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Fanfic Writing - 23c. crews and the difficulties of characterisation...

turbomagnusturbomagnus Member Posts: 3,479 Arc User
in Ten Forward
(Spoilers ahead...)

I'm not sure how many other STO fanfic writers we have here, but I have something that's part question and part observation...

Is it just me, or are 23c. Starfleet crews the most difficult to fit personalities to? I mean, Romulan crews get characterisation thrown at you (Khev's search for his sister, Veril and the events with Slamek and her father, rescuing D'Vex from the Elachi), the KDF and FED crews have plenty of character shaping moments too... but 23c. crews... Skavrin gets fleshed out well on Edran IV, but other than that Tarsi doesn't seem more than a simple redshirt, T'Met's only moment of personality is telling the player to turn around so she can be sure they're not infected by Denevan parasites, 'Hunter' turns out to be Daniels and leaves the fourth slot open for a generic BOff... they just seem kind of bland.

Now, don't get me completely wrong - I LIKE being able to create or elaborate (hm, something about that word makes me think of Exercises...) my own personality for a character, but I do sometimes wish - especially when writing more than playing - that 23c. crews gave a little more to work with for a starting point...
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." -- Q, TNG: "Q-Who?"
^Words that every player should keep in mind, especially whenever there's a problem with the game...

Comments

  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    patrickngo wrote: »
    turbomagnus wrote: »
    (Spoilers ahead...)

    I'm not sure how many other STO fanfic writers we have here, but I have something that's part question and part observation...

    Is it just me, or are 23c. Starfleet crews the most difficult to fit personalities to? I mean, Romulan crews get characterisation thrown at you (Khev's search for his sister, Veril and the events with Slamek and her father, rescuing D'Vex from the Elachi), the KDF and FED crews have plenty of character shaping moments too... but 23c. crews... Skavrin gets fleshed out well on Edran IV, but other than that Tarsi doesn't seem more than a simple redshirt, T'Met's only moment of personality is telling the player to turn around so she can be sure they're not infected by Denevan parasites, 'Hunter' turns out to be Daniels and leaves the fourth slot open for a generic BOff... they just seem kind of bland.

    Now, don't get me completely wrong - I LIKE being able to create or elaborate (hm, something about that word makes me think of Exercises...) my own personality for a character, but I do sometimes wish - especially when writing more than playing - that 23c. crews gave a little more to work with for a starting point...

    The writing staff changed between Legacy of Romulus, and Agents of Yesterday. What you're seeing is a difference in style between the previous writer and the current one.

    Well, the whole Tovan Khev thing might have contributed to that.

    Since I think you missed that, @turbomagnus, when the game originally came out, your boffs were pretty much a blank slate to enable maximum customization. Then Cryptic was bought by Perfect World and got enough investment finally to release Legacy of Romulus, which added the Romulan Republic sub-faction and redid the storyline for the Klingons into its current form (mostly; they didn't get permission to use Michael Dorn's appearance for Worf until later). With Tovan Khev, they attempted to give him his own story arc (the fact that Star Wars: The Old Republic, which has a fleshed-out player party and companion quests, came out about this time probably isn't coincidental), but that apparently meant making him a mandatory, unremovable character, and some people disliked that intensely for various reasons.

    Essentially, between STO and SWTOR you're looking at MMO versions of the two main models of player parties in CRPGs going back to the Black Isle-Interplay era of D&D-based games in the late '90s:
    • The Icewind Dale model, with fully customizable parties that let the player come up with their own stories, which comes at the cost of not being able to have fleshed-out companions since the player can change them in any way at any time. Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir worked around this issue somewhat by having an assortment of dialogue options unlocked by factors including character species, class, alignment, patron deity, and skills. Star Trek Online for the most part follows this model and, rarely, uses SoZ's workaround (such as giving you unique dialogue with Rugan Skyl if you play "Surface Tension" as a Bajoran).
    • The Baldur's Gate model, followed by nearly every BioWare game including SWTOR, with a selection of premade player companions who have their own extensive personalities and stories. This is the model STO attempted to emulate with Tovan Khev, but it didn't really take hold and so they backwheeled it with later stories: Elisa Flores gets a little personalization in the new Federation tutorial but none afterwards, and as you've seen they did the same thing with the 23rd century Starfleet.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • hfmuddhfmudd Member Posts: 881 Arc User
    And as someone with lots of alts, who started playing back in "the old days" (one year after launch), I like being able to come up with my own crew(s) rather than having one set forced upon me. There's enough there, IMO, to serve as a starting point if I want to build on the "standard issue" BOffs, but I'm more likely to come up with my own.

