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yubishines) wrote2015-12-27 06:22 am
yubishines) wrote2015-12-27 06:22 am
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Musing on how different all the tabletop kids I've played ended up, compared to what I had in mind at their inception.
The joke with Rana was that I asked if I could play a pokemon trainer in Beyond the Wall, and the GM went, "Actually, there's totally a class for that." But my real first thought for her personality was a gem fusion between Sings-to-Trees (from Nine Goblins) and Daine (a couple years before The Immortals books start). I definitely intended her to be much more pacifistic and insisting on talking to every encounter rather than fighting them.
(Honestly, that's for the best, that would have gotten obnoxious especially given some of the things we were fighting.)
As it stands, she's a little more all over the place than I'd like... I wrote 13-year-old Rana as having a burning thirst for knowledge that was rapidly outgrowing the village, but my decision to make her Law-aligned has shaped her more than I thought. Fairness and duty and due process!
Meg was intended as "younger, punkier Neal Caffrey". That didn't happen at all. Partly that problem was I had no idea how to play a charismatic character, at least not on voice, so the whole sophisticated-art-burglar concept ended up at odds with the brujah thug she became. I think I kind of made it work in the end, where she got this brutally pragmatic mind (all of the clunkiness was worth that moment when she went, "I can't save anyone so I have to attack my ally to make the prince think I'm loyal to her," and I couldn't come up with a different/better solution no matter how I tried) but if I had to do it over, I'd try harder to nail the whole "brujah playing at being a fancypants toreador and irritating both clans" thing better.
(Hence why I'm going with a social-primary ventrue the next time we play VTM, now I have a better grip on things.)
Anyway, if I ever do get into TSW RP, maybe I'll have the opportunity to reinvent Meg.
I... I actually don't think I went into the 13th Age B-Side game with a real concept for Shrike in mind, except for "functional drunk." All the backstory stuff about her family and rose-lensed loyalty to them popped up later. She definitely ended up more upset about her situation than I figured -- conflict between someone who sincerely loves the world vs. the role she's meant to play in the world due to her heritage vs. what she thinks is about to happen to the world.
I haven't gotten to roll Sen Okada out, so I don't know what she'll get up to in a real game. Worth pointing out, though, that my very first idea was "Electro-Human Tackle as she should have been" and... yeah, nah. ("Okada" is Tackle's actress's surname.) I do think I need to play up the researcher/engineer aspect of her more, instead of the one-note revenge motivation -- i.e., "All the world is a series of levers to pull; all the world's problems are errors in the machine that can be fixed with the right mindset and the right set of tools."
Oh, yes -- Lila was only in a H:tV oneshot, but she still managed to get a classic THE VIGIL moment. At the start of the session she tried to tell a kindly lie, failed the roll and ended up stammering and mumbling. At the end she told another lie to the very same NPC, this time as a threat and a bluff, and succeeded: "If you try to run -- we know people. We know people all over the country. There's nowhere safe for you." Not bad for someone whose best friend is her dog.
The joke with Rana was that I asked if I could play a pokemon trainer in Beyond the Wall, and the GM went, "Actually, there's totally a class for that." But my real first thought for her personality was a gem fusion between Sings-to-Trees (from Nine Goblins) and Daine (a couple years before The Immortals books start). I definitely intended her to be much more pacifistic and insisting on talking to every encounter rather than fighting them.
(Honestly, that's for the best, that would have gotten obnoxious especially given some of the things we were fighting.)
As it stands, she's a little more all over the place than I'd like... I wrote 13-year-old Rana as having a burning thirst for knowledge that was rapidly outgrowing the village, but my decision to make her Law-aligned has shaped her more than I thought. Fairness and duty and due process!
Meg was intended as "younger, punkier Neal Caffrey". That didn't happen at all. Partly that problem was I had no idea how to play a charismatic character, at least not on voice, so the whole sophisticated-art-burglar concept ended up at odds with the brujah thug she became. I think I kind of made it work in the end, where she got this brutally pragmatic mind (all of the clunkiness was worth that moment when she went, "I can't save anyone so I have to attack my ally to make the prince think I'm loyal to her," and I couldn't come up with a different/better solution no matter how I tried) but if I had to do it over, I'd try harder to nail the whole "brujah playing at being a fancypants toreador and irritating both clans" thing better.
(Hence why I'm going with a social-primary ventrue the next time we play VTM, now I have a better grip on things.)
Anyway, if I ever do get into TSW RP, maybe I'll have the opportunity to reinvent Meg.
I... I actually don't think I went into the 13th Age B-Side game with a real concept for Shrike in mind, except for "functional drunk." All the backstory stuff about her family and rose-lensed loyalty to them popped up later. She definitely ended up more upset about her situation than I figured -- conflict between someone who sincerely loves the world vs. the role she's meant to play in the world due to her heritage vs. what she thinks is about to happen to the world.
I haven't gotten to roll Sen Okada out, so I don't know what she'll get up to in a real game. Worth pointing out, though, that my very first idea was "Electro-Human Tackle as she should have been" and... yeah, nah. ("Okada" is Tackle's actress's surname.) I do think I need to play up the researcher/engineer aspect of her more, instead of the one-note revenge motivation -- i.e., "All the world is a series of levers to pull; all the world's problems are errors in the machine that can be fixed with the right mindset and the right set of tools."
Oh, yes -- Lila was only in a H:tV oneshot, but she still managed to get a classic THE VIGIL moment. At the start of the session she tried to tell a kindly lie, failed the roll and ended up stammering and mumbling. At the end she told another lie to the very same NPC, this time as a threat and a bluff, and succeeded: "If you try to run -- we know people. We know people all over the country. There's nowhere safe for you." Not bad for someone whose best friend is her dog.