Your characters and you

[Valdivia]

What we all love about this community is the possibility to live the Star Trek stories we saw and loved when we were in front of a TV. How many times did we ask ourselves ‘what would I have done in that situation?’. And now, we all have the opportunity to find out. We are here sharing a piece of this amazing world. And we all do it in one way: through our characters.

Which brings us to this week’s question. Who are your characters? Are they related to you somehow? Are you living out the fantasy of being in Starfleet? Are you exploring aspects of yourself? Are you exploring other characters you would have no chance of being in Real Life? (that is, outside of being a Starfleet officer trekking through the stars)

This is a new post in our category Simming Questions. Here we will be asking questions about our community, our characters and our writing, and how you interact with it all.

[+ Trellis Vondaryan]

I think like any writer will say, there's always at least an aspect of yourself in your character. There are lots of things I have in common with my character, but there are also tons of things that he does that I would never do (nor want to). So I was torn between the last two answers because in some respects my character doesn't have much to do with me at all. I've found those aspects the ones that have been both the most fun and difficult to write.

[Wilmer]

I think in my case, Nate Wilmer is intended to be a descendant of myself, but not actually me. In the "trek" universe, if I also existed, had many children, grandchildren, et. al. in the 400 years between myself and Nate, he is what my family turns into in the 24th century. Apart from my physical face, I try to make him different than myself... and he's definitely better at math.

[Ayiana Sevo]

The most obvious difference between me and Ayiana is gender, of course.  Otherwise, she shares a lot of similar interests to me. It mostly makes it easier to write, as I know what I'm talking about. A couple of her skills, some which developed organically as I wrote her, are independent of me. Swimming, for example. She is a fish; I am a rock. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, Ayiana is pretty much the ideal woman I would find attractive.

[Vylaa]

9 minutes ago, Ayiana said:

 At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, Ayiana is pretty much the ideal woman I would find attractive.

Lol, we've all seen the pictures.

Alucard is pretty much not like me at all.  He's confident, highly educated, not to mention built like a greek god.  There are some similarities.  Our love for medieval weaponry, for instance.

[Ayiana Sevo]

1 minute ago, Alucard Vess said:

Lol, we've all seen the pictures.

:: Cough. ::

1 minute ago, Alucard Vess said:

Alucard is pretty much not like me at all.  He's confident, highly educated, not to mention built like a greek god.  There are some similarities.  Our love for medieval weaponry, for instance.

Don't forget the scotch. And kilts.

[Vylaa]

Scotch, yes.  Kilts; not so much lately.  When you go from a 44 waist to a 36, a replacement kilt is expensive...

And this is my favorite of Ayiana.  Don't mess with her:

[Ayiana Sevo]

You're not drinking enough scotch. 

I'm quite proud of that moment. She got a reprimand from Eerie, but it felt gooooood.

[Renos]

I remember that moment too. XD haha! 

As for my characters they all have something from me in them, it's usually something different and often I don't even realise what it is until after playing them a while. I often create character to explore a specific idea of concept, even my first PC Evanna Blackwood had one - I just didn't have the skill at that time to write about it as skillfully as I could now.

For example:

* Dominic Gray was my experiment with a corporate psychopath. No one ever knew he was a psychopath IC and the only ones that ever found out OOC did because I told them about it. That experiment was avery interesting and went more or less how I thought it would. He is likely to get taken off the shelf in the future.

* Percival Maxwell was only meant to be a shot shot deal just to inject some humour into a serious plot we were doing on the Avandar but was such a hoot to play and got such a good reaction I ended up keeping him around and borrowing some traits from him to create my PC Reinard down the line. 

* Renos is of course my current PC and a member of an androgynous race who is genderfluid (something that is deeply frowned upon in J'naii society). Rather than be subjected to Psychotectic Treatment ne fled to the Federation and has lived a pretty successful life - too much so perhaps as the bounty hunters have finally caught up with nem. 

[Sal Taybrim]

I admit my first characters ever were "me, but with superpowers!" or "me, but in medieval times!" or "Me, plus everything I liked in Star Trek!"

I think that's pretty natural for starting players - the character is a mirror of ourselves and this can be a good thing.  We can write about things we admire and learn to incorporate those things into our own lives.  We can experiment with things we desire without having to do them in the real world.  The pitfall is, of course, not getting too attached to the character because as in real life, the game doesn't always go exactly as planned.

For me, one of the big ah-hah! moments was when I took my "me-but-a-Cardassian-Starfleet-officer" character to a different game they told me it was a crap concept.  And 17 year old me was crushed.    So I had to write a new character and build it realistically.  Well, shortly afterwards we started roleplaying tabletop in college, and I was encouraged to write better character backstories and give reasons for the characters to have certain traits or powers.  So we started making different characters.  And after a while we started making better characters.

