Maxwell

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

Bridgeburner: Better. To address the rest of your post, I'm a believer in having a solid grasp who your character is and where he's from before the game begins. You're entitled to your opinion, naturally, but personally I've never, in eleven years of role playing, seen anyone actually pull off what you describe.

Nemaisare: Both were good, but the dog was better. That appearance section - though pretty impressive, given that you were basically describing a wolf - was a little too long, though.

Chromane: Also very good, but I'd like at least a brief description of what he was doing the night the castle was breached.

Everyone: If I've forgotten to mention it to anyone, ending your background with a brief description of what happened during the final moments before the start of the game would be good. It means I'll have an easier time writing the opening post, and it means I'll be able to incorporate your characters into the opening narrative. Which is something I want to do.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

No time for character sheets now. I'm just gonna answer those last three questions.

1. Anything's possible, but giving yourself irreversible powers might be crossing the line. No one can reverse death, anyway (direct divine intervention is *not* common), and I doubt you'll have a lot of recurring enemies. I wasn't going to hit you guys with a bunch of irreversible effects, anyway.

2. Yes, with the caveat that the god has to actually exist. Your invisible friend can't grant you spells, you can't worship yourself for spells, and your character can't make up, say, a god of Every Third Wednesday just to get magic. Otherwise, even if there is only one worshiper left in the world, his god can still grant him magic (if he is a priest), for reasons mortal minds are not meant to comprehend. There's no significant difference in power between a priest of a god with ten million followers and one with just ten - presumably because even the mightiest priest is a speck of dust compared to the weakest god.

3. You may, your characters may not. See point 2. If think you're giving yourself a free army, I will be very cross.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

I just had three hours' worth of writing deleted, so I'm gonna go kill myself now, and answer any further questions posthumously tomorrow.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

I think you quoted the wrong part of my post there, but what I'm saying is that the 'arakh', the favoured weapon of the Dothraki, is from A Song of Ice and Fire. The khopesh works more like an axe than a scythe, by the way, and while that's not super-important in a fantasy game, I'm enough of a nerd that I would grind my teeth down to nubs if it came up often enough.

Magic-Centered, GOT-like Cool RP idea

Possibly, but I'll hold out for more.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

It feels good to be able to criticize people for lacking depth of character. It's been a long time since I had so many good choices for a game.

Bridgeburner: That appearance is way too short. He could look like anyone. Furthermore, he could use more of a personality - I might have failed to read between the lines, but all I'm getting is "proud warrior culture guy", which is a fine archetype, but it can't be all there is to him.

Lastly, why would you rip off a weapon from A Song of Ice and Fire (and not even rename it) instead of just using a khopesh?

Raptorman: Considerably better. I still think the towering goddess who can force people to like her smacks of wish fulfillment, and she's still going to stick out like a sore thumb. For the former, I guess we might see, and for the latter, that doesn't actually have any impact on the selection process, only on your in-game odds.

MaxStokes: Giving you a point by point rebuttal would take a lot of time and energy and probably not lead anywhere. You make a lot of assumptions based only on your own convictions, and that tells me I'm not going to change your mind. If you reject the premise of the game, you probably aren't going to enjoy it anyway.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

MaxStokes said It seems hard to justify a character going full vengeance over the king. Either they had to have really liked the king (if so why weren't they there when he died?), or they are kinda of self-destructive and petty.

See, now you just went and casually dismissed the motivations of all the characters in this thread, just because you don't agree with them. You're entitled to your opinion, but I submit that exploring different points of view is at the heart of role playing. I would certainly never stick my neck out for some dead guy, regardless of our relationship, but that doesn't mean I can't romanticize loyalty and honour beyond death, or generally want to play a character with strong moral convictions that I don't personally share.

If you don't, well, fair enough. This may not be the right game to not want that, though.

Everyone else: I'll give you feedback on your character sheets as soon as I have time to give them a proper read.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

Now that I have fifteen minutes of peace and quiet, I'm gonna reply to at least one post, I hope.

Bainshie: You've explained how your character is awesome at what he does, but you need to expand a lot on who he is before I'd consider him interesting. Granted, this may be completely subjective, but I'm still the guy you have to win over. Additionally, if this were a school assignment, I'd dock you points for formatting and not signing your name.

Oh, and while being an exceptional commander is acceptable, and winning over a force ten times the size of your own can be acceptable under some circumstances, I want to mention that this is not something you can expect to do consistently, and certainly not under all circumstances. Having the ability to improve the performance of NPCs is otherwise pretty handy in a PvE sort of way.

MaxStokes: I'm down to five minutes now, so I'll make this super-quick. Your character seems to have no relationship with the king, and from your backstory, seems to barely be aware of what's going on around him. Making obedient bodyguard-type characters that still participate in the story can be difficult, and that means it's gonna be difficult to convince me it's gonna work out. Your backstory also includes a long story about how he ended up in the arena, but none of that seems to have anything to do with who he is - this doesn't really detract from the background as such, but it doesn't add much either.

Shit, now I'm late.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

EDIT: I wrote this before seeing the last four or so posts. I don't have time to reply to anything else for a while, so I'll leave you with this. Go ahead and resubmit. Everyone can make as many sheets as they want, so long as they make sure I know which one they want to use in the end.

