Pre made Characters

[BrentW]

Do you use them? Like I mean premade like personalities and goals. I did in FTO it worked well. But I got into a lot of trouble on the forums for that. I was told it wasnt RP and all that just wondering what you all think. These forums are very civil.

[Doug R.]

I have a general idea of what my character will be like, but I rarely hard-code anything before they spawn. I think having pre-made personalities is fine, but pre-made goals can be really annoying/problematic, especially if you spawn in the worst place possible to achieve those goals. If you want to be the world's greatest sailor, yet where you spawn is nowhere near water nor has any maps showing you where water is, then what do you do? I think leaving to find water in that case would be a minor CRB.

[Snickie]

I have a general idea of what my character will be like, but I rarely hard-code anything before they spawn. I think having pre-made personalities is fine, but pre-made goals can be really annoying/problematic, especially if you spawn in the worst place possible to achieve those goals. If you want to be the world's greatest sailor, yet where you spawn is nowhere near water nor has any maps showing you where water is, then what do you do? I think leaving to find water in that case would be a minor CRB.

I've tried that thrice, hard-coding characters. It didn't turn out so well for most of them.

One was supposed to be a religious heretic.....and she spawned in one of the emptiest survivable places in the game (or at least it seems that way at times). As soon as I saw that, I was like, "......Yeah, not going to happen."
Another spawned with a pre-spawning story as a history for why she is the way she is today. She's shared it with three people. Two bought it, one nearly drove her out of town (mentally) because of it.
Finally, another spawned wanting to be a sailor, but was spawned inland, so I hid that desire away until a map was picked up with arrows pointing to other islands.


Most of my characters have pre-made personalities, except for my first and my last one. My first has pretty much no personality, and my last I hard-wired after spawning.
All of my characters also have pre-made image descriptions. It's one reason I've never been successful when playing the Sims, is I spent so much time on the physical aspects. So far it's mattered really for only two of my characters. But now I am off-topic, and so I'm going to shut up now before I digress even more.

[BrentW]

I get the not possible I did change that. Like I dont do them for a certain char. Like if I have a char by water he will have personality and goal of char A if he is inland he would be char B. Then of course I can see not having any and letting is flow for some of course. Got to have that sort of fun.

[CrashBlizz]

I get normally get a vague idea of what I want their personality to be like. This then changes, sometimes quite drastically, depending whose around when I spawn and how they treat my character. Since the implementation of skills I save thinking about what I want them to do until after get a rough Ide of what they're good at. On side note, I did prefer it pre-skills when I could make them do anything I felt like playing before making them.

[DylPickle]

My characters usually start off quietly, hopefully the next thing to invisible. I'll craft their early personality once I get a feel for the place, after a day or two.
It's kind of dumb for me to do since I'll usually create a new character specifically when my character page is that depressing grey for too long a time, so the self-imposed adjustment period can be hard to follow when you just want some action, but I find it makes things more interesting for me to see what the town has to offer, and more importantly what it lacks. Makes for some plot opportunities (so long as my RP doesn't decide to suck )

[Miri]

I've got a set of pre-made personalities ('seeds', as I call them), but whether I use any of them I decide after the character got spawned and I had a chance to asses which one has the highest chance to grow in an interesting way. Although it happens that my pile of 'seeds' grows when I need to think of a new one for a new spawn that wouldn't be fit for any of those I've already had... or when I just want to try something new

What I'd like to emphasise is that, despite I often reuse certain 'seeds', those ARE NOT CLONE CHARS, or at least they don't end up like ones. Just like with real seeds - the soil and weather around influences the plant greatly.
For example - one of my favourite 'seed's incarnations:
1. nearly from start accompanied happily with his love, becomes a well-doing pirate with a great crew (although he'd really, really like a certain nymphet get get off his love). Although he gets reckless when his love starts getting too sleepy and, in result, gets himself killed and the crew captured or scattered.
2. A bit frustrated after a something he mistook for possible romance, he becomes an assistant on trade ship of the big town he spawned in. Just as he starts realising there might be something for him and the captain, though, the later dies of sleepiness, and my char, not wanting to go back, renames the ship and becomes a lone vagabond, the sociable dominant of him crumbled and longing for human companion. Dies not long after, while trying to help the first guy he's met after years of lonesome travel to free his friends.
3. spawned in a forest which most interesting resource (for him) is silk, he quickly sets his ways to become a master tailor, As he shares it with another guy there, they decide to become partners. The other one stays in the place gathering, while mine carries what they've already gathered to the nearby harbour, just to find it being abandoned. Instead of buying resources for starting the bussiness in the forest he spends it on a crowbar, screwdriver and enough iron for a new lock - and gets back to the forest in a bit used, but still flashy sportscar. They decide to start their bussiness in the abandoned harbour instead, with hemp being available there, so they can go into sailcloth and ropes as well. Dies many years later, of sleepyness, after his partner's death, of sleepyness as well.
4. My 'hawky' who knows - knows. I don't write bios for living ones

