Character Development Thread--Discussion

Ok, thanks, I'm starting to get the idea now. Can you post more than once? Can they arrvive by (space) ship, or is interdimensional portal the preffered method?

... I'm starting to look like that one kid in class who raises his hand every two seconds, arnt i?

edited 14th Oct '15 9:21:58 PM by AustinHinton

They can turn up however is most appropriate for them. A lot of the characters come from different universes, therefore some people reflect that by having them arrive by portal but you can do what you like.

I think there's at least one more separate group also on Main Street, but they can put "Group 2" or "Outside the xxxx" to distinguish them from the group your characters are in.

edited 14th Oct '15 9:37:31 PM by Wolf1066

Agh!!!

Sorry, looks like my posting is going to be further delayed. Lost my post-in-progress. Lazarus Form Recovery royally screwed me over on this one (it magically saves forms from before and after I last worked on the post but not the post itself, even though it was saved earlier this afternoon!!)

I'm kind of angry about this... and yeah, starting from scratch... I thought I'd have something out tonight, but that's doubtful now...

fucking fucking fuck inconsistent-ass programs

Wow, that really sucks. I've had things like it happen before. You have my sympathies.

Ach! Shitfire! I well know the frustration - not only the lost time and having to lose more time redoing, but the frigging work and creativity that went into it only to lose all that.

Gutted, mate.

Going to bed now, but I want to ask this again in the hopes of getting an answer by the time I get up tomorrow, since it's somewhat relevant to what I post next:

Could be soon... could be longer. Honestly hard to tell. Writing by ear, if that makes any sense. Of course, lady luck can swoop in and make things go more smoothly if the day needs to be wrapping itself up.

None of my characters in Capital are embroiled in anything major so wrapping them up can easily be done any time if it needs to be done at all: "they had a fun evening" pretty much sums it up for all of them.

As to what to replace it with, I've got absolutely no idea. Everything I can think of is too limited in scope for the wide range of characters/genres represented here or would require someone acting as some sort of Games Master or Host-Your-Own-Murder-Mystery host.

(Goddamn, I really shouldn't be awake right now but I can't go to sleep anytime soon unless I want to bomb my Chinese quiz.)

So, just letting the forest folk know that this afternoon I will be done with midterms so Kito can be more active (I might even have him use Cyrus's body), but I think I'll keep Cyrus in his current state for another hour of in-thread time. It's probably more realistic than bringing him back now, and I can't imagine he'd have much to do during the Moreg/ Hoshi fight anyway.

As for thread ideas, I don't really have anything fresh. I've revamped a lot of character backstories lately—the Cyrus in Frontier is already somewhat outdated, though he hasn't talked that much about himself yet so it's no big deal—so I've also been thinking about my characters' past iterations, which brought up Old Shame memories of things I've done with them in these threads. I've been awake for almost 24 hours so you should probably take this with a grain of salt, but what about a thread reboot? We choose a thread, use the current version of the same character(s) we used in the old thread, and just see what happens. That way newer folks can also have a chance to participate in threads they missed if they find some of the old ones interesting.

My favorite thread was Dream, but I'm also kind of interested in Dig Site because I wasn't around for any of it.

edited 15th Oct '15 3:14:04 AM by SnowyFoxes

I'm gonna be home late after school because of an art class, and tomorrow I'm traveling to visit a college so I'm not sure when I'm going to post.

A thread reboot with new and improved versions of your characters sounds pretty much exactly what I've been wanting all along. (I just never mentioned it because it seems akin to obsessing over an old piece of writing that a truly 'serious' writer would know to walk away from, I'm glad not everyone feels that way.) Especially for Dig Site, I was having some serious issues with Vince at the time that took something like two or three years to fix.

And it's possible Tsadro might not stick around that long in Frontier because he might actually be the sort of character who is hard to get to know, just because he doesn't typically start conversations himself, is standoffish on top of that, and is driven mainly by a desire to show that he can be The Ace, as a result of the backstory I'm still working on actually writing in his piece on my Wattpad. In hindsight, he would have been better off joining the Dead God plot, and he would run into personal conflict since Brin stated specifically at the beginning that showing off wouldn't be tolerated. Of course, he missed the boat, because I didn't have time to join until the plot attracted too many people.

