Your first time

[kihaku]

I've been thinking lately (as dangerous and perilous as that may be) about how many years I've actually devoted to the past-time of RP'ing online. All the characters I've created, all the powers and storylines I've made up, and I came to realize that I never kept at my very first character for one simple reason:

He was too perfect.

He had no character flaws that made him fallible to the moral and ethical pitfalls that may plague anyone and everyone in their day-to-day life. Without them, there was no drama, no motivating action behind anything he did outside of the stereotypical "good-guy doing the honorable thing," motif. The reason I really like RP'ing as Brandon is because he's just like everyone else with his own problems, his own fears, his own likes, his own aspirations, but most imporantly: his own faults.

This lead me to a question that I'd like to put to all of you:

Who was your first character? Are they still around? If you could change anything about them now, would you?

[Ryan - Loki]

Ooooooo, now this is a good question Mike!

I suppose if we’re talking about a fully RP style RPG then my very first character would have been Zechariah, or Zack as many know him, from Forced Heroes.

TECHNICALLY he’s still around I suppose, but then again I’ve not been on FH in a very long time, plus I think it’s closed now, hasn’t it? I should really check to be honest – it’s just finding the time. Anyway, when I first started rp’ing with Zack he was pretty much the same as your first character Mike, the whole “good-guy doing the right thing all the time” story. Despite this I still love Zack as a character because he wasn’t perfect, he had faults and he often found himself involved in lots of drama – albeit usually thanks to his beloved Ceres.

I think that was mainly why I loved Zack so much, because he was able to change with time – and with me as I grew up as both a person and a writer. He went from a clean-cut superhero type guy, to falling in love and finally marrying, only to lose that love and go off the rails. He became rough-looking, an arsehole who cared about nothing more than finding his love, he didn’t care about himself, he started smoking heavily and drinking to the same extent, but most of all he became an anti-hero – only helping people by accident, as a by-product of usually while doing what he wanted to do.

As my time became less and less free with my responsibilities on LoD taking leaps and bounds I didn’t get to post as much as I’d have liked to on FH and eventually even stopped completely. I’ve often tried to integrate Zack into even other sites but it never seemed the same and never lasted. Despite this though ever so often he’ll make an appearance, slightly changed from the original, but popping up nevertheless.

I actually truly regret never having finished my story-arc with him. I was enjoying it and looking forward to being able to read back through it at some point, though I am currently working on (in my free time, which is limited at the best of times) that story arc, as well as a back-story to his past, which I intend to finally finish and look towards publishing at a later date. So who knows!

[Jimmy Claymore]

Niku and I'm glad to say he's still around although he had to undergo a lot of changes in name, structure and powers at his core he was always the same helpful kid, created by science and raised by a psychotic martial artist in a family surrounded by multi-coloured siblings.

It's kinda weird since I see a lot of myself in him and he's had a lot of evil sh*t dumped on him through various story arcs but I always kinda believe he'll do what's right in my head and then when I type it he pulls through. I dunno if he's a perfect hero but he's the kind of hero you need when a situation calls for it, he won't come out of it unscathed and he'll probably end up making the dumb (if right) decision by letting the super villain live. In fact, as far as I'm aware, he's even got an alternate reality version playing around since I loaned his concept to Badger.

But yeah, despite the fact he's heroic, I like the way he'll make the idiot's decision and has recently gotten enormously cynical about the things he ends up fighting.