wankgate | 253: abandon me harder daddy

atp i'm so sick of video games with silent or malleable protagonists. i want named protagonists with a set personality, the self inserts always invited wank bc by their very nature they're for people to project onto, and characters cannot conflict with them without being treated like they're satan. they just make storytelling so boring. and they're annoying to rp with since everyone has to glaze them even though they don't have much personality.

i don't mind the games themselves as long as it's possible for the protag to make enemies, but i wish people wouldn't rp them because nobody likes a fandom oc with connections to the main cast no matter how good their icons or how pretty their journal. we'd all rather just play with the npcs from whatever the game is, sorry

if it's from a tabletop system like dnd just make an oc. what i think what would curb a lot of protag apps would be if more games allowed ocs from more 'tabletop system' canons besides dnd. right now the community wide 'no fandom ocs' dissuades people from making these kind of ocs unless they're from dnd, but there's a reason why games like faderift are still going after ten years, people love making ocs from settings that have deep world building. specify that the oc can't have any connections to canon characters beyond heard of them if they're someone famous like drizzt do'urden

i've seen some really good ocs from canons that i've loved that have actually been good at not having any connection to the canon characters. there was an spn one that used to be around, a hunter that 'knew of' the winchesters, but had no ties to them. no secret babies or relationships or siblings. that's basically why canon ocs get such a shit rap. i've had people play my character's 'long lost twin' or siblings or 'hey, i got pregnant/i'm your 16 year old love child' and it's been an instant nope for me.

but if you want to make an oc from a world that gives you worldbuilding depth? go ahead. i'd love to play with more supernatural characters. or marvel ocs. or a dragonrider from pern or empyrean series. just don't make them be 'secretly' tied to the main cast, or shove an au in there. if the world is built well, it makes it so it's easy to build a character for it. just like d&d. you could easily make a hunter character or another angel or a vampire, etc. no reason to have your character be dean's unknown daughter.

there's absolutely no reason people can't make, for example, pokemon trainers or random minor pirates from one piece or bounty hunters from star wars. the worlds are so huge that there's plenty of room to play around in without there being any need or reason for a connection with the canon characters.

trust me if i could rp characters like these more often i would. the problem is that they fall under fandom ocs and no game will take them, aside from nice cases like faderift (where the oc has to be a native of thedas)

i understand why fandom ocs have a bad rep i was here for that. but if dwrp has eased up on ocs to the point most games do accept urban fantasy and dnd ocs why can't they accept ocs from similar world building like the elder scrolls or cyberpunk

i really think the reason why malleable protags are so popular is because people want to make ocs but they don't want to world build for their concepts. they want to play in already existing sandboxes. it's the same urge that makes this community skew towards panfandom rp with canon npcs being the most played

we already have blanket bans on malleable protags that are not viable (the warrior of light) so why not just allow fandom ocs with the same standards put on regular ocs?

if i had to take a guess, as a former app mod, it's too much work. let's say someone wants to app in a herald from valdemar oc. well, what if i'm not familiar with valdemar? what if i don't know that they're writing a character that's a sibling/consort of a main character? they write an app with names i'm not familiar with and it all looks pretty kosher, so they get a plus and then i get dms about how this other canon version isn't happy with an oc that's playing the long lost heir and how their character is being chased for cr that they don't agree with.

it's great if you have people that are canon savvy and can call out shitty ocs that tie to canon characters, but if you're not canon familiar, all you have to go on is worldbuilding and their history written out. and the worst types will pull a ddb and just 'not put that in the app because it didn't matter/wouldn't let them in'. a lot of people slip stuff in their playing that they didn't put in their app for obvious reasons.

but i do wish that there were more allowances for it. maybe if there's that canon in the game, have one of them look it over to see if it's separated enough. idk. or just give no fucks, but then that leads to people wanting canon aus in and female bucky barnes is totally valid, guys.

