(04-15-2015, 08:18 PM)Flickering Ember Wrote: I wish I could word it better. To me, saying that people should only role-play what is considered "normal" for that race is troubling. How do you establish what is normal? You can't really, because even considering things like culture, people are just people. When you try to generalize and fit everyone in neat little boxes, it's a souring experience even in role-play. Not on an IC level but on a meta level. When I played WoW, the community I was in was very insistent on playing the races according to the stereotype. If you wanted to play a bloodthirsty tauren or a flower-picking orc you would get a lot of flak for that.
Actually, I think a better way to phrase the complaint against 'normal' is not the world 'normal' at all. It's 'common' or 'average'. It applies to real-life things as well. The majority isn't 'normal', persay, it's just 'common', the literal majority. To that end, think of writing a roleplay character (or any character, really) as a matter of addition. The more unusual factors (or really, any factors in general), the higher that end number turns out. And sometimes roleplayers can have a knee-jerk reaction to a character with a particularly large mental number because it's often used as a shortcut to be interesting.
Let's go through that infamous example, the Miqo'te-Ishgardian dragoon. Let's make them a male Seeker too, just to ramp it up a little.
So we have Miqo'te + male + Seeker + Ishgardian + lancer + dragoon (yes, lancer and dragoon are two entries).Â
Breaking it down, Miqo'te have very particular tribal lore that makes them a little less common to see around, particularly male Seekers and female Keepers. So first, you have to explain why that male Seeker is no longer in his tribe - or was never part of one to begin with even with the Miqo'te social structures. There's already a lot of factors to bear in mind. To continue on, now you have the issues between Ishgardians and others and estimating how common your particular race would be (using NPCs as a general statistic). Lancer isn't a particularly unique factor, it's just a matter of training, who would train them, ect, how many years they've put into it. Then we have to add on dragoon, because it's a very particular, iconic and significant practice with ample lore behind it. The odds of getting training in that study, again how many years they've put into it, how skilled they are... let's not even think about any other additions they might have, like particularly traumatic backstories, how old they are, so on and so forth. That's a lot of factors to be woven together into a coherent, believable whole.
That's not to say what I just said is impossible or should be frowned upon, just the opposite.Â
Many people see it as a 'you could, but why would you?' sort of question and it's up to the roleplayer to give an adequate and interesting answer to it.Â
If you're just racking up that number without much thought, planning or interest in the lore behind it, at the end it might seem like a careless attempt at making yourself unique and special without actually being interesting. Others can often resent this attitude (or the appearance of it) and that's why you see people protesting 'but keep the lore in mind!' or 'but that's not common at all!' because of half-baked characters that reel off a ridiculously complex backstory or design and are all the more uninteresting for it. Sometimes they expect to be the center of attention or simply just want to be extra special while having a cardboard personality.
The bottom line is, many - if not most - ideas can be done, and done well. It's up to you to justify your character design in a fashion that's engaging and interesting - both for you and those you interact with, ideally while keeping the tone and lore of the world for immersion purposes. Roleplaying is a community effort, after all.
oh god that looked like less blather when I wrote it
