User:Habap

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My name is Dave Navarre. Information on my characters is available on the Habap Family page.

Infobox Military Conflict

At Pizarro's urging, I copied the Template:Infobox Military Conflict over from Wikipedia and modified it (I took out all the if-statements, which I couldn't get to work here) for our purposes. I think it looks pretty good and now that I understand more about templates, I might fiddle around with some new ones for the Taselak Tribune and the RedSpan Revealer.

On roleplaying

Roleplaying is hard to do well. One of the ways of determining whether you are doing it well is to see the reaction other people have to your character.

The easiest way to elicit a reaction is to be "evil". All you have to do is be a jerk and people will, in fact, hate your character. To actually roleplay it well requires that your character be more than just rude and mean. I have, thus far, been surprised at the number of people who aspire to have a character who is evil and/or hated. It strikes both as an unwise move, since many can easily confuse the character and the player, and as far too easy to be a challenge. It's quite simple to act like a jerk or an idiot.

The best roleplaying character is one with nuances. Some good points, some bad points, some depth of feeling and emotion. Thinking of actors on stage - some can make you believe they are who they play, while others are simply reading lines. The level of mastery of an actor is not in how well he plays one characters, but how he plays many different types of characters. Compare John Malkovich, whose characters are unique, to Tom Cruise, whose characters are all the same (I happen to like the one character Cruise can play, so I usually enjoy his movies).

Now on the other hand, it is quite common for new players to want their character to be the archetypical knight in shining armor, riding a white horse. This usually falls flat because it is so one-dimensional. Again, there needs to be some nuance. If he is always good, always loyal, always brave and has no doubts, he isn't very interesting.

Of course, having a character who is clever or popular might simply not be feasible. I'm not particularly clever, so no matter how hard I tried to play a character who is clever, I don't think I could do it unless he only interacted with NPCs. For someone to play a character who is charismatic and popular, the player have to write with charisma, which few people can do.

Perhaps one starts with a caricature, but you have to find a way to move beyond that to character.

I'm not sure I can do that in this media and am assuredly not sure I have the time to do so.