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[ application: original characters ]
IMPORTANT! We are officially in endgame until August 31, 2020. Applications are on a rolling basis. There is a small "block" period from the 1st through the 4th of every month to allow a bulk of apps to be submitted, and then applications can be submitted at any time during the month. Notices will be sent out all at once after the first "block" period, and then between 24 hours to the end of the weekend depending on how many and our schedule. Applications are guaranteed to be processed during the weekends.
IMPORTANT: Only the following types of original characters are allowed to be applied for—
The following would not be allowed:
Before applying, please be sure to read the following:
We have compiled sample applications from our players to show what the mod team and the application moderators are looking for in terms of writing quality and depth. We hope you find these samples useful!
⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player:
Contact: Journal/Plurk/AIM — anything to help identify since someone might share your name handle.
Age: You must be at least 13 years old to apply.
Current Characters: If a new player, just put "N/A"
⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character:
Age:
OC Type: Indicate whether this OC is a Pure, MMO, or Blank Protagonist type of OC. If it is a Blank Protagonist, indicate the canon here.
Point Taken: A sense of time when the character is taken. More applicable to MMO and Blank Protagonist OCs.
World Building:This is separate from the character's personal history. This section is to provide us with information about the character's “canon” in general. We will have no idea what kind of world that the character is coming from, and this is the only place we can learn about it. We don't want an encyclopedia, but we will need to know important details about it so that we can understand the culture the character is coming from and how that will affect how they think and behave. What countries are important? What kind of geography or political climate? Are there any social conflicts that would impact the character or would influence how they view others? For MMO and Blank Protagonist OCs, linking us to wikis will suffice, but feel free to add more to it.
Backstory: While we don't need a play-by-play, what we would like to see includes how the character lived, what choices they've made and why, what events occurred that developed them, and other important facts that will help us understand the character. For MMO OCs: Most MMORPGs will have a set storyline that the player character has the opportunity to play through. Keep in mind that rather there being a singular "Great Hero," all MMO OCs are to be seen as a part of a large group of heroes if you choose to follow the main storyline. Also keep in mind that all MMO OCs will have to follow their game’s canon lore. For example: A character could not save the NPC that canonly died, nor could a mission fail if it is set to succeed. However, your character could have died and or had difficulty fulfilling the mission. It is also possible that your character had no part in the overall game's story and had their own adventures in the world instead. Finally, there can be no romantic or familial relationships with named NPCs.
Personality: We're looking for how they think, why they act the way they do, their strengths, their weaknesses, their thought processes, their opinions, their conflicts, what makes them feel the way they do, their significant traits. When writing your character, be careful! We want to avoid characters that are the super invincible almighty hero that can do no wrong. The one who can charm anyone with a smile, can easily trick and deceive, has the power to bend wills with ease. All characters have flaws—no one is perfect. But more importantly, such infallible characters are not interesting to play and interact with. In short, the character should be realistic, balanced, and well thought out. If we feel that your character does not meet this standard, then we may ask for a revision or reject if it cannot be changed.
Abilities: If there are any particular abilities the character has supernatural or otherwise, list them here. Referencing to a wiki list is acceptable if applicable. However, if there are any particular abilities that need to be weakened or removed, note them here.
Alignment: Please refer to the Alignment entry to choose which alignment your character would most likely fall under. Include a brief (a couple of sentences max) just to help explain why you think your choice is the best fit.
Other: Anything else you'd like to mention.
⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: We have two sample requirements.
General Sample: We should see examples of the character's dialogue as well as some introspection or additional narrative to further show how you intend to write the character. This is the most important part of the sample and where most of the weight will be.
Emotion Sample: This is our "game setting" requirement. Essentially we want to ensure that you have a basic grasp of the game's premise, especially with the use of emotions. It can be a small scene, even incidental to the main sample. A reminder that apathetic characters will also create effects, such as loss of color, surface distortion, holes forming. This section doesn't have to be lengthy, but the effect must be clear for us to see.
The emotion sample can be part of the general character sample. If so, please link directly or directly quote that portion so that it's easier for us to quickly find it.
The samples can be "written" in three different ways and you can choose which one will work best for you:
Format wise, you can use either [ brackets ] OR narrative prose. We do require that the writing at least be coherent, have proper sentence structure, and is mostly grammatically correct (we realize that writing styles can be loose/creative in [ bracket ] form so we're giving a bit more leeway). One last suggestion we have is try to have the character interacting with the environment and try thinking of the sample less of a narrative piece but more like a post or thread prompt you might make in the game. That will help the sample show not only how you will write the character, but also how you will play them in practice.
Questions: If you have any questions, ask them here.