That first sentence (of my last post) was not supposed to be there. Makes my post seem (even) more negative than intended, and conveys a level of conviction that I didn't actually feel. I apologize for that, especially considering what I'm about to unload. I hope I don't come off as too mean-spirited.

Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. I don't care about the sword - I didn't even mention it in my post, and as far as I can tell, its effects on gameplay are negligible at most. Knowing arcane magic (healing or otherwise) makes you a wizard, in the same sense that being a pediatrician makes you a doctor. You may not get the respect that a brain surgeon has, but you had a hell of a way to go to get there anyway. You know magic, that is your main skill in life, not something you pick up as a hobby. Especially something as painstakingly precise as healing - unless you want to turn yourself inside out by accident. Seems like that was a simple misunderstanding, though, so I'll withdraw some of my accusations.

You also lose all natural evolution privileges once you've made a half-giant, half-tree person. The fact that *that* blasphemy against genetics can have a child with whatever race Erasmus was just throws any science talk out the window right away. But that's not the issue here. My personal aversion toward fantasy halfbreeds notwithstanding, in-universe justifications are just window dressing. What's important is the player's motivation for wanting to play whatever character they've made - and how well they convince me they're going to enrich the game rather than take away from. I do see the one you put in your post down there at the bottom, and I'll address that in a moment. I just want to emphasize that that's what matters.

Your sheet is too long for me to go over it with a fine-toothed comb looking for every place where I think communication failed, but ultimately, what you convey is much more important than what exactly you write. I didn't take away much about your character from reading it - especially not about who she became who she is. She seems to live by natural talent and sheer luck, and the hardships she's faced amount to a childhood tragedy and one hungry ocean voyage, after which she immediately married into royalty and lived in the lap of luxury ever since. Traumatizing, certainly, but there's no journey, no progression, no development, just "everyone died and she was sad, now she's not sad anymore." Every part where she might have connected with society and the people around her are glossed over, where the parts you could have glossed over "her mother was kidnapped during a raid and taken as a concubine by the king, done" take up several paragraphs, despite happening in the distant past, far away and to characters that have nothing to do with anyone else's character and will never affect the game in any meaningful way.

What was her marriage like? How did she snap out of her depression? Was she a burden to her husband until he nearly abandoned her? Did having children change her? What did she think about living in a country permanently waging war at every border? Did she have to struggle to find acceptance? How was her unique brand of magic received? There are thousands of things that could affect who she is, but her background seems to mostly focus on the physical flow of events, and not at all on how any of this impacted her. Even the stuff that could be emotionally impactful is relegated to a couple of sentences - her child is murdered, but all that leads to is a description of how the attackers lost some limbs. Even the violence strikes me as uninspired. Also, you promised flashbacks - as in, role playing segments no one can interact with or even perceive. I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve with that, and to me that only increases the feeling that your character is stuck in a past that has nothing to do with the present.

You say your character has cultural traits from her father's country, but you only list things that are not going to be noticeable in the actual game. You say you wrote parts of it when you were exhausted, well, to that I can only shrug. I still only have what you gave me to judge you by. Appendices and explanations after the fact are gonna be very impractical once the game starts, as well, so your ability to communicate everything you need to in a single post is actually important.

And then, there's a whole 'nother misunderstanding I have to address. This one's not nearly as serious or big, though. Everyone is stronger, tougher, faster etc than a baseline human, unless you choose not to be (and of course, I expect wizards to limit themselves relative to warriors), and the way you wrote it, I interpreted it as you not realizing that, but wanting to have it all anyway, which is an attitude I'm wary of to the point of paranoia. Getting run through with a sword and just keeling over dead is actually below my expectations. Did you perhaps mean to say that that's all she has to make her more physically capable than the average person?

Your last paragraph, wherein you explain your motivation, is the reason I still have faith in you. That motivation is what I care about the most. However, even there I have some issues. Mainly, that I don't feel the impact of any of those things in your sheet, and despite your explanation, I have no idea what you want.

Such Haukes, Such Hounds

Raptorman: Okay, let's see here...

Your character is a super tall, super strong, super tough, super rare supermodel with superpowers. Her personality is 'sad background', 'kind', and 'hesitates to use her wondrous powers'. On top of that, she is a wizard, a talented negotiator even when not using her mind control powers, a lost princess from a distant kingdom (whose cultural values she does not seem to share), and a half-breed of two races that are both of the 'like humans but better and prettier' variety.

I am always open to the possibility that I may be wrong, and feel free to object if you feel I've summarized your character unfairly. Surely, though, you can see why I'm getting some serious wish fulfillment vibes from this character. I'm also not sensing much of a motivation behind your choices - there's a lot of text, and while it's not bad prose as such, it really seems to me as if there are two characters traits and one element of her backstory that take up the vast majority of the focus.

Other than that, I have a minor gripe. You cannot play arcane magic by ear, especially when creating magical items. The success rate is low enough and the cost high enough that an emperor would beggar himself before he guessed how it works.

Additionally, I would assume that this woman would be famous throughout the Fanged Isles for her immaculate beauty and unrivaled healing magic. That might make going anywhere incognito rather difficult.

MaxStokes: You could have gotten away with a less thorough description, but I'm not complaining. I've got no complaints about the race - the Fanged Islands could use something to set them apart culturally anyway. However, I'm a lot less interested in the physical properties of a race, than what you want to use them for.

And no, depressingly, there is no way to preview your posts. You can edit them, though.