I'm pretty sure a big reason why I don't get anywhere near as much out of these threads as I should is poor/inopportune decision making. Bringing a character to the wrong type of setting, derailing characters in ways that flat-out kill interaction or development, just plain poor timing or impatience because I'm trying to limit my CDT involvement, and now I guess trying to work with overly quiet/standoffish characters who are focused on doing. I guess Sonzai was right that characters exist who are hard to do anything useful with in a typical CDT setting.

TL;DR: Having second takes of old threads would be awesome.

edited 15th Oct '15 6:51:07 AM by CrystalGlacia

I like the idea of reusing the setting of an older thread. If nothing else, I've no ideas for a new thread setting and some of the old thread settings sound rather nice.

However, it's really worth noting that we've had a lot of newcomers, some of whom have only been around for one or two threads. Furthermore, a lot of the people who participated in those older threads are no longer contributing to the threads. And there's also the possibility that the writers of some of the characters in the older threads are simply no longer interested in working on them (they haven't changed much, the character in question has been axed, or the writer is simply no longer interested in working on that particular story of theirs).

Going off this, I'm not sure if a "true" thread reboot (same setting, same characters just with all the changes they've had between then and now) is actually a good idea. I think a better idea if we go down this route is simply reusing the setting but leave it up to the participants whether or not they want to use new and improved versions of the characters they used back in the original thread.

edited 15th Oct '15 8:00:18 AM by Yomegami

Snowy brought the idea up because she wants to participate in a thread she missed entirely. That, functionally, isn't any different from a writer returning to an old setting with a different character. I see it more as an opportunity to try again if you messed up the first time in any way or want to try something cool with an old setting, or a second go if you entirely missed a setting you're interested in.

I am for this in every way! Somewhat because I have been thinking about binge reading one or two of previous threads. Even if they make Game Of Thrones look like a children's book.

edited 15th Oct '15 9:22:10 AM by TroPartner

-crashes through wall- Did someone say thread reboot? Because I am all for this idea.

And I already know which thread we should reboot; Character City!

Because I just really loved the thread ok.

City did get pretty crazy the first time around, but isn't that setting very similar to Capital (which is presumably the thread we'll be replacing)?

City is rather similar to Capital. While I do think it'd be nice to go through that thread with 100% less interference by stupid powerful god creatures, I don't think it's a good idea to do two similar settings back-to-back.

I'd be most interested in a reboot of Dream, actually. I just barely missed that one and in the time since then I've found dreams to be a major interest of mine. There's also Resort, but half the reason I regret missing that one was half the characters owned by people who are no longer participating in the CDTs and given how miserably Mountain Resort performed I have my doubts about a reboot.

Though I think we should probably wait for more opinions on the idea of a thread reboot before we start throwing out ideas.

There are no epic battles against demons in Capital so no, they're very different.

Kidding, kidding.

I'm not sure if I was around for Dream. Or my memory sucks. Most likely the matter.

Was Dream before, during, or after University? University was the first thread I participated in so I don't remember much of Dream.

Dream was before. I hopped on with University too, and I think Resort was the other thread at the time.

Dream was before University. University was my first thread as well, and I do remember Dream ending and people talking about its successor back then. Now that I think of it, I actually didn't miss Dream entirely; I did arrive in time to participate in it and considered it, but I decided against it due to how far along it was at the time and back then I think it was rather confusing.

And I'm ninja'd.

edited 15th Oct '15 10:44:47 AM by Yomegami

Aww and now I'm starting to miss University, with the three of us and our characters. Good times.

Reusing an older setting sounds like a cool idea. I agree that it wouldn't technically be a "reboot" as tropers and characters have moved on and new ones have arrived so it'd be more a "reinvention" - which sounds excellent!

BTW, thanks to those who have been moving their characters into "locations" on the Frontier page, it's certainly making it easier to see where everyone is.

Shall we do that by default for all CDTs from now on so that we can see before we join "where the action is"?

University was pretty fun, though it got mad tangled by the end. I think I got a lot more out of Joseph than I did out of Oswald for that thread. Should go back and read it through sometime... I probably overthought everything I wrote back then (Or rather, even more than I do now). Crazy that it's been 3 years.

I hadn't thought about a thread reboot, but it's kind of an interesting idea. I personally have always wished we could revisit the setting of Character Heist free from the drama-inducing railroad plot, but I don't really have any strong preferences.

Which of the previous threads were the most "successful" from the point of view of having an engaging setting and premise that got things really going and provided the best opportunities for characters to interact/develop?

Reinventing one of them would be a great start. And nothing to stop us doing the same with other previous settings after that.