rpanons | Stick a fork in it

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.

Temporary Change: To reduce the strain on Dreamwidth's servers new entries will go up when a post reaches 3,000. Please refrain from spamming so we can stretch these entries for a little longer. We don't need several threads soliciting photo evidence of body parts, and we already know that we only care about yaoi. Failure to comply will only result in deletions and butthurt. "People may notice site slowdown/cache error pages. We're working on fixing. You can help: finish posts at 3k comments, not 5k or more." - Dreamwidth@Twitter

Rules:

Do not post pornographic or shocking images.
Do not share private entries, plurks, chat logs, etc.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not use this community as your social/political/hatespeech soapbox.
Do not be redundant. One page does not need three or more threads on one topic/theme.
Do not treat this comm like your personal Plurk or Twitter. Off-topic happens, but it should be open for discussion and not just a play-by-play of your life. No one cares.

Concerns?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

what makes an oc interesting?

This comes down to what you mean by "interesting," I think.

I personally think that a believable personality (even if not relatable) and BALANCE. If your character is someone whose personality seems believable based on their life history then I find them more interesting because I can see how they turned out to be who they are, even if I don't LIKE or agree with how they turned out. Cause and effect is a way of life, so I always try to keep that in mind when I make my characters.

Now, I don't believe you have to pile on the flaws to make your character interesting. I think having NO flaws is unrealistic and therefore boring to me, but if your character's list of flaws is five pages long to balance out super godmode powers you built into them, then you're going about balance the wrong way. You don't need to make them crippled with emotional and mental issues just to make up for the fact they're super strong fighters or magic users. I mean, plenty of official canons have characters that are like that who aren't even considered the actual godmodes of the series. Instead, you should make sure that their powers make sense and that you haven't broken the laws of your own original canon with them for no good reason. Even characters who make NO sense in our logic but make sense within the logic of their own worlds are interesting to me.

Balance is that how you PLAY them shouldn't be overpowered by how much you LOVE them. The worst OCs I've ever seen were not ones that were stupidly powerful godmodes, but the ones that the players took too seriously and put on pedestals like they were perfect creations. They acted as if we should love them and our characters should love them, even if they were a horrible dick or just accidentally blew up a country or cried every time someone said something mean to them. Never let your love for your OC get in the way of IC consequences for their actions or of IC reactions from other characters toward them. It ruins the experience for a lot of the people tagging with you and turns them off to your OC not because of the character but because of the player.

I also find that the more interesting OCs to me are the ones with extensive history to them that you don't NEED that knowledge to tag/engage them. The ones that I don't need to ask a bunch of questions about to be able to tag them, but while still being able to get solid, in-depth answers from the player if I do. If you know your character and their world and their history enough that you can explain it to me and make me believe it, I am infinitely more engaged with them.

But at the same time, you should be able to show, not tell. I don't need an unprompted infodump about your character's canon history in the middle of a tag. I want to be able to get insight into how their world works and has shaped them just by tagging with them naturally. It's no different to me than playing against a character from a canon I don't know. I don't play video games, but people who can show me enough to get a feel for the characters' world when I tag them make me more interested in tagging them again.

Now if you want to get a bit more surface-layer in what makes OCs more interesting in a "getting tagged on memes and on D_M" way, then I have a few ideas for that, too.

Characters that are either very talkative/social, quirky, confrontational, or visually unique (like say you're OC is a purple alien with yellow hair and three eyes) in some way often get more responses because they appeal to people or are different enough to make people want to find out more about them. Also I've noticed that a lot of people judge OCs MUCH harder when it comes to icons, but I don't really pay as much attention. For me, really, what makes an OC interesting comes down to the way the player presents them, but it's the same for fandom characters, too.

I'd say it's a lot easier to get into an original character if you can relate to them and can have them stand out without focusing too much on the specifics of your own world building. Roleplaying is a give and take hobby, so keeping that in mind usually makes things flow smoother.

Stick a fork in it

Re: Discussion Questions

no subject

no subject