Reply With QuoteOkay, it's fixed, tell me if it needs further tweaking.
[Designation] works, but you need to tell me why the character concept only works as an android rather than a regular human. Usually I don't ask for the themes and projected character arc of a PC before the thread starts, but that's because they usually have human psychology and the people in my thread are, on average, humans themselves. So, I need to know what the themes and motivations of the character are supposed to be. If you'd prefer to keep them a secret, you can PM them to me instead. There's also a nitpick in that if she was pulled out of the wreckage of Wolf 359, what's she doing in Sirius? Warps are expensive, absurdly so. Each one is an event unto itself, it can't just happen.
Tayleos has one major hole in his concept: He's a mesmer, and not only that, he's go the most existentially terrifying psychic power from a theme comprised of almost nothing but existentially terrifying psychic powers, and yet his backstory makes no mention of this whatsoever. How did he not become leader of the thugs in a heartbeat, by virtue of making the current leader shoot himself until they gave up and put him on top? How was Sander able to force him to do anything, when Tayleos can make him unlock whatever he wants and then kill himself once he's no longer useful? Possession requires a lot of focus, but there's a reason it's the King, it is devastatingly useful. How did the local warlord/military dictatorship not figure out about this when he was younger and come for him personally? If they're even remotely intelligent they'll have huge rewards for this kind of information.
Also, what's in it for Sander in any of this? What is the academy and how does it profit from going around killing slavers? How do you get from killing bands of barely organized planetary criminals to being an interplanetary mercenary?
Okay, it's fixed, tell me if it needs further tweaking.
Last edited by AngelofMourning; 06-01-2012 at 02:24 PM.
It's unclear whether or not Telmer is the name of the slum or the planet. You talk about it like it's a big deal, but you also treat it like it's not bigger than Connecticut, so it's hard to tell. An entire planet always being ruled by just one government, and falling completely into the hands of anyone who defeats its existing government, makes as much sense as the same applied to continents. No one ever talks about a King of Asia, and if there was a guy like that, he would be a big deal and would have the backing of an efficient and advanced bureaucracy. That bureaucracy might be a military dictatorship, but it'd still be inaccurate to call him a "warlord." If that guy and his government got taken out or turned on itself, there wouldn't be a clean transition of power to the victor. The nation would break apart into a warring states period that could last for decades (and in fact the vast majority of most worlds in the Sirius system are still in a warring states period from when the Old Federation broke down, with a few advanced dictatorships about the size of the US or China alongside hundreds or thousands of Rhode Island sized warlord territories).
What exactly was Dayn's plan? Why was he just keeping a potentially dangerous mesmer just lying around, drugged and useless, instead of either training him for his own use or just killing him immediately?
Also, nitpick, Mind Blank works by creating a cloud of static around your brain, which makes it basically impossible for a mesmer to not notice when another mesmer is blanked.
This is a conversation between Chamomile and myself. We seem to be butting heads so I would like some third party perspectives on what we have discussed so far.
Chamomile:
[Designation] works, but you need to tell me why the character concept only works as an android rather than a regular human. Usually I don't ask for the themes and projected character arc of a PC before the thread starts, but that's because they usually have human psychology and the people in my thread are, on average, humans themselves. So, I need to know what the themes and motivations of the character are supposed to be. If you'd prefer to keep them a secret, you can PM them to me instead. There's also a nitpick in that if she was pulled out of the wreckage of Wolf 359, what's she doing in Sirius? Warps are expensive, absurdly so. Each one is an event unto itself, it can't just happen.
Hikari Sama:
I'm not sure I understand what youre asking me to tell you. She is a sentient autonomous life form that operates based on a pre ordained set of guidelines. Obviously her priority is to provide medical attention to the crew as-needed. There is no theme, she does not have a personality in the same way that you and I do.
Chamomile:
Then she's not a PC, she's a non-sentient piece of equipment and will not be the slightest interesting to interact with. It'd be like roleplaying someone's scanner glasses, or their rifle.
Hikari Sama:
Then I did not explain correctly. She has the capability to be inquisitive and assimilate new information. She is interactive, you can have an intelligent conversation with her. She can anticipate behavioral and emotional responses from the crew but she can not process or experience emotion herself. She can, however, develop preferences and become accustomed to the presence of others. She's not just a walking medical database, she is self-aware, intelligent, and she has "consciousness" (for lack of a better word).
Chamomile:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hikari Sama
"...but she can not process or experience emotion herself."
Then she will never do anything. A sentient being with no emotions has no motivation to ever do anything. If she's programmed to place a high priority on doing something, like save people's lives or whatever, that is a desire. Exactly how are you picturing a character with no emotions?
Hikari Sama:
She is, for all intents and purposes, a physician so she is programmed to prioritize preserving life but you are trying to "humanize" it by calling it a desire. It is a directive hard-wired into her core programming.
Oh, if we're going to make this public, here's my latest response:
Hikari, what do you think a "desire" is? It's not magic. It just means you would prefer that one thing happen rather than another. Any robot that actually does anything will have that. And intelligent programmers will design the android to display the emotional reaction we'd expect, so that the android will act happy when its priorities are fulfilled and act sad when they aren't (on the most basic level). Because a machine with a flexible intelligence might change tactics if its current approach isn't fulfilling its priorities, and the new tactics might end up being dangerous to the humans around the android, and you want people who are not trained programmers to be able to keep track of roughly how likely it is to flip out over its priorities being unfulfilled. Further, if the machine's specific priorities end up defeating its abstract purpose, we'll want to know about it before SkyNet starts throwing nukes around.
So androids will have bizarre priorities, because they're designed from the ground up to want very specific things that are conducive to fulfilling a certain purpose. It's weird that an android built to make washing machines has such an obsessive, fetishistic desire to make more and better washing machines. And you can split hairs over whether or not they really feel anything because their neurons are made out of metal and not meat, but programming them to look and act exactly like humans do is still overwhelmingly safer than the alternatives of allowing them to remain totally unreadable all the time. But they're going to express emotions in the exact same way as humans, and not only that, they'll wear their hearts on their sleeves, because not doing that is an absurd and unnecessary risk for the programmers to take.
My first instinct is to say that an android is not an autistic guy made out of metal, but what you're proposing is actually way more than just autism. You're seriously proposing...I don't even know. A sentient being without desires will not ever do anything. They have no priorities at all. If your android patches people up and we ask her why, what will she say? "Because that's what I'm programmed to do" is literally the exact same thing as saying "because that makes me happy." Personalities aren't magic, they're just objectives and a method of accomplishing them.
I'm sorry, I was not trying to argue that she does not have personality. In fact, I agree with you. I was trying to convey the nature of that personality, and I apparently failed at doing so.
---------- Post added at 11:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:55 PM ----------
Haha, in all of our back and forth. I was trying to tell you the same thing you were trying to tell me. Maybe you're not as bad at explaining things as you thought?
Good to know there's at least one person who's as bad at explaining things as I am. Guess that works out, then.
There is still the issue of a proper designation. Unless of course you simply wish to call her "Doctor" for the entire RP.
That actually could work. If her official designation is just a massive string of numbers then she's likely to be nicknamed rather than referred to as "Two Twenty-Eight" or whatever the first ~3 digits of her model number happen to be. She's extremely unlikely to care about the details of her name.
True, "Doctor" is sufficient.
---------- Post added at 12:16 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:12 AM ----------
The adjustments have been made to the CS.
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