stock-characters
Latest
Storyboard: Only good once
Truce Sokolov is a character I like to hold up as an example of how characters can take on lives of their own. She was created as more of a throwaway than anything, a Draenei Shaman whose main character trait was being kind of shy. Flash-forward a year, and she was my main character on the Alliance side of the fence, fleshed out into a strong and capable woman hamstrung by her lack of faith in herself and a resentment of her militaristic environment. She defined a large chunk of my roleplaying in World of Warcraft. So I've tried to port her over to other games. And it has never worked. To date, I've created about a dozen different Truces in different games, and absolutely every one of them has tripped at the starting gate. Or imploded on the launch pad. So as I sift through the wreckage of yet another incarnation of the character, it seems apropos to discuss characters that only work in a single incarnation no matter how hard you try.
Storyboard: The stock
So there I was, sitting down and preparing to play through Mass Effect for the third time, except this time it was with the intent of playing a character straight through to the end of the franchise. That meant going through the list of regular roleplaying characters I had, trying to decide who made sense in context. I had already played through twice, which meant my options were a bit more limited, but I was willing to bet that I could find someone in my stable of characters worth playing. How is this relevant to roleplaying with MMOs? Simple: These are characters whom I'd played and generally created via MMOs, heroes and villains alike. And the lure of sticking to a strong character is seductive because you know whom you'll be playing and how to play the character for maximum impact. But you run a very real risk of being locked into a narrow range of character possibilities, and after a while, having stock characters built up becomes limiting rather than liberating.