Clean copy and paste form here:
IMPORTANT: Only the following types of original characters are allowed to be applied for—
- Pure OC. These are the typical kind of OC that everyone is familiar with. They are characters that are the player's own creation with their own world that is also of the player's design. There is zero relation to any pre-existing canon.
- MMO OC. MMOs, or Massively Multiplayer Online games, particularly those with a lot of roleplay and character build-up, have existing world building and lore that they have to follow. These characters are created by the player and can have their own story, but they have to follow the rules of the game lore. We consider "main hero" characters as those who are one of many in a great group that influenced the storyline, rather than the singular Great Hero character. This is to help multiple MMO OCs from the same game to have stories that mesh well together. In the sake of fairness to current FFXIV OC players and consistency with previous mod teams' decisions, we do not currently allow FFXIV Warriors of Light.
- Blank Slate Canon Protagonists. For our criteria, these types of characters are those which you control throughout the game and essentially make the player the main character. They may have a name and a couple of personality traits, but everything else is up to the player to interpret. Examples of these are most of the main characters from Dragon Age, Skyrim, Pokémon, etc. Important: Please note that this category ONLY pertains to the protagonists of canons. This does not allow side characters or other support NPCs as they have set stories and personalities. This section has nothing to do with how much headcanon is used and is only about the purpose and design of the protagonist character.
The following would not be allowed:
- Fanon/AU OCs. Characters that are based off pre-existing canons or an alternate version of the canon. We would not allow these OCs not because we are against them on principle, but it could cause unwanted confusion and complications with current existing casts. This type of OC would have needed to be allowed from the very beginning so players would know what they were getting into.
- Game Native OCs. Currently the game is not ready for such a type of character, as it would introduce other complications and worldbuilding that the interested player would have to be aware of. In addition, it would require more close connection with us the mods than we are currently ready for.
Before applying, please be sure to read the following:
- Read the Rules and the Game Information.
- RETURNING PLAYERS! You only need to submit any old application. Does not matter how long ago, as long as it was accepted and you have good standing (ie, not banned), it will be valid.
- Suggestion: Find some character sheets that have questions directly related to character building. These will help flesh out your application and give some guidelines as to how to write about your character.
- Feel free to use the most recent test drive both for practice as well as to use for samples. IMPORTANT! If you submit threads as samples, you must submit the application with that character journal. This is the only way we can ensure that the samples are from you and not someone else.
- Linked samples must have been made within the past year.
- You may apply for up to two characters per cycle.
- Do not plagiarize. If we find that the information provided was directly taken by either another player or some other source material, the application will be rejected immediately. If we find this after processing the application, we will revoke the application and have you removed from the game with potential ban.
- Reusing your own applications from other games is allowed. We only ask any original written samples to conform to our game. That is, we don't want to read samples that are set specifically for another game's premise. Note: this does not apply to threads linked from other games used as samples.
- If you are rejected, you cannot reapply for the same character for two weeks. However, you can apply for a different character in that same period.
- Those accepted must fill out all of the required entries within a week to be considered part of the game. Otherwise, we will consider it a revocation of the application.
- Fill out the form and comment to this entry! All applications must be posted directly to this entry; no linked-in applications allowed.
We have compiled sample applications from our players to show what the mod team and the application moderators are looking for in terms of writing quality and depth. We hope you find these samples useful!
- Sun Wukong (RWBY)
- Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)
- Goro Akechi (Persona 5)
Player:
Contact: Journal/Plurk/AIM — anything to help identify since someone might share your name handle.
Age: You must be at least 13 years old to apply.
Current Characters: If a new player, just put "N/A"
Character:
Age:
OC Type: Indicate whether this OC is a Pure, MMO, or Blank Protagonist type of OC. If it is a Blank Protagonist, indicate the canon here.
Point Taken: A sense of time when the character is taken. More applicable to MMO and Blank Protagonist OCs.
World Building:This is separate from the character's personal history. This section is to provide us with information about the character's “canon” in general. We will have no idea what kind of world that the character is coming from, and this is the only place we can learn about it. We don't want an encyclopedia, but we will need to know important details about it so that we can understand the culture the character is coming from and how that will affect how they think and behave. What countries are important? What kind of geography or political climate? Are there any social conflicts that would impact the character or would influence how they view others? For MMO and Blank Protagonist OCs, linking us to wikis will suffice, but feel free to add more to it.
