The Harbinger of Ferocity

Post a random fact about yourself.

Allow me to answer that by foremost stating there is no adequate scale to define my love for everything feline. There is nothing else in the entire world I pour more passion and love into - nothing I legitimately care about in the same sense. I have been exposed to great horror and enormous triumph, yet nothing is more sincere to me than that which is of Felidae, and everything else feels distant as though I cannot feel it unless it involves these things. I have sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars into the conservation and preservation of the cat and all its forms. It has been a point of mine to learn all the various forms of communication that they may display and to know what it means without thought, even when I knew the answer already to begin with. All of my extraordinary experiences internal have come to me as felid in variety; even in my instances of near death, these things carried with me.

Countless hours of my life have been committed to the study and the pursuit of the understanding; classes, dissertations, dialogues, essays, speeches, what have you. My blood burns with agonizing violence at the sense of maltreatment unto these things, just as swiftly as it can run cold and bring a sense of terrifying calm in embracing the symbolic meaning. My domain is decorated in fragments of fossils and artwork, bones, relics, all of this one brand of carnivore. There is joy beyond joy to be just in the presence of them and it is what one would call a religious experience to be in some of these ancient places with them.

@Chasebloodcrest, there is nothing in this world that is as much me as I am it. A simple "one-hundred of one-hundred" does not describe it.

The Roleplayer Confessions Thread

Seeing as we are resurrecting topics from the long dead, I suppose I could share something in this vein as it is still interesting, even years later. That said, the first of which I have to share is that I am woefully self-conscious about writing human characters. How does one write for people? For the life of me, even if others claim it is fine or better yet well-written and credible, I dread writing anything outside of those animal, namely those things people. At least with some fantasy races or fictional species such as with those things extraterrestrial I can tap into their undertones and make them closer to overt, to make them different and distinct, but people? Writing people is a terrible experience for me because I haven't the faintest how they should behave as people. As characters, certainly, that is no challenge - what motivates them, what they think, why they think it - but how to encapsulate that as a human being? A different challenge altogether.

The second that I will share for the time being is that I absolutely despise not being able to continue characters. The idea of writing expendable, or that which I perceive as such, characters who cannot progress from topic to topic with time is just a baffling and frustrating thing. I came up in a time where it was unusual to have more than one character and all the investment, everything itself, went into that one character, who moved and progressed through various narratives and places. Yet now it feels as though the written roleplaying world is made up of but islands, all separate, and to the extent that one cannot even navigate to most of them from another. Thus one needs make a character for each and that certainly does rub the fur the wrong way.

Post a random fact about yourself.

I have never once used a "face claim" image that I did not own for a character. Every character I have attributed artwork to, I owned and had purchased, as well as had commissioned, specifically and solely for that individual. This leads me to maintain a large gallery of defunct characters and their associated pieces as it is very difficult in this era of roleplaying to carry on with one continuous character.

Post a random fact about yourself.

If there is a singular rule in any gaming system that I have always had trouble understanding despite knowing it, no matter how many times I revisit it or can use it, "To Hit Armor Class Zero" - THAC0 - is easily the most difficult. For those who do not know, the way to calculate the number needed to hit is the To Hit Armor Class Zero subtracted from the target's Armor Class, rather than just rolling a number, adding bonuses, and attempting to meet or best the Armor Class.

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

To be brief, while I do see many stock characters, more so with the way they are presented in art, I generally can only roll my eyes at it. They are archetypes and tropes for a reason, as unsuccessful as that may be. For my own characters, they all follow a central theme in many shades yet the largest issue is that they cannot be worked well into most settings or situations - their novelty or uniqueness would detract from the overall theme and setting or at the very least be worlds distracting. Because I am none fond of being that sort of player, I tend not to apply in the first place as a result. But when and where I do play purely outside my realm of comfort, I always envision those characters as average. Not ugly or repulsive, yet not attractive, at perhaps their best admirable in some caliber and capacity that way but certainly not because of appearance.

Yet while I do see a fair number of characters who are stock and bog standard in being individuals, as the "young but troubled master of the sword who is on an adventure" or the "mysterious creepy introvert" or "wacky, zany, 'funny' one", those tend not to last long or they tend to evolve with time. Not always, but it at least gains some ground as the plot goes forward. Likewise, characters with the dark, mysterious, unknowable and terrible past - the aforementioned likely orphan of some variety - contrarily do not because they lack interface with the rest. That leads me to believe there is more to do with how well they fit in, both with the character and writer, than what trope - irksome it might even be - they are. But I cannot say I definitively know that for certain, rather just solely from experience and observation that this outcome is more true than it is not.

Post a random fact about yourself.

A number of circumstances made my existence unlikely, not the least of which were that I was the only survivor or the very last because of that. Were things even so slightly different, for one reason or another I would not be here, in an odd way making me the first and the last of my entire line.

D&D 5e - Hoard of the Dragon Queen

Here I was about to ask the exact same question but with answer already had, all I can add now is I eagerly await finding out just whatever this creature is. It certainly feels strange and out of place with dragons but then again, I haven't paid all the draconic leanings of the editions much mind.

Post a random fact about yourself.

Out of the many unusual things in life I have tried based upon purported benefits of culturally borne enlightenment or health, kombucha tea is one of those I simply do not find all that fantastic. It is best described for what it is, fermented, acidic tea, with large amounts of microorganisms and their mats in it. Now one can see how it is not all that appetizing although I can say I appreciate the experience.

Obscure RP Genres

One of the stranger ones that is seldom mentioned is "savage fantasy", something of the more traditional sword and sorcery variety that is grounded more in the nature of the world itself being mythic and massive, with the characters being comparatively small in the scheme of things. The narrative is more primal and earthly, with the mysteries and mysticism, the magic itself, not being elaborated upon or explained, rather a known factor but too ethereal and distant for most to master. Many monsters and creatures themselves are based upon those living beasts historic yet drummed up to exceptional levels of power and scale, almost a sort of Stone Age fantasy but bearing obvious tropes toward traditional fantasy - noble savages, heroic barbarians, useless peasants, mad wizards and the like.

The entire genre with an overtone of "wolves at the door" niche is not often found or paid much mind. It tends to be gritty and simple individually, really only larger in its scope due to the seemingly boundless nature of the world; the exact type of thing a "sandbox narrative" aims to be. Unfortunately, given high fantasy or its derivatives et all tend to be much more popular, especially from an individual character standpoint - more interesting to write for when each person seeks different outcomes and different forms of power - this subset is almost never seen.

Post a random fact about yourself.

Even in the world dreaming, I find that I am the same throughout. My bearing, my character, my demeanor, or my personification neither flags nor changes. Here I am in all of these strange places, reinterpretations of events or elaborations thereafter, and in all of them at first nothing is different to the observers. Yet, in short order, they begin to realize that not all things are as they appear and that I, the outlier, am to blame. They see through the illusion the dream sets up and quickly come to know that what they are dealing with is not what they thought it to be.

Were one to say, view it from their perspective, this would be fuel for a nightmare. But the nightmarish elements do not so much as strike me any longer and deflect harmlessly from the bulwark of mind. Even terrible things relived or fathomed in some new, twisted way, none of them affect me, but they affect these constructs, these entities of the dream. What a strange place to be grounded, somehow, among it all and not flinch. The tastes, the smells, the sights, the sounds, the touch.