My character was spontaneous.
http://community.failbettergames.com/topic24496-just-a-dumb-post-to-allieve-election-heat.aspx
I had already played Fallen London for perhaps a year or two before completely overhauling myself from a common lurker to… this.
This is my final form!
it used to be unimportant, much like the lore of one’s avatar in cs:go is irrelevant to all the shooting. i played my character as a puppet-proxy for myself, and treated choices less like actual meaningful choices and more like a choice as to which segment of the interactive book will i see next.
but then i wanted to draw them, and i did, but you can only draw a character as a bandaged dementor for so long, before you feel like to give them a more characteristic look and, you know, an actual face. but what sort of look would suit this puppet-proxy with no agency and no personality of their own? so i grudgingly gave them some personality and history, loosely basing it off some of my main gameplay decisions. and then i suddenly discovered that it’s… . actually… fun… who would’ve thought.
so, (like in case of many people here, i see as well) the lore and roleplaying just slowly grew on me with time.
To echo some other fine gentlefolk here, when I first started I didn’t really know what was going on. This is reflected in my original character name which is not lore friendly at all. Now I am older and wiser FL wise I still have no idea what’s going on, but Polite Society was born as I thought the name better reflected the nature of the game I was getting more and more into.
As for Lore, my original character is basically me-ish, but far happier to take risks, kill people, steal and be nasty or generous to far further extremes than I would personally be ok with. She covers the spectrum end to end and so does whatever floats her boat at the time.
Polite Society is more RP - he is essentially a hardcore criminal and wannabee kingpin - happiest in the underground environs of the neath - murder, larceny, blackmail etc is just another days work for Polite. Strangely enough the game seems to play that way for Polite in that he has a ridiculously high renown with criminals despite generally working to build all the factions anyway (like 2-3x the others). Criminal cards just seem to rain on the guy and that’s just the way he likes it. If you see Polite post on the forums chances are it will be in character (apart from this post, cough)
Mrs Eaten is my 3rd and last character - as you can probably guess she was built to be a seeker once I worked out what seeking was and decided I probably didn’t want to kill my other characters but I was very interested in the mysterious storyline. She has but one goal - to find her lost love. Everything else is secondary and meaningless apart from that one purpose. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t get distracted however and her attention span can be quite short. Sadly she is not particularly adept at following the path or noticing there is a path, or staying on the path if she stumbles across it so I expect she will be seeking for quite a long time, Oh look, something shiny over there… oh dear here we go again…
It railroads you too hard into specific kinds of characters, but the situations it presents are very interesting.
I feel like you shouldn’t treat the game proper as a roleplaying medium… per se. More like, a writing/brainstorming prompt for real roleplays in the setting.
I feel like the game/roleplay balance goes like a hill. At first, it’s all about figuring out how your character fits into this incredible setting that slowly unfurls itself before you as you play and learn more about it, but then your character begins to mature, and you begin to realize that the choices are simply too limited to properly account for your developing characters decisions, and the nuances behind them, and so you slowly migrate them towards the roleplaying forum. Or supplement in copious amounts of headcanon while playing. Usually it’s both. :P
edited by Addis Rook on 12/31/2017
I agree with Addis Rook a lot. Given the game, you have to be a kleptomaniac daredevil on the wrong side of the law, not matter what character you might eventually roleplay with others. Sure, some stories ask you to make a moral choice, but if you fully role-played the game would be unplayable and/or you would miss half of it.
I avoid cruelty or cowardice, and I am surprised of how many chunks of content get taken away for that (Velocipede squad, University department etc). All in all, I mostly roleplay Jolanda in my contacts with other players and when it comes to crucial decisions. The rest of the time, my artistic, spying, comfort loving Jolanda is for some esoteric reason doing Heists at the Flit.
I don’t understand how to pay this game without RP, the rewards are not nearly rewarding enough to justify playing if not to confront decisions and see how your character fits in to this world. However, I do feel starting as a blank slate is wiser than going in with extensive backstory or traits in mind, as it will require a LOT of head cannon and stuff to try and justify certain actions. For example, Amsfield was always envisioned as a debauched, hedonistic writer with amoral tendencies, and has largely stayed true to that (although he has switched sides from more radical leanings now that the status quo benefits him), but that was all he was in the beginning and is now considerably more nuanced. I did have much more difficulty with my first two alts however, as Maiser is asexual and I hadn’t thought about how much of the game that would lock them out of (the entire Persuasive track, basically), so I had to head cannon why they were doing this (although fortunately, FL is discreet enough in descriptions that wasn’t too hard) and Honoria despises criminals, so why she would pursue a life of crime took some effort on my part.