Backstory: While we don't need a play-by-play, what we would like to see includes how the character lived, what choices they've made and why, what events occurred that developed them, and other important facts that will help us understand the character. For MMO OCs: Most MMORPGs will have a set storyline that the player character has the opportunity to play through. Keep in mind that rather there being a singular "Great Hero," all MMO OCs are to be seen as a part of a large group of heroes if you choose to follow the main storyline. Also keep in mind that all MMO OCs will have to follow their game’s canon lore. For example: A character could not save the NPC that canonly died, nor could a mission fail if it is set to succeed. However, your character could have died and or had difficulty fulfilling the mission. It is also possible that your character had no part in the overall game's story and had their own adventures in the world instead. Finally, there can be no romantic or familial relationships with named NPCs.
Personality: We're looking for how they think, why they act the way they do, their strengths, their weaknesses, their thought processes, their opinions, their conflicts, what makes them feel the way they do, their significant traits. When writing your character, be careful! We want to avoid characters that are the super invincible almighty hero that can do no wrong. The one who can charm anyone with a smile, can easily trick and deceive, has the power to bend wills with ease. All characters have flaws—no one is perfect. But more importantly, such infallible characters are not interesting to play and interact with. In short, the character should be realistic, balanced, and well thought out. If we feel that your character does not meet this standard, then we may ask for a revision or reject if it cannot be changed.
Abilities: If there are any particular abilities the character has supernatural or otherwise, list them here. Referencing to a wiki list is acceptable if applicable. However, if there are any particular abilities that need to be weakened or removed, note them here.
Alignment: Please refer to the Alignment entry to choose which alignment your character would most likely fall under. Include a brief (a couple of sentences max) just to help explain why you think your choice is the best fit.
Other: Anything else you'd like to mention.
Sample: We have two sample requirements.
General Sample: We should see examples of the character's dialogue as well as some introspection or additional narrative to further show how you intend to write the character. This is the most important part of the sample and where most of the weight will be.
Emotion Sample: This is our "game setting" requirement. Essentially we want to ensure that you have a basic grasp of the game's premise, especially with the use of emotions. It can be a small scene, even incidental to the main sample. A reminder that apathetic characters will also create effects, such as loss of color, surface distortion, holes forming. This section doesn't have to be lengthy, but the effect must be clear for us to see.
The emotion sample can be part of the general character sample. If so, please link directly or directly quote that portion so that it's easier for us to quickly find it.
The samples can be "written" in three different ways and you can choose which one will work best for you:
- Test Drive. You can utilize our test drive to cover both requirements of the sample. So long as there is enough character portrayal and a scene with an emotional reaction, be it within the prompt or done during the thread, then it can be used for both.
- Link out + Written. You can link to threads/entries from other games, memes, or museboxes to show character portrayal, and then write an additional short scene for the emotion portion of the sample.
- Original Sample. You can write a complete sample that shows both character portrayal and a scene involving emotion use. This can be one sample or two separate samples. If you opt to write an original sample, you are welcome to use any prompts from any of our Test Drives, Intro Logs, Task Board, and even past events. You are also free to change things up and are not restricted to any of these prompts. They are just here to help offer ideas.
Format wise, you can use either [ brackets ] OR narrative prose. We do require that the writing at least be coherent, have proper sentence structure, and is mostly grammatically correct (we realize that writing styles can be loose/creative in [ bracket ] form so we're giving a bit more leeway). One last suggestion we have is try to have the character interacting with the environment and try thinking of the sample less of a narrative piece but more like a post or thread prompt you might make in the game. That will help the sample show not only how you will write the character, but also how you will play them in practice.
Questions: If you have any questions, ask them here.
no subject
That said, while she seems to be incredibly down on herself, she believes firmly in others. In those she likes and cares about, she believes in their ability to do anything, and in their good heart. Even in those she doesn’t particularly like or those she thinks of as evil, she believes in their ability to be better, and wishes them the best. Her deepest wish is when faced with evil, the evil may simply decide to… stop being evil, and allow a happy ending. Even when faced with Ulrich and forced to obey him to betray the party, she wished, deep down, he would simply forgive her, and turn good, and that she could have her father and her friends.
However, though she believes in people’s good hearts and their ability to always better themselves, she is extremely practical. If someone is attacking her, she will fight back rather than trying to persuade them to stop, and if it is to save other people, she can act ruthlessly and take lives. It is easy for her to fall back under her training as an assassin, after all, and she knows how to take lives, and would rather it be her that does it, rather than someone innocent. She does think of killing as the last resort, but it is not off the table for her- She is practical and pragmatic, and will not let her own feelings get in the way of that.
She is fueled mostly by an incredible guilt. That guilt guides most of her larger decisions, though less so in day-to-day life. She chose to become a doctor entirely out of her guilt, and her desire to save more lives than she took. But on a related note, she doesn’t value her own life very highly at all, willing to throw it away with no hesitation. She does not believe she herself has any value or could possibly be wanted at all, and no one would mind if she was gone.