[Doug R.]

@snick - I tend to make my character's descriptions before I spawn them as well. I had no problems when descriptions were implemented.

[SekoETC]

In the beginning I used to have background stories and imagined up what my characters would look like, searched for a name with a meaning that went along with some physical or personal trait the character possessed and it generally worked out well. Later I made a character when I came up with a good name and set of visual characteristics, and only let a personality develop according to how I happened to react to the spawning environment.

I think we've discussed stuff like this in the past but I'd like to go through my characters as far as I can remember them.

#1 I wanted to become an artist. I was a bit upset to notice that the game had no built in art, so the only ways to produce it ingame were to host pictures on an external site or do ascii art or just write a description on a note. Or you could email a picture to an address and have it manually accepted, but I didn't want to be a bother to the moderators. This character never had a very detailed personality, she was pretty much my own avatar and did things as I would've done.

#2 had a background story of torching his house after his mom died. He was a bit retarded but a great character, many people liked him. He occasionally saw dead people. He was pretty stubborn and childish, but had a strong sense of justice and fairness, didn't like the thought of people getting locked up. He had some quirky visual traits.

#3 had no personality, I just wanted to make a Swedish character to practice the language. Later he ended up becoming an explorer and didn't meet other Swedes for years.

#4 had a background story of her father getting mauled by a bear, and she had been sent out to make her own living since she was the oldest child. Also her parents had wished the first child to be a boy, so she had been raised a bit tomboyish. She likes to punch people in the arm and wrestle with them. Around the age of 30 she had a bit of a crisis wondering if there was something wrong with her because she remembered having parents and siblings when no one else knew of such things, but later she stopped thinking about them.

#5 was escaping an arranged marriage, and she also had a well-thought-out physical appearance. She didn't have a very detailed personality but she loved making inventory lists.

It gets a bit difficult to remember the numbers now, but I think #6 was an uppity guy who thought he was better than everyone else, believed to be of a noble bloodline and above the peasants he spawned among. It was refreshing to play a jerk.

Then I had one without a well-thought-out personality but he liked to relax and smoke hemp. Still he ended up having to work hard to make a living, and he was a bit of a sad loser at first, only losing his virginity when he was about 50, but then he ended up becoming rich and successful and the most frequently named English character in Cantr as far as I can recall. He's been prone to depression but can be very chatty and charming when talking to people. Actually he has a rather complex personality, it's just difficult to summarize. He shares some traits with my father, particularly the chattiness.

Hmm... I'm not going to list all my characters here, but one day I created two in a row because I was bored, and both of them ended up in locations I had been to in the past. One of them ended up being grumpy and desperate of being noticed and getting recognition, while the other one was more happy but a bit concerned about his masculinity until he ended up meeting the woman of his life. When the woman fell asleep and died, it was also the end of his life. The other character ended up becoming a pirate, although he occasionally does other things than pirating, and he's convinced that he's better than most people even though he can occasionally acknowledge that he's being a bad person.

Then I have one that I initially wanted to become a factory worker or someone gullible and exploitable because there aren't enough people like that in the world, but she ended up growing a strong sense of self-preservation and ended up running a primitive settlement for years before getting captured by high-tech people from another island. So she got a fate similar to what I had originally planned for her, but only after she had reached a life situation where other people would rely on her to come back home, so the settlement will probably end up dying if some miracle won't give her freedom.

