Introduction + Thoughts on developing a neutral character.

Folmor

Well, first of all, hello everyone.
I´m Folmor and honestly I haven´t thought on making a presentation thread since there´s no actual place to put it, So I decided to open up my interaction with the community via posting this little thought on how to develop my first character in the game.
I want to start all of this by describing each features of me as a player, my character and what is needed to know to get to... well, know me.
I LOVE role playing, but I´m truly a newbie here since is the first time I get to play a game like Achaea, but even tho is quite hard to learn, remember everything, and the fact that has NO graphics at all, makes it something really fun and interesting and It hooked me right off the bat. I´ve been forced to become a casual player since I got a new job that demands me a lot of time, and I found a place for this game in my heart because I can take it with me everywhere, and develop my character the way I really want to, with no boundaries at all (It seems), so I´m eager to interact with you all and learn more about the game, get inside the community and become part of it soon.
It´s hard to catch up, but one of the main things was what is my character going to be. At first I made it a dwarf, runewarden, who lives in ashtan and has a huge issue trying to function as a normal living being, yet he is developing its own personality and I´m getting inspired each day I play.
So with this, my character will try to be what I never got to be in other RPGs that are way more linear, which is a merchant, a seller, a chapmen, an adventurer who doesn´t wield a sword but a journal, a bag of gold and a fierce need of being famous and important everywhere he goes. But to reach that he must start somewhere.
It seems all cities have a determined ideology and a mision and vision to play along, and it almost defines your character through asking you to become loyal to their cause so you can get the full benefits of citizenship. And Folmor Isn´t sure about that, he wants to find a way to make gold,  trade and interact with the markets, fool people to give him more gold for cheap wares and, sail overseas to learn about new and different societies and civilizations. Funny guy and always eager to share a drink and laugh to death, he doesnt see himself fighting on the goody goody side or the chaotic perfectionists side. He isn´t completely sure about being a runewarden, since he really just want to hang around and not play the super hero thing, as a dwarf of course he knows how to wield and use a sword, but he prefers to wear them as adornments and use them just in real worst case scenarios. What can this young dwarf do in order to seek a life of adventure outside brute force and submission to a war he wants to make profit off without taking part on it?
I´m really looking forward to the development of my character and I want to play more and more, I´m loving the game and I´d love to see if you like what I plan to be in this universe and take any advice you have on the matter.
Pardon my french, but english is not my native tongue.
Lot of kisses, fish and explosives
Folmor

Sena

It sounds like the city you want is Cyrene. Possibly Hashan, if you want something a bit less neutral and more involved in conflict.

Someone else can give a more detailed overview of the two cities than I could.

Voli

This is really the only IRE Mud that has neutrality as a valid option with fun potential. The others sort of force a bit of faction-choosing in order to engage in the larger narrative. This one does too (somewhat), but it doesn't punish you like the others for not picking a side.

I'd rather let someone more qualified talk about Cyrene, since most of my contribution has been as a glorified rogue until recently.

Nazihk

Folmor said:

It seems all cities have a determined ideology and a mision and vision to play along, and it almost defines your character through asking you to become loyal to their cause so you can get the full benefits of citizenship. And Folmor Isn´t sure about that, he wants to find a way to make gold,  trade and interact with the markets, fool people to give him more gold for cheap wares and, sail overseas to learn about new and different societies and civilizations. 

You are looking for Cyrene.

Klendathu

If you want to stay in Ashtan, which doesn't force hard-line following of Chaos, the Esoteric Consortium is the best fit for traders / merchants. /shamelessplug

Kiet

Cyrene (and possibly the Merchant house, either on its own or in tandem) are by far your best options for being neutral. Cyrene has a lot of stuff going on, usually, so it's less boring than being a neutral rogue.

As always, though, I'd recommend you consider if you really want neutrality that badly. Neutral characters are like eating nothing but unseasoned boiled potatoes for the rest of your life. Sure, it's food, but you're missing out on all the things that are actually interesting about food/achaea/roleplaying in general. Neutral characters are easy to play because you can do what you want, but not being able to do everything you want can lead you to much more enriching experiences, imo.

Leffe

It depends how strict you are with being neutral. There's neutral and there's ambivalence.

