The importance of character stories...

[n00bl3t]

Yep, it took me a while to swallow it... writing stories is like writing a test (for me). I don't enjoy it - its torture... you know how long it took my buddy and me to write those 2 simple character history posts?

Love that last post. In a blink of an eye. Anyway, you've been killing outcasts so if I see you I will kill you.:)

---

Anything I say is not intended as offensive, and to try and deliberately misinterpret it as such would be an attempt at trolling via misrepresentation.

It's not a conspiracy, it's localised bias. They're not intelligent enough to form a conspiracy.

[Laowai]

Some interesting points written up in this thread....

Kudos to Sovereign and Dreygon, you guys summed up essentially most of what i think.

I'm actually one of the players who does write these little "novels"... my main ones "Outsider - The chronicles of Ben Laowai" and "Adam Greerson - The Unstoppable Truth" are both quite long. I'm sure the length of them steers potential readers away!
That being said, i didn't start writing until after i had been here for quite a while. I started just posting in some message dumps and on the Corsairs VIP bar, and found i enjoyed it. I started writing posts in my own story threads because i felt it seemed to flesh out my characters, gave them more depth - and it was fun. I definitely write in spurts - ill go for a couple of weeks with very little then write up a bunch.

I read a lot of other people's stories as well - consider this: You RP with these people in game, which is fine. You dont NEED to read their stories, you can learn about them from their in game behavior of course, but once you have read their story, you then know so much more about that character, who they are, what motivates them.... and more importantly, it can and does open many more in game RP opportunities.

Actually i dont think stories should be used as a benchmark for in game RP though - it cant be universally applied as many people here have stated, they dont enjoy it, or dont believe they can do it. I dont think that people should have to write novels to justify a battleship, or any ship for that matter. However, if someone does, then there is no reason why that work and effort should not be counted towards their RP record - after all, everyone here concedes that the forum is a vital part of the Discovery community, we refer new people here all the time, there has been a recent upsurge in the importance of "Faction rules" which can only be read on the forum anyway. Players who choose to write stories are simply using the forum as a RP tool.
I do, as always, believe that should be a players choice - Don't want to write a story? dont feel like you can or couldn't be bothered? That's fine, then exersize your RP in game, do your thing there. That's how you will be judged as a Role Player - but as i said, Disco isn't just in game, things on the forums do have an impact.


Another few things that stories do - which isn't why people write them - but it's a practical upshot of a story nevertheless - is that it proves a few key facts about a player:

First, you can string a sentence together. Sounds obvious enough, but actually its not - If you cant write a few lines of storyline in a forum, how are you going to respond to the ample and varied RP of an in-game situation? "2 Mil or die?". Again, a story is not a prerequisite for this, but having one that people have read means people in game can assume you know how to talk.
Secondly, it shows you have a knowledge of server history, faction history and the freelancer storyline. Again, you might have this anyway and not write stories, but a written story viewable by the public merely announces this fact before you even get in game. Knowing Disco's little stories and nuances WILL get you respected by older players, factions and yes even admins. Good RP in game, a screen shot or two in a message dump by the way, will earn you the same thing - stories are just another way of doing it.
Thirdly - not as important but still worth mentioning; it shows you can use English. Many of our players here, Good Role Players too - are not native English speakers, but they still get respect anyway because they have worked through it in game and made it happen. However... You write a story or post in the RP message dumps when you're not a native English speaker? - Wow... Kudos to you! and it will come much faster from a publicly posted story or Message dump then it will from chats in game that perhaps only a few people see. The end result will be the same one would hope, but the net result will be gained faster from a forum post.
Fourthly and lastly, in some situations, the community demands it - admins will want to see something on the forums. The Terrorist ID is a classic example of this. I dont claim to know all the standards admins apply to granting one - but i do have one, and im sure my stories played no small part in bringing that about. The RP for the character in question is still playing out now, but it was already relatively extensive before i even applied for the ID.


In short - You dont need a story, definitely dont need a "novel". But having one does allow people to form judgments of the player and their characters before ever meeting them in game.

---

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/3289/...047770.png

[ryoken]

Bla. I got 13 char's, and have not written 1 story. I RP in game.If people do not like it? to fracking bad. I am not wasting time i could be playing, just to write a novel.

---

[Ayem]

With regard to broadcasts across systems, while it may not be ideal- there has to be a suspension of disbelief in a RP game at any level. If I have time, I'll focus attention on a single vessel. 'Republican Shipping vessel Phaethon to the Donaghue. Get out of the way you damn dock hog.' For example.

I don't like restricting my RP to private channels and groups, RP should be seen by everyone involved (everyone in system) in my view, so they have the opportunity to react and interact.

With regard to not seeing the faces of people, we see the faces of npcs all the time when they talk to us through comms. We all have webcams in our cockpits, obviously.

---

[tfmachad]

References to a character in the forums are as important as the impact a character will have around it. They aren't necessary for low profile, regular role characters, but are of the utmost importance to characters whose overall behavior can create a disruption in the status quo around them.

This reference doesn't have to be a story to a point, it can be a set of guidelines to that character's behavior so the community (the people who will be exposed to that character in game) can verify if those guidelines are something acceptable to them. It goes pretty much in the same lines as the proposition for a faction. People will want to know what ships are you using, why, what are you going to do with them, who you will be going to attack and why etc.

