RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

FreelanceWizard · **06-28-2013, 09:13 PM**

(06-28-2013, 08:55 PM)Bea Wrote: You'd be surprised, indeed. If this thread has shown me anything, it'd be that there are a number of people who prefer that their character look pretty, both in character model and general intention for the character, no matter the world. Which is, you know, all fine and dandy. But, still something that's pretty confusing to me.

It's escapism, I'd argue; by making a perfect character in game, one can achieve a greatness not available in one's less-than-perfect real life. While I'm not making a value judgment here (by RPing in an MMO, we're all engaging in escapism Smile

), I will say that this behavior, taken to an extreme and with other aspects of "perfection" included, can become bad -- or at the very least self-limiting -- RP. I'd suggest that's why pretty characters provoke negative reactions sometimes, and why some players like to rough up their characters a great deal; no one wants to be accused of being "too pretty" and a dread, if ill defined, "Mary Sue."

Personally, I'm all about WYSIWYG for characters in MMOs. I've never been a big fan of detailing differences between my character's "true" appearance and their in-game one in an RP profile, for instance; I build the character as the game permits it, and that's how the character looks. About the only differences I'll include in the "appearance" section of a profile are bits of jewelry, small tattoos, or other less relevant and impossible to display details. I do this for two reasons. One, the devs make the character generator to make characters that they think fit the game world. Two, not everyone has the ability or desire to review RP profiles using a UI mod, wiki, or what have you, so restricting the details there to largely irrelevant ones increases the number of people with which I can RP.

Pretty characters in a harsh world.

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes