On Races and Character pages

So. I started making a tropes page for the Pathfinder bestiaries, which I brought up here.

Fighteer, apparently a moderator, showed up and said that character pages don't work that way.

I told him about other character sheets that had races and such, and specified Mass Effect and Redwall, which did have entries (and in the former, a whole page) dedicated to races.

He called such a "misuse" and flat-out deleted all of them.

My question: Should we have a "races/species" subpage for franchises that have them?

This is not a tech wishlist item, this is a Wiki Talk item. Moving.

We've been over this in the past. Characters pages are for characters. Races, species, archetypes are not characters.

Which is why I ask this: Should we have a new subpage for works that have a lot of races, with tropes that apply to them?

Also, Dwarf Fortress's character page kind of depends on the races/creatures, so I'd still like those preserved, on their own subpage if not as a character page.

edited 21st Feb '13 5:25:09 AM by Voyd211

^^ Huh, I honestly didn't know that. So much for Characters.Master Of Orion...

Yeah, a lot of races do have tropes that apply to them, but at the moment they don't have anywhere to go.

edited 21st Feb '13 5:57:23 AM by Voyd211

"Don't have anywhere to go" is inaccurate, though. They can go on the main page (and will for Master of Orion, once I get everything set up to account for a set of entries for each game in the series).

How about organizations, i.e. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?

edited 21st Feb '13 6:02:05 AM by lrrose

^ List the relevant tropes on the main page. Organizations can't even claim to be living beings, let alone characters.

But those pages are about characters, they just happen to be split according to the organisations they belong in. All the tropes in are about individuals, not the organisation as a whole.

The problem is when you get a character sheet talking only about the Behemoths/Dragons/Polar Bears while no distinguishable characters can be found.

1) Yes, general tropes applying to races, classes, etc., can go in the Main article. Archetypal observations like "all Goblins are greedy" or "all Dwarves are miners" are distinct tropes, and we have a specific index for them: Our Monsters Are Different. For sci-fi fare, Planet of Hats.

2) If a race/class acts like a character and exhibits storytelling and/or characterization tropes, then it can get an entry. For examples, I'm looking at things like Team Fortress 2, where The Heavy is a distinct character even if there may be lots of them running around, or Star Wars: The Old Republic, where each class gets a single-player storyline in which they behave like an individual, not a category. It's hard to see how this can apply to races unless they act like characters for all intents and purposes: one example might be Star Control 2.

3) If a race/class/species acts as an archetype from which characters are constructed, then it does not count. For example, D&D has Orcs and Paladins, but "Orc" is not a character. "Ogtuk the Orc" is a character.

4) Groups are made up of individuals and may or may not be treated like characters, depending on how they act. Few groups are sufficiently uniform that you can universally apply characterization tropes to them. For example, Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is a well-known trait of stormtroopers in Star Wars, but you would not write a character sheet entry for them and list it there; it's a main-page trope.

edited 21st Feb '13 8:13:19 AM by Fighteer

Could we have a namespace for race-specific tropes, though?

The old Mass Effect Races page was really good, and actually quite informative.

(to me, who's never played Mass Effect and is also a Spoiler Hound)

I'd prefer a group-specific namespace in that case. Races, factions, subdivisions, guilds, and other types of groups are often treated similarly in that respect.

They can go on the main article. That's what it's for. We don't have subpages for plot tropes, setting tropes, or anything else besides character tropes.

Now, some articles have been organized along those lines; since the trope list for the Mass Effect series is huge, it's been hard split. If you want to propose reorganizing it in a categorical, rather than alphabetical scheme, that's fine. Gather feedback, and if there's enough support, make the change.

edited 21st Feb '13 11:23:55 AM by Fighteer

The thing is, though: In top-down strategy games (like Master of Orion happens to be), each race is effectively a character, in that there's a single player controlling each one outright as a single, unified entity. In the same way you "play" a single person in an RPG, you're also "playing" a race / faction / empire in a strategy game.

edited 21st Feb '13 2:08:29 PM by Specialist290

What players do with a race/faction/whatever in a game is not tropable in the sense you're thinking. We cut Troper Tales along time ago for that very reason.

edited 21st Feb '13 2:07:01 PM by Fighteer

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying that in strategy games, the faction as a whole fills the "character" niche occupied by individuals in other media. They act together, as a single unit, under a single will, and have defining characteristics that both define them as themselves and set them apart from the other "characters."

And I am saying that those are all main page items. Now, if the factions have defined individuals as their heroes and leaders, those can go on Characters subpages.

That's the thing, though: The player isn't taking control of a single person, but of the faction as a whole. The faction is the "character" for all intents and purposes. It is the vessel through which the player acts in the context of the game world, and most do have some sort of basic characterization apart from what the player does with them.

edited 21st Feb '13 2:39:03 PM by Specialist290

That's what I meant: The race/group/whatever AS A WHOLE has a collective characterization, with individuals being given expanded development.

Essentially, the race is the character's basic... well, character. The foundation, on which the rest of their characterization is built.

(I need new words dammit, I didn't like saying "character" over and over)

edited 21st Feb '13 2:37:51 PM by Voyd211

"The vessel through which the player acts in the context of the game world" has nothing to do with a race being a character. The player controlling something doesn't make that thing a character. (And that gets really weird when applied to Simulation games.) If I'm playing Age of Empires II, Joan, Le Hire, Barbossa, Henry the Lion, and all them are the characters, not The French or The Huns. Joan and Le Hire aren't sub-characters of the main character known as The French. Also, the factions don't generally fill the name niche as characters: most mainstream RTS and tactics games have "characters" as would be understood in other media, anyway.

This is not to say that the French army doesn't have tropes associated with it, just the way the Terrans do in Starcraft, the Auriok do in Magic: The Gathering, the Others do in Lost, the Rohan do in The Lord of the Rings, or the Empire does in Star Wars. But the characters are (to take an example from each) Le Hire, Jim Raynor, Jor Kadeen, Benjamin Linus, Eomer, and Darth Vader.

I have thought for a while that we should have a "Setting" namespace, just as we have Characters; it's a natural way to organise tropes. (Admittedly whilst every story has characters, only a minority have settings of note.)

The space as I imagine it would be restricted to setting elements that are standing and recurring (so in at least two instalments) and are important to shaping the story. It would only apply to elements that the work itself divides into distinct groupings in any way (tropes that apply to the entire story belong on Main). Hence the main object would be races/factions/societies in works that follow Planet of Hats to any extent.

I know it may seem arbitrary, but in the likes of Mass Effect these elements are the most important enduring tropes after the characters.

What about the 40K factions?

These are there because apparently in that work everything works by race not by character.

Addressing the OP, I have seen plenty of races on character pages. Moving them back to Main/ will need a large-scale cleanup effort.

Huh. My Characters.Master Of Orion cut request (which linked to Fighteer's first post in this thread in the reason message) was declined. Insufficient mod group communication on the issue?

That or because it would lock the page.