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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 23, 2016 8:33:29 GMT -5
I see what you mean, but I'm still hung up on the slipperiness of the "starring character" designation. Who are the starring characters in Terminer? Yeah, some obvious names come to mind, but is Talia a starring character? Kilik? Jesse? Hell, Deandre? There's a big grey area, which just seems like a recipe for a lot of shifting around and ambiguous calls.
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 23, 2016 11:11:56 GMT -5
This is more maintenance work, but we could make the character sheet landing page one paragraph descriptions with a list of names of the alliances, so if people want to find out more about a particular character, they can still at least search for the name. For even more maintenance, add the one line description for each character.
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 23, 2016 11:20:30 GMT -5
Yeah, adding some guiding info on the hub page as opposed to just listing the links to the subpages might help make the page more newbie-friendly as Lee wants. That could work.
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Post by Loogs on Apr 23, 2016 13:48:54 GMT -5
I am complete garbage at trying to find the right tropes. I'm gonna need someone to help me out with Anchor and Sailing's tropes ugh
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 25, 2016 10:50:04 GMT -5
Any more thoughts on the character page discussion?
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 25, 2016 12:29:00 GMT -5
had another thought but on Lee's side: some alliances are gonna have some super tiny pages
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Post by Tout-Perd on Apr 26, 2016 19:50:33 GMT -5
Formally, my proposal is that we create a new tab for Retired/Out of Focus/On Hiatus characters. We'd copy and paste it over, keeping the same folders.
Starting from the top: Whelkshore: Ender, Sly, Rick, Eragon Rogues and Brogues: Flora, Alyssa(?) SPS: Tsubota, Joseph, Summer, Cobra Obsidian Hearts: George, Berthold, Fascere Order: Auguste Tylor, Nachoset (neither is inactive/hiatus, but they're largely out of focus) Winstone: MAYBE Massimo (has the benefit of hiding his fate for any new reader who hasn't read anything besides the main page)Landsvale, Davidson, the Curator, the thugs from Ishkabibble Drakengrad: Not sure who yet, but likely a majority of the NPCs can be counted as supporting. Sakura Alliance: Is anything lost by kicking Vieve to Terminer's tab, and just shuffling this whole mess over to inactive? Timewenders: MAYBE Mr. Rabbit? The rest are super-active. Cardsharks: Sikes. Kinda suspect having a folder for the trio of characters by one author? Then again, Obsidian Hearts ain't much better these days. Terminer: Keep all of them. I'd actually suggest moving it up the page, somewhere in the top four. Misc Heroes: Al, Aquara, Nick, Avery, Jacqueline, Dracon... Maybe Prime? Misc Bad Guys: Lucas, Scar, Bernard, Karcharos, Shouta, Neutral: Kalim & Nugget, Ryuu, Aya, Rain, Death PRP: Just kick the whole folder over.
As is, I think that it takes away very little a new reader would need to know. Misc. Goodguys:
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 7:28:58 GMT -5
I feel like the fact that you don't have a great sense of who's supporting cast in Drakengrad (no judging, I mean, I don't either, King's Men needs to unfold more), and are actively pushing to keep everyone in Terminer's massive cast on the proposed main characters tab, just feeds back into my argument at the top of this page that the main/supporting distinction is really up in the air, most of all when the RP in question is still new and underway. It's easy to look at, say, the South Pole Summoners and identify who's main and who's supporting, but that's with years' worth of hindsight. Alliances are much more clear-cut (still not totally set in stone, obviously, but much more clear-cut).
Got an idea for a compromise though. Because I finally dug up something in TVTropes technology that does what I was hoping for, even though I've never actually seen it used.
[[[HASH]AnchorPoint]]: Creates a point on a wiki page for linking to, in the same way that headings on Wikipedia can be linked individually. For something with a lot of sections, put one of these in each heading with the same text as the heading itself for ease of navigation. Link by typing Namespace/PageTitle[HASH]AnchorPoint.