There's no reason your ambivalent character can't be involved in certain conflicts along the way, while remaining neutral with other things. Maybe he has his own reasons for caring about something. Maybe he gets bored, or makes a mistake and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he's young and stupid.

Maybe he evolves as a person, and starts to care about something. Or maybe he doesn't. Whatever you pick for your character now can be changed along the way - don't forget that. 

In many ways this can be more fun than holing up in an extreme faction that doesn't get along with anyone else. You get to explore and meet with the people in all the cities.

I originally intended to start Leffe this way, with the intention of having him pick a side after growing up a bit and developing ethics/beliefs organically. I accidentally met some great people in one of the stricter cities though and just joined it instead.

Jafin

Ledge brings up an interesting point. Imagine a neutral merchant wanting to profit from the war so he allies the losing side at any given point in order to extend the war. Natural follower of aegis and prospero. Crazy thought.

Laedha

Joining the Merchant house and living in either Hashan or Cyrene would make the most sense for the character you're thinking. 

@Kiet is right about really considering if neutrality is what you want. It will necessarily keep you less involved in the big-picture storylines of the game. However, if your main fun in roleplaying is developing and playing your character, building a business, building relationships with people, maybe organizational roleplay, you can do that with a neutral character and find a lot of enjoyment. I play a neutral-good Cyrenian and enjoy it, but it's not for everybody. 

The part of your post that makes me think you may want to shift to a more factional character is when you say he has "a fierce need of being famous and important everywhere he goes." If you want global recognition for your character, you're going to have a hard time doing that unless you're an influential player in a faction. 

Kiet

I find that "extreme factions" requiring you to "hole up" is kind of a boogeyman, imo. I play in one of the two most extreme factions in the game and have no issue talking to people from any city at all. Plenty of people from both Mhaldor and Targ are very chatty with people from other cities.

There's the false dichotomy created here that neutral characters let you develop your character and social relationships, and factionalized ones can only pk or something. That's not true at all.

Like you said, though, neutral characters let you pick whatever conflicts etc. you want to get involved in, and being able to pick and choose is inherently easier and more relaxed. It's just that easy situations and being able to choose everything for yourself is much less likely to lead you to situations where your character really has to consider what they value most, or to try and navigate rocky situations. If you look at general fiction, no popular character has ever arisen from having nothing ever thrust on them--the archetypal hero is always one that's been pushed into something.

Torinn

Kiet is exactly right.  It's choices, hard decisions, and conflict (any kind of conflict) that makes for great stories.

Leffe

@Kiet
I'm glad to hear that's the case here. In some of the other IRE muds it's been the opposite at times, and I've had a lot of enjoyment from doing it anyway (inter-factional RP, that is). It only really works if your character has enough influence to weather the repercussions though.

But even so, Folmor's planned character seems like a difficult fit for Mhaldor. Not impossible though (merchant prince of a slave empire, anyone?)

Laedha

@Kiet so you think some people here are creating a false dichotomy that factional characters only care about pk and not roleplaying..... immediately after you compare neutral characters to unseasoned boiled potatoes who are missing out on everything interesting about Achaea?  

Some people find small-scale conflict and political intrigue more interesting than large-scale conflict. If you don't want people pigeonholing factional characters maybe you could try chilling out about how you think being neutral is boring and worthless. 

Voli

There is something to his words, though. Neutrality forces you to be the catalyst for your own growth and development. You're effectively limited by your own creativity and willingness to reach out for conflict or intrigue or what have you. When you're in a heavily aligned faction with a much stricter set of rules to go by, you're already in a world with pressures on your character. Pressures that, with your own RP goals and development, can help shape your character where as a Neutral char with unfocused intent is just left to drift around.

For example, I had a char that was rogue and unaligned. What ended up happening was that I spent about 90% of my time bashing on that char because she had no real personality. No real interactions. As I noted above, I was limited by my willingness to reach out. I was projecting my own lack of socializing/extrovert traits into my char and just focusing on the one thing that everyone can do, and is universal between all of IRE's muds, bashing. (This char is dead now, btw. I dropped her. Just boring and nothing going on for her)

Now take Voli, for example. She suffered the same issues as my rogue did, except she was a part of Cyrene. It really wasn't until I started talking to people, interacting with the City, and pushing for it that I started to develop her character beyond the concepts she pretty much began with. Joining the Shield helped, too, because it offered more structured goals to aim for beyond the "Must bash to 100" or the "Must get Water Elemental". It also provided more opportunities for player interaction.

tl;dr Neutrality tends to make you push for your own story due to the openness of it, where heavily aligned factions tend to give you a lot more structure to develop in. Sometimes offers accelerated character growth.