i feel like many of these problems could be stopped by stating clearly in the app rules no aus, cannot be related to a canon character, etc. the sneaking stuff in is a problem with canon characters too so idk what can be done there

but you're right about it being more work which is probably why most games nowadays ban fandom ocs

i get it no one's getting paid to do this so i can't be mad

just sucks i have so many oc ideas but the only game that exists for this sort of stuff is a canon i no longer care about

i'd give up my first born for a game set in tamriel or night city the worlds are huge

i'll be honest: a lot of the people who gravitate toward characters like malleable protags because they want to make ocs want to make those ocs for not-good reasons, or they wouldn't play those "everybody has to love them or it's not ic" types. easing up on fandom ocs would allow one or two normal rpers to app their decent ocs...but also open the floodgates for the 19 people who wanted to app their super-special warrior of light but susie catgirl got in first. not every game bans fandom ocs so long as they're not connected to the main cast, and i've been in games that allow them, and this is what happens: those ocs struggle to get play for the same reasons their malleable protags would have, and they wind up vagueplurking to mope about susie catgirl or characters who won't tag them.

and they're not wrong, in a way, because this is a site where people primarily want to tag canon characters (outside of psls, where imo there's a greater emphasis on writing quality and dynamics).

i sympathize, as someone who loves to make fandom ocs because i love the worlds they're in, but if you want to do that and get a lot more traction and less pushback, mmo-based rp is made for it. pick your poison, make your characters, find the relevant discord servers or forums, bam, easy. other than that, advertising that you want a psl in your setting of choice on rpa might net you some interest with other people who love doing the same thing.

or they wouldn't play those "everybody has to love them or it's not ic" types

not going to lie i think people around these parts exaggerate how true this actually is. a malleable protag usually starts the game as a nobody who has to prove themselves. they're usually rags to riches stories, like hawke, or zero to hero, like the warden or the hero of kvatch. in a lot of these games people are not falling over themselves for you. most blatant example is morrowind where, despite being the reincarnation of dark elf jesus, everyone hates your ass and they continue to hate your ass even after you fulfill the prophecy. cyberpunk 2077 famously has johnny silverhand telling you to blow your brains out on your first meeting

if dwrp doesn't like malleable protags that's perfectly fine. but i think the oversaturation of wols (who also started as a zero to hero but how now been a hero for so long people have forgotten what it was like when people didn't fall in love with your wol on first sight, but i digress) is what leads to everyone thinking malleable protags = instant positive cr with canon characters. not really a thing in any of these canons, you can easily find tons of examples of people who hate the protag's ass, tons of companions/team members who do not have positive rapport with the main character

it's just shit rpers, honestly. it's people who are unoriginal and, for one reason or another, cannot tolerate negative cr. i wasn't here for the wols chasing off canon characters by aggressively insisting the canon character has to be in love with their wol, but i know how it goes because i've seen with canon character ships too

"it's just shit rpers, honestly. it's people who are unoriginal and, for one reason or another, cannot tolerate negative cr."

ayrt and that's exactly what i'm saying though. and this isn't just about wols; as discussed above somewhere, people also do this with tavs/durges and DA protags despite that in those games npcs can hate your character. you keep bringing up elder scrolls, but i can count the number of elder scrolls ocs i've seen here literally on one hand, and if i had to go out on a limb as to why, it's because elder scrolls games don't intentionally offer you a buffet of self-insert bfs or gfs to drool over. those are the types of rpers who want to play these fandom ocs.

i think we hang out in different corners of this hobby because i've seen a bunch of tes ocs. and the release of oblivion remastered could bring some more heroes of kvatch

personally the lack of focus on romances is exactly why i prefer bethesda over bioware but you're right we have more bioware malleable protags (and bioware npcs) running around

but most people still rather rp with a shepard or a warden than a wol

ngl my impression had always been that the reason silent/malleable protags are popular is because aside from guaranteed cr, they have much more freedom with how their personalities are. Even those with some given personality traits (persona protags for example) are still extremely limited about it that you can have your own interpretation of how serious or goofy they are based on those.

you don't get the same restraints as playing a canon character, but you get more perceived benefits than ocs who have to sell their setting to the players in theory. WOLs are probably the worst of this because they're too free for interpretation with no consequences in the game for their actions, so everyone else is constrained to love them but they themselves aren't constrained to playing a genuinely good character that makes sense for them to love them.

That said, I've always thought canon OCs were fine as long as they have zero connection to the main cast or are very far-flung from the plot that they probably fell to the wayside and just benefited from the setting. This doesn't hurt the other players nor force them to acknowledge this rando in their world that they could have easily missed due to canon circumstances. I'd still ban wols in that setup because npcs have no choice but to acknowledge their presence when they're nothing more than a self-insert OC most times.

253: abandon me harder daddy

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