Organic Growth Vs Player Input

[DylPickle]

I've struggled with this for a while, but with my new batch of character in the current state of the game, this question has been rattling around my head more and more. How strict ought we to be with letting our characters develop based exclusively on their surroundings/environment VS the sort of "divine inspiration" of player input?

First, let me be clear that by player input, I don't mean CRBs with ingame information and ooc knowledge, but more around developing motivations that may not come around organically, but would have a shot at making the game more diversified and interesting.

Maybe it's just the places I've spawned, but it feels like there has been a major reversion to the mean when it comes to structures. If places have laws, rules, customs, or historical institutions, they appear to be largely ignored by the residents or their players (both?) There are far fewer "factions" , groups, cultures than there were at times in the past.

An organic character shaped by their community may experience very few catalysts for a change to their society, and it feels like it takes a large degree of player input to have a chance at stoking a change that could make a location have an identity greater than simply it's personalities.

This is a bit more of a ramble than I expected, but I'd like to hear perspectives.

[Mafia Salad]

Nobody replied to this? Oh, well I'm not going to waste a good lurk. Do both!

I haven't played in a couple years so my perception is dated: for the most part the unique cultures of the game have died under the constant pressure of newspawns with generic liberal leaning Western sensibilities and a couple decades of people learning what works best and implementing that. So if you let the game define your characters they are mostly going to suck. As I was playing I decided it was more enjoyable and more important for the betterment of the game as a whole to insert life and culture than adapt to the culture that was in place. Unless there was a unique and fun town, then start sucking up and spitting out it's uniqueness.

I still love the idea of the game shaping a character so I start with a personality type (nature, based loosely on a character I like from a book or show or more often a type from the four humors, DISC or Myers-Briggs). Then, since the societal structure of the game has some... repetition, I would overplay minor events as traumatic life changing ones (nurture: That woman didn't share her carrots, I hate all other women now! or that guy drove by in a car and said "hi", so cars make you cool. I must become an autobarron!) Create an interesting backstory out of the boring cards you are dealt. Allude to the back story more than describing it and let other players fill in the blank with a more interesting story that they imagine.

Then hopefully your more interesting characters help shape the other characters around them and that develops into a unique location (This town permits only one woman, the princess, all others must leave within 24 hours of arriving or they will be forcibly deported)

Did it work? kinda. It probably would work better if I played more than 8 months in a stretch and let my character accumulate some influence.

[Rocket Frog]

All in all, my characters are almost always defined by their surroundings. Only when I can't sense some strong kind of culture or something around (or when I'm trying to test something in particular) is when I throw the dices or I execute some previously drawn profile and script.

This has gone many times out of my hands; whatever player who knows me well also knows I more often than not enter into the character as if it were a second skin. So everything there is real if I'm really connected to the character I'm playing at that given moment. But I always try to stick to what's there, only adding some 'player input' when I can't find anything to hold myself from.

I think respecting the surroundings and acting (and reacting) accordingly is one of the most important things, as it's part of the setting you are playing in. And contributing to it and not depleting it it's equally important too, just as being consequent with your character and its history.

Another example: there have been several times I wanted to contribute with some place's development and helping. My characters were not up to that and I sadly had to act as they would (something didn't like, but...).
All in all, I always try to adress the chain of events and the setting. But I think some times the setting is pretty poor and you have to manually introduce some things.

[alecto]

I usually prefer my characters to develop a personality after they spawn, to be honest. It's great when some event or other happens in town that kicks off a character arc and gives my blank little canvases some colour.

(A side effect of this is that, if I decide this one is more shy or more bold, I have to figure out why they might radically change in attitude after their first five days of neutrality. Hmm.)

I don't always get inspiration though, and sometimes after an in-game year or two of silence, I'll try to come up with something using their skills or the surroundings (or even... start a little drama ). It's hard for me to just decide their personality without something to go on. Sometimes I don't even name them, and let circumstances or other people decide their name (or, on one occasion, I really couldn't decide on a name and people in town kept asking, so I decided that poor char had a complex about it).

Personally I think it's okay to spawn a character with a little bit of personality, like "they're stubborn and hate rice" or something general, but it's difficult to work with a character who say, spawns in a tiny town on the frontier of Fu and immediately wants to be a bus driver. (I'm just inventing an example here, I haven't seen a char like that. And okay, maybe that's doable... it could be so interesting as long as there was a convoluted motivation behind it and the character stuck with it!)

[zymurge]

Since my return from many years ago, for all my new chars, I tried coming in with a pretty well defined personality up front. So far they've all been based on, and even named after, movie or TV chars, although all from a few rows back into the supporting cast to make the references less obvious. Some are more obscure than others, which makes it more fun.

None of what they come in with is specific to how they'll live in the Cantr world and my intent is that they are going to maintain that personality as they evolve into whatever they become based on where they land, the surrounding characters, and whatever is going on that affects them. I do have to make a conscience effort to not have them all act too much like I would and become too similar -- kinda like all my Pandora stations start to play the same songs after enough training Having them based off actual media chars also let's me think back on how they act, so that helps give me a reference to keep them from converging.

In this way, I think that they can add a bit of color that contrasts with the more vanilla types that show up and instantly start asking to work for a [fill in the blank] on day 1. I find these types are already too Cantr cultured by design in that they seem to have goals set on what they want to do materially with the subset of items that Cantr provides. Because of this material bias, they tend to not separate from the pack as much. With my chars, they adapt to what material items are offered or are easily attainable, so that their personality can stay the focus. What this is resulting in is them settling into whatever their community needs are and that influences how they get to apply their predefined personalities.

Even so, I get to enjoy seeing how they evolve into their worlds and find that sometimes I've made decisions to let them soften certain idiosyncrasies or behaviors that I had originally planned. In other words, I am allowing them a fair amount of organic growth. So really, I think the formula I'm trying is a combination of the two. So far, about 12ish Cantr years in now, it's been a blast!