Later I made another exploitable and she has been in a couple of scary situations but now I wish her a good, safe life with no unpleasant surprises. It's easy to plan a character as an exploitable once you haven't invested much in them, but when a developed character ends up imprisoned or enslaved, that's a tough situation.

[Alladinsane]

My first two characters had their personalities planned ahead, really it was those idea's that even got me to try the game. It really didn't matter where they spawned as their particular traits were going to be unaffected by their chosen profession and roles. Who I saw them becoming was then based on environmental factors though. The mold was cookie cutter in alot of ways, yet I have yet to see another based on the same concepts (I look forward to it!).

Thanks to Doug, one of them will be forever famous. Well, maybe not forever...but you rock Doug, I appreciate the patience in dealing with my noobness.

I know its been discussed before, though maybe not with the same people, but it seems that characters RP'ing some fuzzy memories is possible. We still have the logical disconnect of people spawning when they have already had 20chronological yrs of their life passed. I understand the reasons why you picked this number and it isn't at all arbitrary imo, I just think that some opportunities may be lost. Adjusting any imagined (or real?) past can be limited by your spawning stats, but it might open some RP chances that were being ignored. Just a thought. Somewhere the 'unnamed woman in her twenties' got that accent, heck, got language at all.

Be well

[Snickie]

Most of my characters don't really act their age. 2, sometimes 6, occasionally 5, and especially 7 act younger.

7 really has the mentality of an eight-year-old, I guess, other than using correct grammar and whatnot, which my fault because I am a grammar Nazi (kind of a slang term), but I digress. She has a strong sense of guilt, likes to run around and be silly ALL the time, and even has a complex plotline going on with the rodent population. How did she ever get this way? When she spawned and I saw she was much weaker than average, I decided to make up for it via her personality. And thusfar she has been my most successful character in terms of my roleplaying.

2 spawned as not acting her age, and while she was still in her spawnplace I guess she maintained it fairly well. But she has matured a LOT since she left. It was bad roleplaying on my part, but I love who she's become. 7 was my attempt to try again at that style that I'd originally spawned 2 with (which was successful).

6... I don't know what to do with him. I honestly don't. I need to come up with more songs.

Since 5 is (supposed to be) a Cantrian representation of me (which is an epic fail) and I am under the age of 23, she occasionally acts younger than twenty-three.

3, 4, and 5 mostly act older than their age. These are rather my "clone" characters, who in personality are pretty much identical, with the obvious differences based on the context of their situations. But put in the same situations, they'd respond identically. But now I'm off-topic. 3 has to, in a sense, because of the den of iniquity in which she happens to live. 4 because she has never known anything else. And finally 5 because.....I dunno. It's just bad roleplaying, I guess.



See, if I were to abide by the "Don't talk about your own live characters," I'd have nothing to talk about. And as you've probably seen, I like to talk about my characters.

[Doug R.]

Thanks to Doug, one of them will be forever famous. Well, maybe not forever...but you rock Doug, I appreciate the patience in dealing with my noobness.

Um, you're welcome? (Has no idea what Alladinsane's talking about, because his memory is terrible.)

[etece]

I've had quite a few 'pre made' characters, either in personality or goals. But I generaly always start them out as a somewhat watered down version of what I hope them to be, and then let IC events direct them from there. For example my doctor/medicine man type character spent many years as a simple plant collector, it wasn't untill he finally found a wounded character and felt driven to help them that he really started to fulfil the concept I had for him. And vica versa I've had characters who's IC events have driven them to be completely the oposite of what I was planning for them to be.

I supose it would be more accurate to say rather than having 'pre made' characters I have characters with pre concieved personality types and traits, which will make them predisposed to develope in a certain way should certain events unfold.

I guess this is kind of the cantarian version of the Nature vs Nurture debate

[Armulus Satchula]

About 95% of the time, I make a new character with no idea what I want in mind. I use to just alternate between male and female when clicking register. I'll come up with a name based on the area I'm in and the goals are whatever is pretty feasible for that place. I rarely make long term plans since things can change nearly at any moment.

[Snickie]

Thanks to Doug, one of them will be forever famous. Well, maybe not forever...but you rock Doug, I appreciate the patience in dealing with my noobness.

Um, you're welcome? (Has no idea what Alladinsane's talking about, because his memory is terrible.)

-has an idea of which character Alladinsane is talking about-