What if we created alliance-based subpages, but on each one, installed one or two anchor points for the characters deemed most prominent in that group? This is incorporating your main/supporting distinction to some degree, but honing it to just the very most important characters will make a shorter and more objective list.
What we do then is supplement the main Characters page with brief Loogs-style descriptions of each of those top characters, and use those anchor points to link to their places within the appropriate alliance subpage, where you can read more about them. So someone coming to the character page for the first time gets a good amount of meat on the real have-to-knows of RP, and then is clearly directed to find more info about whichever character strikes their fancy, and the rest of that alliance.
These would be my suggestions: Whelkshore: Thyra, Natalie R&B: Terrian, Blaise Summoners: Yoshimitsu, and Miko and/or Illiana Terminer: Almudena, Carlos, Silumas Genlab?: Rie (I think this could easily be its own page, with her, Ender, Ysane, Cobra, Harmony, etc.) Fascere: Nopcsa, Garth Winstone: Yoon, Williams Shahrazad: Hector Drakengrad: Valon Obsidian: Emily Timewenders: Flint? This one is admittedly tough Cardsharks: Tanner Joyeuse: Huckabee
Sakura Alliance, as people have said, can be dismantled and rearranged into other pages. The three Miscellaneous clusters would remain, but probably don't need any spotlighted characters. PRP could be dropped for all I care, I've got the tropes saved. (I'm sure Lee will find an excuse at some point to pull Dace off the sinking ship and make her a full-fledged ORP character.)
I think this system would ultimately be better organized than halving everyone along an imprecise main/supporting split, and friendlier to us editors than having one or two big pages, but it would also take some of Lee's reasoning and try to present a good character "map" for new readers, with some of the most prominent figures as lampposts to help them navigate.
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Post by Tout-Perd on Apr 27, 2016 9:08:33 GMT -5
As far as options go, yeah, that's pretty much the ideal.
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 9:45:07 GMT -5
Yeah? Cool, any other opinions/alternatives? At the least, neither Lee nor I should make any big changes without signoffs from fellow tropers Yoshimitsu , Choobs, and Loogs.
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 27, 2016 10:04:55 GMT -5
Yeah, all for elevator pitches for supporting characters
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Post by Loogs on Apr 27, 2016 13:13:28 GMT -5
I'm down because finally people understand why we need quick bios
One thing though, won't all these new alliance tabs clutter the tab space at the top? I suppose I'm bad at grasping ideas sometimes without visual reference first.
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 13:22:08 GMT -5
Oh, yeah, I'm just using "tab" loosely (and Lee is as well, or else he's not clear on the details). We can't actually add new tabs like YMMV or Characters that aren't already defined (so you can't just make up a "Cool Stuff" tab and make it a clickable button). I'm thinking of a system like the Game of Thrones character page, which is just a hub with links to subpages for the different houses and such. Shouldn't really have used "tab".
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Post by Loogs on Apr 27, 2016 13:29:21 GMT -5
Another semi-relevant question, what the heck is the WMG tab and why do we even have it if there's exactly one whole trope on it
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 27, 2016 13:38:03 GMT -5
we can just copy and paste canon or nah into there
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 13:44:36 GMT -5
It's "Wild Mass Guessing".