Then I fell down the rabbit-hole of being an ST for White Wolf games.  And creating literally hundreds of NPCs; many of which had backstories and personalities all of their own for the players to discover and interact with.

So, now I keep all my former characters in a folder of Word files.  I have ::cough:: 47 Star Trek characters that I have played as PCs; at least two dozen of which were played seriously for at least 3 months (some of them were just to test out a new game which ended up not being to my liking back in the days when there were a zillion games cropping up every week).  I seriously hope I don't have 47 different personalities, so I'd say most of my characters are "not me" anymore. 

That said, I'd agree that you have to have some of you in every character, otherwise you won't enjoy writing them.  Even if it's just a small thing - or maybe something you like in them.  Some characters are nasty antagonists - but they're the sort of nasty antagonist that interests you. 

I take an authorial tone to simming; and I often comment on my characters decisions in the narrative.  Especially my secondary, Wyn - who I play as a total jerk at times and try to remind readers in the narrative that the author may not agree with the bad decisions he makes; but is having fun leading him down a path that will cause drama.

So I like simming people who aren't me; but who interest me.  Every day I'm Jamie, the married lady with two cats, a crazy but fulfilling job; a knitter who's a black belt in tae kwon do and runs 5ks.  That's cool - but that's who I "play" in the real world every day.  I like my pretendy time to be a fun romp in someone else's head, like a shamelessly extroverted male Betazoid who struggles between wanting to meet ALL THE PEOPLE! and be everyone's new best friend and the crushing weight of command.  Much more interested than the nightly real life discussion of "what's for dinner, honey?"

[+ Salkath]

I've been doing this style of playing for going on 20 years, and nearly all of my characters were escapist - in that they accentuated traits that I did not have in some sense of wish fulfillment or a step away from my actual reality. Traenor was designed to be a challenge in that he is the most faithful recreation of myself in a character. How do I take plain ol' little ol' me and make him an engaging character? I've taken some artistic licenses, of course, but it's been a true joy to take some of my real life traits and personal situations and transpose them into a fictional setting.

That being said, I do yearn for my favorite of all ST species often enough... the Bajorans. Traenor is a hoot, but he ain't no Bajoran

[+ Hutch]

All my characters set out to be different and unique in some way, but inevitably they all end up inheriting some of my own character traits as I become more comfortable in writing them.

ive been role playing in one capacity or another for about 18 years and it's hard not to have a fleshed out character who is totally different to me. I've done a lot of live role playing and you really have to concentrate on staying in character at events and I think that has taught me a lot. One of those things is that I'm a crap actor.

with SB118, my first character was Jhen Thelev, he was definitely similar to me, and deliberately so. I wanted a character to be my eyes and ears in experiencing this world. As I was more concerned with the present I didn't really go into his background much. My current character, Sinda Essen, is very different though. I've written her to be the product of her background and upbringing and to have a very particular outlook. It is harder, because I still find her exhibiting elements of me - I'm much nicer for starters!

[Merrick R'Ven]

My characters do share a few general traits with me but have other traits and make choices that I would never do in real life.

 

Merrick is the ever curious self, always serious, scientist who is always separate from everyone who is struggling to find a way to fit in. Some of that I can identify with from my long gone teenage years. Then again there are other aspects of Merrick that are simply personalty amplified: his Intellect and logic are definitely in that category. But then again the way Merrick reacts to people his tendency to pull back and his desperate need to belong are not me, at least not now.

 

Sindrana, my PNPC is a psychologist type which is a subject I like, and I think I am a fairly good judge of character like her and am fairly good and getting to the root of things, but she is far more outgoing then I and far more courageous then myself as well, and both of my characters have been though so many hard time that I have never seen. 

 

Although both my characters and myself are also people watchers to a greater or lesser degree. A running theme I guess

 

So for me choice 3 was a no-brainer

[Scudder]

I have played many characters in D&D, but Scudder is the only Trek character I ever made. And he had a brief life in two previous Trek games that never got off the ground. A version of him appeared in some work I did in a fiction workshop. I think we're talking 10 years ago he first appeared, wow. And he was white back then.

At any rate. I studied a lot of psych, soc, and philosophy in school [hello, Liberal Arts major] and I think there's a philosophical bent in Scudder's friendly counseling style... And outside of school I'm *always* reading about mental health, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, trauma, depression -- I just love that stuff! Which I hope doesn't sound morbid. I suppose it's a rewarding interest because the subject is, in the end, about helping people who experience life very differently.

So beside being inspired by the nurturing women of TNG (Crusher and Troi), Scudder is my way to be a counselor without actually being a counselor. In real life, I think I'd be a little too impatient and grumpy about putting up with my patient's problems.

That aside, I'm not an adorable Indian man. But I've dated a few! Maybe Scudder is the ideal boyfriend that my exes couldn't be?