p

Yeah... I was rooting for you until this post. You sound like real a holier-than-thou twit.

it was a joke ):

if anyone is actually interested, i'd happily share more about her.

Damn it my sarcasm meter is broken again

Sorry anon, carry on! These other people are giving good advice re: how to present them in a way that people will play with you. I think you should do it.

guessing that was sarcasm, but i'm being serious. it's all about presentation. if you describe your character as a "tormented half-angel" then you've basically done nothing but play a trope. you've removed her personality and left nothing but the bare bones.

so what if she's a tormented half-angel? that's just what she is, not who she is. that stuff should be the afterthought not her personality. you need to stop thinking about her in trope terms because while it's good shorthand for characters that are already known, it just makes OCs look like there isn't anything more to them. especially when you use "tormented" because it makes you sound like you're in it for the angst. "conflicted" could have worked better.

waiting for people to be interested when you haven't said anything they haven't heard before isn't going to work out for you. an OC player has to go the extra distance. you don't need to tl;dr to describe your character in a better phrase or sentence than that.

my favorite OC tl;drs make people go "waaah? ... yeah, that actually sounds pretty interesting"

"hawaiian space wizard"

"happy sparkly necromancer"

"lazy couchsurfing demon"

...is Hawaiian space wizard a real thing because I really want to hear about it now.

it sounds like it might fall under that "dumber than it really is" trope, if you're really confident in the execution of your character. i know trying to explain my androidesque oc is hard to explain without sounding really shitty, as opposed to just carrying out actual threads.

when writing apps for OCs, specifically history sections, do people care if you go into their childhood?

to clarify, usually when it comes to adult characters, canon may rarely or never go into what they were like as kids, what their parents were like, what their circumstances were, etc. the story just jumps into them in their 20s or later, and if you put "[X] was born in [Y] and grew up to be a [blah blah blah]" then that's fine.

I've noticed that rpers have a hard ass time summarizing childhoods at all. usually it comes out as overly enid-blytonesque twee ("[X] grew up in a normal idyllic life on a farm with their mom and dad and siblings and never had a care in the world") or overly melodramatic ("until tragedy struck and soldiers burnt their farm to the ground and killed their family and shot the dog and stepped on the cat") or both.

obviously if something pivotal did happen when they were a kid, I'd write it in (one of my OCs has a weird upbringing where part of their character arc is realizing how screwed-up it was, for instance). but if seriously nothing relevant happened before their twenties, I think I'd feel justified in just elaborating on the setting to show where the character is coming from, and then picking things up where the action starts.

I'm just uncertain, since there's so much emphasis (rightfully so) on OC apps for including EVERYTHING.

When I did mine, I sort of glazed over their childhood, but if there were instances that were relevant to how their personality had been formed or why x hated y or things of that nature, I'd go into that a little. Not like, intense scrutinizing detail, but someone could read over the history and understand why x was afraid of water or why they had an intense hatred of sheep. Things that affect them as an adult that had a root in childhood should be mentioned. If they refuse to be violent because of an instance in their childhood, mention it. If they got locked in a fridge for a day and are now claustrophobic, mention it. Otherwise you can pretty much just give a basic run down of whether they were happy/sad had a good family/bad family and all that.

That's just my opinion.

what kind of parents they had, what living situation they were born into, whether it was happy or miserable, and anything that had major consequences on their personality or shaped their motivations later in life

shouldn't be more than a paragraph unless shit got real

this is good advice.

sounds good to me! thanks very much, anon.

At first I glances

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