We have to play the role of our own fandom, around here
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Post by Yoshimitsu on Apr 27, 2016 15:59:57 GMT -5
As long as I can read it, I'm down
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 16:38:13 GMT -5
Nice. That makes a full green light among the resident tropers. How do we feel about this selection, then? Any additions or subtractions? Whelkshore: Thyra, Natalie R&B: Terrian, Blaise Summoners: Yoshimitsu, and Miko and/or Illiana Terminer: Almudena, Carlos, Silumas Genlab?: Rie (I think this could easily be its own page, with her, Ender, Ysane, Cobra, Harmony, etc.) Fascere: Nopcsa, Garth Winstone: Yoon, Williams Shahrazad: Hector Drakengrad: Valon Obsidian: Emily Timewenders: Flint? This one is admittedly tough Cardsharks: Tanner Joyeuse: Huckabee Some of the Flickr bios would work well here, although a couple (like Valon and Flint) are a bit too terse. Hector: A scruffy young sailor raising his daughter and his dog in a cozy sailing ship on the seven seas. He's looking to atone for some mistakes he's made in the past. Thyra: A Power orphaned in the Salcester Incident a decade ago. She's now founded Terminer Academy, a school to provide young Powers with guidance so they don't need to suffer as she did. Nopcsa: A smarmy mindreader from the Fascere Order, an organization that deals in mystical artifacts. He finds himself frequently at odds between the goals of his employer and the well-being of his friends. Garth: A youth who stumbled upon the powerful Ophiuchus Amulet, he tries to do what good he can in the world, despite his powers slowly killing him. Miko: Emperor of the militaristic Summoner Race, he's been pushing his people to approach the rest of the world with peace and diplomacy... with very limited success. Here are a few for my characters. Terrian: The Archipelago's most neurotic so-called hero accidentally turned into its most prolific counterfeiter overnight when he discovered a lucrative exploit for his power of self-duplication. Yoon: This well-connected information broker was alerted to your first step into Winstone City, and has already arranged a plan to politely destroy you for meddling in her delicate business. Williams: Winstone City's sharp-tongued commissioner of police harbors a longstanding grudge against Powers, but recent collaborations have brought him to a difficult reckoning with his own prejudices. Tanner: Consciously styling himself as one of the operatic arch-criminals of old Europe, the conjurer called the "King of Clubs" pursues an agenda as fickle as the spin of a roulette wheel.
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 27, 2016 17:03:26 GMT -5
does Ysane in Genlab count as a spoiler?
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 17:26:31 GMT -5
Oh, good question. Um... I don't feel like she had shown up enough within RP proper before Head Games for it to be a major spoiler. What were her prior appearances, All Strings Attached and The Cat's Meow in 2008? Anything since then?
She's one of those characters with such a memorable name and concept that she endured in the Archie Exie consciousness for years without much presence, and it's for those people like Lee and me that the Head Games reveal was a big shock, because we'd have never associated her mystical trappings with the ultra-scifi Genlab otherwise. But a newer reader who hasn't read Head Games probably hasn't heard of Ysane at all, so it wouldn't register as a spoiler to them.
Still, she doesn't have to be there, I just got overly excited about populating a new character category.
EDIT: It occurs to me, we could put her on the Genlab page, but specific details about her affiliation with that group could be spoiler-tagged... If that would help.
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 27, 2016 18:00:51 GMT -5
tbh it was a backfilled conspiracy on my part that ended up feeling right
but yeah, it is a good point that she really hasn't done anything before Head Games, so probably not a spoiler.
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Post by Tout-Perd on Apr 27, 2016 19:35:03 GMT -5
Actually, Choobs planned large portions of Head Games with me, so uh, I knew the Ysane reveal for what, five years now? Of course, flipside of that, I'm guessing pohatu knew the Mandelbrot reveal. Sooo...
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Post by Tout-Perd on Apr 27, 2016 19:39:45 GMT -5
Also, I'd love for people to fill more into fridge logic and WMG tabs. Those both can be really interesting if done right, and might seed some interesting speculation.
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Post by ch00beh on Apr 27, 2016 20:19:55 GMT -5
ya i was sitting on two of the most frustrating plot twists for 5 years
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 27, 2016 22:07:35 GMT -5
Thoughts on the selection of spotlighted characters. Is it worth spotlighting all three of Miko, Yoshimitsu, and Illiana? Yoshi is a gimme in the overall context of RP, and Miko is key to the Summoners, while Illiana... Man, she just feels like someone really worth knowing about these days. She's risen to the fore in a big way.
Almudena, Carlos, and Silumas as an acceptable trio of reps for Dis?
Flint for Timewenders is the only other one that's much up for debate, I think. The other choices all seem pretty solid.
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Post by Beelzebibble on Apr 28, 2016 12:13:43 GMT -5
I'm moving ahead with this as a proof of concept, and you can see the work so far here. Any decisions about character categorization and who should be featured in the "character primer" are still up for debate, and easy to change.
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