Laedha

Yeah I'm not saying @Kiet is wrong that being neutral is less inherently dynamic. Being part of a faction creates conflict and hooks you into big storylines. Being neutral doesn't. Some people find a lot of richness in smaller scale conflict and roleplay. 

@Voli being Cyrenian is neutral though. The factions are good/evil/chaos/nature. You're right that being in any org creates more structure for character growth but you're still not being thrust into factional conflict in the same way. 

Leffe

Voli said:

There is something to his words, though. Neutrality forces you to be the catalyst for your own growth and development. You're effectively limited by your own creativity and willingness to reach out for conflict or intrigue or what have you. When you're in a heavily aligned faction with a much stricter set of rules to go by, you're already in a world with pressures on your character. Pressures that, with your own RP goals and development, can help shape your character where as a Neutral char with unfocused intent is just left to drift around.

That is simultaneously the advantage of neutrality though. You can be heavily aligned to the beliefs, goals, rules, ethics and story that you dream up for your character.

Voli

Yeah. I noted that Voli suffered a lot of the same issues my Rogue had suffered from. The thing she had to her advantage, though, was the fact that she was a part of Cyrene, and being a part of Cyrene gave me the opportunity to expand. I just had to be willing to do it. It is just dependent on how forceful you want to be about pursuing your RP.

I'm not saying that you can't be the same way in any of the other cities, though. The neutrality of a city like Cyrene, or the ability to be a rogue, just exacerbates it in those instances.

There is both good and bad to being part of either, though.  I enjoy having that freedom to do pretty much whatever I feel like doing (within the bounds of law, of course.) It just depends on how you want to go about your character's development. Even if it means joining Cyrene to explore a bit and create your own story, before settling on some place like Targossas or Mhaldor for a more unique, detailed experience to enhance the story you started to develop.

So.. all that said, I'd not advise going Rogue if you can avoid it, unless the endgoal is to work your way into a city anyway. At least, for the newbie experience. It is a massive turnoff if you aren't ready to just deal with the isolation that comes with it (outside of trying to befriend everyone with brains ie. non-NPCs)

Kiet

Laedha said:

@Kiet so you think some people here are creating a false dichotomy that factional characters only care about pk and not roleplaying..... immediately after you compare neutral characters to unseasoned boiled potatoes who are missing out on everything interesting about Achaea?  

Some people find small-scale conflict and political intrigue more interesting than large-scale conflict. If you don't want people pigeonholing factional characters maybe you could try chilling out about how you think being neutral is boring and worthless. 

I don't believe that Achaean characters playing in a neutral faction are boiled potatoes, I generally simply see all characters whose 'alignment' would place them smack in the middle, in all media, as boring and insipid. When's the last time you read a novel about Bob, who woke up every day to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, had no goals or strong opinions, and ultimately stood for nothing and did nothing?

There's a reason that 'chaotic neutral' is such an inordinately common alignment in role-playing games, and why neutrality remains popular in Achaea, and none of it is because all the people in Cyrene are boring irl or can't roleplay. People want to do whatever they want, and neutrality frees you from ever having to think 'does this violate my character's ethos?' You can justify literally any action you ever take, because, hey, your character never really had any strong convictions in the first place. Your character does not feel conflicted when what they say and what they do don't match up, because they're not really saying or doing anything all that big in the first place. There's no anxiety about living up to the standards of your faction, because neutral characters have no standards imposed on them. They can't fail in the same way as someone who fails an aligned organization.

Note that someone playing in Cyrene isn't automatically banned from having strong convictions, ethos, so on. Someone can play in Cyrene without being 'neutral' themselves, but the reality is that Cyrene will push you towards neutrality, and almost no one restricts themselves the way that an aligned city would restrict them.