Considering this is an RP server, putting all that in a story is a good thing. To a character that is very much exceptional, a back story ceases being something optional to become something necessary. There's only so much you can accomplish through actions and communication in game. Even if you risk metagaming from other players, people will need to know how to react around your out of the ordinary character, it's a matter of respect giving as much information as you can to people so they know what's going on. Not doing will promote unnecessary and uncalled for grievances.

The more unusual your character is, the greater the chances of the game not being able to support you depicting it, so you have to complete the experience somehow. Creating an interesting and attractive story to do so can only be a good thing.

For that matter, players that play odd roles such as that of the Keepers, Dreygon's Mon'Star, mine and Zapp's ghosts and some others, they do have an obligation to the community to make these roles as clear as possible. That is only the first step and it doesn't, by any means, exempt these players from putting an even greater amount of effort into RPing these characters in game.

---

Meet the Kriegers - The story of a family and of two men that shared more than just a name
Fantasmas de la Nube Siniestra
I Mon'Star: The Strange Case of Elizabeth Wallace

[SigCorps]

Greetings,
I am fairly new to the server and Freelancer MP for that matter, I am not new to RP'ing. I really like what you have have going on here and the points made in this post have been very good. Heck it got me to write a post about my toon, and now that I have, I discovered his personality.

So for me writing the story helped me figure out where I was going to take this character and what his opening motivation is. I am also using his post as a neural log where Szerath writes down his adventures and where he wants to go next.

Personally I love to RP, and it can be a challenge to do so if you do not work out some details in your head or on paper about your toon's personality. Posting these stories also lets you show everyone else here that you can , atleast on paper come up with some RP'ing. While yes it dose not mean you can do so in game, it does prove you are atleast a bit creative

Part of my motivation for playing MP is that I have been dying to do some RP. I used to be a big online gamer but a wife and kids will kinda cut that back to about nothing. That and I can not find a decent D&D group up here. So the nice thing about Freelancer is I can log on for 1 hr, acutally acomplish somnething, do a bit of RP and get "my fix" as it were and have some fun.

Guess I kinda went off topic a tad. Anyway I think posting a story is good if you want. It helps the rest of us know you the player and gives us a bit about your character. It also might help you work out some kinks in how you want to portray your new incarnation.

---

Formerly Sam Nichols, creator of OSI

[Unseelie]

Bla. I got 13 char's, and have not written 1 story. I RP in game.If people do not like it? to fracking bad. I am not wasting time i could be playing, just to write a novel.

I consider writing on the forums part of the game. I consider time spent perusing the forums part of the game. When I'm writing a story, I am playing the game.

I am fairly new to the server and Freelancer MP for that matter, I am not new to RP'ing. I really like what you have have going on here and the points made in this post have been very good. Heck it got me to write a post about my toon, and now that I have, I discovered his personality.

So for me writing the story helped me figure out where I was going to take this character and what his opening motivation is. I am also using his post as a neural log where Szerath writes down his adventures and where he wants to go next.

There is a prime, shining example of my main reason why everyone should write a story. It helps.

---

[RParade]

Spot on, really.


I see alot of players who must spend hours writing up novals on these forums, but are often useless in-game roleplaywise..

It's not that I don't admire the creativity or commitment of the authors of these pieces, but it's more along the lines that I'm here to play a game, not sit on a forum for hours at a time reading about it. Some stories update so often that you'd have to read them everyday or every few days, and these stories are exactly that generally - stories, because they didn't actually happen within the roleplaying atmosphere of the server and so players couldn't effect the storyline at any point.


It'd be nice if, instead of writing a forum post to get permission to fly a ship or whatever else, players began to actually do these things In Character while playing on the Discovery RP server. This would make things alot more interesting, and it'd serve to liven up the server abit aswell. You could always roleplay hijacking a capitolship or something along those lines, and you could also do character development with each action you take in-game - characters are intended to be people and as such are subject to change and so on. Getting defeated in battle should effect the personality you're portraying and character development itself should actually be "existent."

It'd be very possible to do all these things, but unfortunately it'd likely require aggressive ADMIN enforcement and alot of work from the playerbase itself. Despite those problems though, considering what Freelancer is and was, the Discovery crew has done a fine job at lining things up for such things seamlessly.:)

[Zapp]

Not to be a shameless self advertiser...

It'd be nice if, instead of writing a forum post to get permission to fly a ship or whatever else, players began to actually do these things In Character while playing on the Discovery RP server. This would make things alot more interesting, and it'd serve to liven up the server abit aswell. You could always roleplay hijacking a capitolship or something along those lines, and you could also do character development with each action you take in-game - characters are intended to be people and as such are subject to change and so on. Getting defeated in battle should effect the personality you're portraying and character development itself should actually be "existent."

My response.

---

[Boss]

I have my own answer. All of my characters are a part of a growing saga. If you read all the stories I have posted (and all the ones I haven't:P), you'll find a an underlying thread that ties them all together. They run into each other, get in fights, trade shots. It's all part of the fun for me.

---

Just go play the game and have fun dammit.

all in all the conclusion is that disco doesn't need antagonist factions, it doesn't need phantoms, it doesn't need nomads, it doesn't need coalition and it doesn't need many other things, no AIs, the game is hijacked by morons to confuse the game with their dickwaving generic competition games mixed up with troll-of-the-day.