Posted by Imbrogno(VIP) on July 7, 2000 at 09:03:58:
In Reply to: Proud Blade's Roleplaying Topic of the Day: Playing Flaws. posted by Proud Blade(VIP) on July 6, 2000 at 00:42:38:
Imbrogno having horns, a demon-hand with only three fingers, and to a lesser extent huge bulges on his back was extremely fun to play. His slipping into "spells" where he cursed in a foreign tongue, flailed about on the ground, and was generally useless for a couple minutes also made him fun. I'm probably much like yourself, in that if I'm not unique I have no fun. I just tried to come up with a unique role for a conjurer, ranked him up to 11th rank, found out that there was another conjurer with the same sphere as me and in the same cabal, and that pretty much put the nail in the coffin of my character, even though him having the same sphere doesn't necessarily mean we're identical, it was enough for me to throw away the character. I have an incredibly difficult time playing something that is being played to death. There's no way in hell that I could roll up a paladin right now, and playing a conjurer almost seems too cliched as well, I'd be interested until about the 3rd rank and then I'd delete. The problem I have that confounds that is that I hate dying. A pk death for me is like a letter in the delete command, each one brings me closer to the final stroke of the "enter" key that throws the character into the [DELETED] abyss. So I have to balance power with originality and that leads to writer's block. As far as speech impediments go I think there's a way to do them that is unique and there's a way to do them that is not. A rager with a speech impediment is not unique, it's almost to the point where playing one without a speech impediment is a novel idea. Alrucus's speech impediment WAS unique. Here you had an arbiter, who for all intents and purposes really does need to be able to get his point across efficiently, who had a speech impediment and it was marvelous. I loved it. I think Graham has a valid point as well. In order to be unique, there has to be a firm understanding of what is the norm. In order to know what the norm is there has to be a racial culture for each race and some races are severely lacking. Storm giants I think are lacking an in-depth culture. Cloud giants don't even really have a place to begin looking for a culture. Hometowns are great places to start looking for the norm of a race, but some hometowns don't go into enough depth. Arial City I think is the perfect example, I don't get a firm grasp of what arials are about just from walking around the city. On the other hand I can fully understand dwarves after walking through Akan, Mortorn, and Khazzad-dum. I think more than anything, new imms really need to either rewrite and otherwise tweak existing areas, or write an area that can give a firm grasp on the culture on a specific race. Wow, did I ever ramble on.