    Heck, one of my Agents of Yesterday is flying around with a bridge crew that's entirely some sort of synthetic - android, hologram, or something even weirder. And I love that the game allows me that option.
    Join Date: January 2011
  • jonsillsjonsills Member Posts: 10,361 Arc User
    In my opinion, Tovan's just piggybacking on my advancement to get a free ride around the galaxy to look for his sister. (Of course, since my second Rom is Tovan Khev, who's collecting all the Tovans and Tovan-equivalents from around the multiverse who've wound up in STO, he was kind of looking for his own sister-of-a-sort too...)
    Lorna-Wing-sig.png
  • silverlobes#2676 silverlobes
    silverlobes#2676
         Member Posts: 1,953 Arc User
    As mentioned above, there's definitely a couple of conflicting strategies involved. Legacy of Romulus is (until the merge, and when we rescue Rinna) Tovan's story, we're just along for the ride. We get command instead of him, because we get a different tour of the flotilla than he does, so from that perspective, it's excusable as 'just one of those things'. The GTA series has massively controlled storylines, where the player is taken on a path, which people clearly don't mind.

    I suspect that part of the reason for the resistance to the Tovan Arc, is because initially, when playing STO, either as Fed or KDF, the player was the central focus, so that's what players have become accustomed to being the centre of attention, so to suddenly not be, to be playing second-fiddle to Tovan, that's going to rub some people the wrong way.

    My favorite beginning story is Agents of Yesterday: We take the role of a junior officer who is given a mission on the ground, then, they take the helm. Soon, they're given command: It makes sense (although I would prefer that it happen at level 40, but hey, that's the story we've got)

    I'd have to agree though, that the 23rd C starter crew, is a bit lacklustre...

    The Class of 2409/10, IMO, gives us a crew with a little more character (although Skavrin's quite cool) I think it's just a case of what we then do with those characters...

    When I first started playing, I wanted my own crew, so I deleted the starters. Now that my main is 'done' (AFAIC) (and having seen so many Default Crews running round Nimbus and Kobalistan) I wanted to reunite her with her old classmates. Some boffs off the exchange, a reclaimed Elisa, and some tailor-reloads later, and the Class of 2409/10 is back :sunglasses:

    The thing I would say, is take the character, from what the character themself provides. For example, when I first played the tutorial, and T'Vrell ran straight into the fray, I was so surprized by the assertiveness and take-charge demeanour, I thought 'she's Romulan...'. Even after deleting T'Vrell, the thought stuck with me, so I made a gag of it with my AOY, and 'reclaim'.

    yKNKcNg.jpg

    SIcu3cP.jpg

    The 'reclaim' behaves in exactly the same way (perhaps the code of the game simply reads VulcanFemaleScienceT'Vrell, so treats her with the same code as the original character) and she always runs into the fray, before standing around and DoingScienceStuff. I've tried giving her rifles, but she doesn't fire them (always defaulting to the science abilities before weapons) so in the end, I gave her a nanopulse Lirpa, which she does at least make use of. I had to follow he character's lead, rather than trying to dictate the character :sunglasses:
    "I fight for the Users!" - Tron

    "I was here before you, I will be here after you are gone. I am here, regardless of your acknowledgement or acceptance..." - The Truth
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    In my opinion, Tovan's just piggybacking on my advancement to get a free ride around the galaxy to look for his sister. (Of course, since my second Rom is Tovan Khev, who's collecting all the Tovans and Tovan-equivalents from around the multiverse who've wound up in STO, he was kind of looking for his own sister-of-a-sort too...)