Note, too, that it's just as absurd to think that characters in aligned cities have no small-scale conflict or political intrigue. There's social drama in every single city in the game, people who maneuver for power even in the dictatorships. If anything, the aligned factions offer you much more in this area, because leading a neutral faction just means that you run meetings and some cultural events. Leading an aligned faction means you get hunted by everyone in the game when you call for mass excommunication across the world, as a random example. The scale of what you can do while remaining neutral is necessarily much smaller.

Ultimately, it's just much easier to roleplay a neutral character, and that's why people generally do it. People tend to go for easy options in most things (and no one's immune to that), but you'll generally find it much more enriching to go for the challenging option. That's just my opinion, of course, and it's not like I've never picked easy routes or that everything you do in your life has to be challenging. People play Achaea for different reasons, and some people just want to unwind, and not necessarily be challenged by it, because they find challenge elsewhere or are simply uninterested.

Kyrra

All I got from that is Cyrene is pro Chaos through neutrality.

Jinos

Ashtan, Cyrene, and Hashan offer some leeway when it comes to having your own agenda that doesn't quite fit the ideology of a city theme.

But keep in mind that characters evolve the more you play and develop them. The friends you make are also a big impact on where you'll stay once you've found your niche.

My advice is to keep progressing your character, but if at one point you find that you're interested in, or enjoy larger scale conflict, don't be afraid to incorporate that into your character. 

Kyrra

Jinos said:

Ashtan, Cyrene, and Hashan offer some leeway when it comes to having your own agenda that doesn't quite fit the ideology of a city theme.

I'm going to disagree here with regards to Ashtan. Everything from the city tasks to the way the Houses are structured with a mandatory requirement to join implies that you're for Chaos and willing to do your part as required to assist the Chaos Court. How involved you want to be is generally up to you, but people are given a choice to leave (and have also been thrown out) if their own agenda goes against Ashtan's agenda.

Ashtan isn't the Ashtan of old where people just do whatever they want. There's a handful of people around that still try to do this and I'm in favour of throwing them to the curb because I see them as being entirely useless and a waste of space within an organisation that has the potential to be doing so much more if people would just participate.

If you're not willing to actively participate in things and actually support the city that you signed up for, go somewhere more fitting for your character. There's nothing worse than trying to include people that don't want to be included.

Jinos

@Kyrra

Well, I meant more toward the mixture of Babelites, Farethi, and Aegeans. 

All very different, but they're still aligned to a cause. If one approach doesn't resonate with someone, they're able to look at the others. 

Tysandr

Kyrra said:

Jinos said:

Ashtan, Cyrene, and Hashan offer some leeway when it comes to having your own agenda that doesn't quite fit the ideology of a city theme.

I'm going to disagree here with regards to Ashtan. Everything from the city tasks to the way the Houses are structured with a mandatory requirement to join implies that you're for Chaos and willing to do your part as required to assist the Chaos Court. How involved you want to be is generally up to you, but people are given a choice to leave (and have also been thrown out) if their own agenda goes against Ashtan's agenda.

Ashtan isn't the Ashtan of old where people just do whatever they want. There's a handful of people around that still try to do this and I'm in favour of throwing them to the curb because I see them as being entirely useless and a waste of space within an organisation that has the potential to be doing so much more if people would just participate.

If you're not willing to actively participate in things and actually support the city that you signed up for, go somewhere more fitting for your character. There's nothing worse than trying to include people that don't want to be included.

Ah shit.

Skye

Speaking as someone who's currently a cityless rogue... I feel that Team Neutral make good bookends to your Achaean experience.

If you're not an experienced MUDer, and you're intending to take it casual, you might appreciate the slower pace of Cyrene. However, once you find your feet (or more time), it's good to try the other cities. There are different facets of the world that you won't get to experience otherwise.

Myself, I started in Cyrene then moved on to Mhaldor and then Eleusis (including holding leadership positions) before going rogue. All of this over a decade. I can tell you that being rogue isn't easy at all. You have to learn to make your own fun and make your own friends. I don't think I could've survived roguedom without the network I built up from being in other cities prior, even then I know that I miss out on *a lot*, especially event-wise.

So yeah, you're welcome to start in a safe space, but don't be afraid to venture out and give those places a real chance, because a whole other part of the game can only be experienced when getting your hands and feet dirty.