Which is another problem of hers- She thinks of herself as a coward, because her default reaction to much of anything difficult is to run away. Whenever she’s in danger, but also when she can’t handle a situation, she’ll run away. Even if only mentally, when faced with a hard truth, she’ll often run away from the facts and try to ignore it and pretend it’s not true, because it’s easier than facing it. In more humorous times, she even reacts to compliments and praise this way- If someone flirts with her, she’s more likely to throw a smoke bomb and run away than to respond. She’s just very anxious.
That social anxiety feeds into her interaction with even her closest friends, as she is rather desperate for approval. Having been starved of love her whole life, she craves affection or validation from others, which means she tends to encourage them, even for their negative aspects- She’s something of an enabler, in other words. Though she doesn’t mean anything by it; she just wants her friends to be happy, and if jumping up on tables and making speeches makes them happy, then she’ll enable them gladly.
But that does have limits. She cares about her friends, and if she thinks they’re going to hurt themselves or otherwise make themselves unhappy, she’ll step in. She is something of a fusser, and as a doctor, tends to fuss at her friends to keep them healthy. She’s something of a mom friend in that regards. But she loves all of her friends deeply, and wants them to be happy.
She’s ultimately just a very shy and anxious but also kind and caring girl, who just wants to do good in the world and find validation that it was okay for her to exist. ”You ruined a perfectly good ninja is what you did. Look at her, she’s got anxiety.”
Abilities: As a half-demon ninja doctor bullshit from a JRPG setting, Alice has a lot of abilities. I’ll try to be brief.
Half-Demon Bullshit: As a half-demon, Alice has a special form of magic that neither humans nor demons can replicate. She is capable, by clashing her demon and human aspects against each other, of creating vast amounts of magical energy and converting those straight into strange effects, such as healing or fireballs or the like. However, this process, while not damaging, is still painful, and as a result she is not very good at anything beyond healing or her ninjutsu skills. The more magic power she generates, the more painful it is to her, and so she limits herself to her more practiced, more refined technique that she can use without waste.
Shapeshifting: Her mother was a full-fledged shapeshifter whose default state was inhuman and monstrous, but shapeshifted into a human to conceive and carry Alice. As a result, Alice has inherited her shapeshifting abilities, but she’s terrible at it. Changing her mass is incredibly difficult for her, and minor details are difficult to get right. Furthermore, she can’t become anything inhuman, and her pointed ears and the markings around her eyes are unable to be shifted away. As of now, she’s made herself a new body that she’s much happier with than her old body, and as a result, she would actually rather die than use this ability, as she fears she would not be able to get her body right like this again.
Ninja Bullshit: As a ninja in a JRPG setting, Alice has many abilities that are basically, if a pop culture ninja can do it, so can she. She can summon elemental effects, has a seemingly-endless supply of smoke bombs or throwing knives (in truth, she spends her nights crafting more smoke bombs for a full supply and carefully retrieves her knives after every battle). She can also craft illusions, making copies of herself to take hits for her. She can climb, she can vanish seemingly instantly, she is skilled at disguises, and can run on top of water and jump incredible distances. However, though her ninja abilities seem to be ninjutsu, all of the magical abilities are in truth simply her half-demon magic, and thus subject to the same limitations of those, such as pain and practice.
Doctor Bullshit: As a trained medic and doctor, Alice is aware of herbs and medicines, able to craft them, and is generally able to care for a person as well as any traveling doctor might. Though most of her knowledge is medieval-era, she learns quickly, and due to the world being magic, does have a fair bit of knowledge that would seem out of place in historical medieval era. She’s also able to use her healing magic and act as a magical healer as well, though this is more to supplement her actual mundane doctoring, as she is both in hiding and cannot let herself be known as a miracle worker again, and also because again, her magic is painful to overuse.
Alignment: Peromei. Alice’s entire arc is falling into despair, and the slow climb out of it again. She despairs easily, and finding hope again is hard for her, but even so, she keeps clawing her way out.
General Sample: TDM toplevel
Emotion Sample: Emotions
Decline
There are a number of questions presented by this app that are either not answered or explained adequately enough to allow us to fully understand the character. For instance, where did Alice learn ninjitsu? Why does she hand over the armor to her father? Does he have mind control powers, or was it through manipulation? You also mention that Alice was affected by the party's offer to protect her, but these relationships are glossed over, and there is no mention of her perspective on these characters in particular nor how they may have affected her personality. While these are only a few of the questions we had regarding this app, we would recommend that you carefully review the application or ask others to review it in order to help flesh out the character.
You are free to reapply for this character or any other character in the next cycle.