    Yeah, well, that's the other problem IMHO: Tovan's sideplot doesn't even go anywhere. You don't spend any time looking for her, she just randomly turns up on Nimbus III, quest over.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    Me, I just invented my own backstories, especially given that my Fed main, Kanril Eleya, predates the new Fed tutorial. I started with an eye to taking Jean-Luc Picard and then making a character who was the exact opposite: instead of a fairly stuffy bourgeois French intellectual career officer, I developed this hotheaded woman from Bajor with a red state-ish working-class background who served in the Bajoran Militia as an NCO (and was decorated for valor in combat) before joining Starfleet.

    The old Fed tutorial gave you this female Andorian tac boff, usually named Corspa. It struck me that Eleya would tend to gather to her some fairly iconoclastic crew members, so from Corspa I developed Tesjha "Tess" Phohl, scion of an old-line Imperial Guard family who had a difficult family life growing up (her four parents having been put together by government arrangement due to the Andorian population crisis, a detail I borrowed from the DS9 Relaunch novels) and applied to Starfleet Academy instead of joining the Guard to spite one of her fathers. And so on and so forth.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • hfmuddhfmudd Member Posts: 881 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    In my opinion, Tovan's just piggybacking on my advancement to get a free ride around the galaxy to look for his sister. (Of course, since my second Rom is Tovan Khev, who's collecting all the Tovans and Tovan-equivalents from around the multiverse who've wound up in STO, he was kind of looking for his own sister-of-a-sort too...)

    My first Rom's version of Tovan was an officer whose name she refused to utter, referring instead to "that man" with considerable venom. In a nod to the game mechanics, he was politically well-connected (Empire or Republic, some things don't change) and forced on her as XO with no way of getting rid of him (whether by transfer, airlock, or feeding him to the singularity core). He was a swaggering, arrogant, lecherous boor who thought he was the second coming of James T. Kirk (with pointed ears and eyebrows) and that her ship was just another stepping stone in his glorious, heroic career. The Romulan Zap Brannigan, basically.

    (ICly if not OOCly, she did finally manage to get rid of him; he spun his minor contribution to the defense of Mol'Rihan from the Iconians (during "Blood of Ancients") into a tale of epic heroism that earned him his own command. Sometimes Taela is a little sorry for whatever crew got stuck with him... but not that sorry.)

    For my Reman special forces guy, I dispensed with the existing character entirely and used him to represent the NPC captain of the warbird that carries the PC and his squad around to whatever needs killed, broken, and/or extracted.
    Join Date: January 2011
  • bwleon7bwleon7 Member Posts: 310 Arc User
    edited January 2018
    I would have loved to see one of them really break down over getting pulled out of their time. They had friends and families that they will never see again. As the PC you help them to deal with it but they never get 100% over it. Maybe even have a mission where one of the crew tries to send the ship back to the 23c. and you have to stop them.
    Dr. Miranda Jones: I understand, Mr. Spock. The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.
    Mr. Spock: And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty.

    -Star Trek: Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968)
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    bwleon7 wrote: »
    I would have loved to see one of them really break down over getting pulled out of their time. They had friends and families that they will never see again. As the PC you help them to deal with it but they never get 100% over it. Maybe even have a mission where one of the crew tries to send the ship back to the 23c. and you have to stop them.

    Yeah, and I'd love to see a story dealing with the psychological fallout to our characters from three straight in-game years of unceasing warfare, but that ain't happenin' neither.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • hfmuddhfmudd Member Posts: 881 Arc User
    Yeah. *sigh*
    That's what fanfic and Foundry are for, I guess.
    Join Date: January 2011
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