OOOOOH yes this is a great question thank you!!! Omg ok if you've known me for a while you know i'm RABID for preplanned game structure & player choice interacting to create stories beyond what either could imagine. So i'm very zealous about being conscious of tbe way my choices and the game's mechanics (i create the vast majority of my ocs as player characters for video games) will interact.

to that end, usually i'll start with a set of traits i think would be fun to play and work as the foundation for a new character. If its my first time playing a game i won't decide anything beyond the basics of their personality at that first step, and then of course with character design i'll work out their appearance (tho tbh a lot of them end up changing a little once they're more fleshed out as characters if the game allows that). I will also usually set up a very basic backstory.

THEN i play, and do a combination of finding and creating story. So like, ill follow the plotlines set by the game but pay active attention to how i think my character would react to them and what their motivations would be for getting from point A to point B - stuff the game doesnt explicitly decide for you. More in depth backstory and character details start appearing here.

As the character emerges i conform my gameplay to them as well. i get really into this! it is a massive part of how i play rpgs and why i love them. when i first played fallout 3 i literally wrote journals for my character, from her perspective/in her voice, for every day she lived. i deliberated over which items she'd loot from bodies and which she wouldn't. my fallout 4 character - a lesbian ex-housewife - carried the wedding rings, both hers and her deceased husband's, unequipped in her inventory. when she and piper were in love i had her give piper one to wear. ivory can confirm how unreasonably faithful i am to my characters' inclinations in fallen london, often even when it's to my own great inconvenience. etc

SO ..... that is how a character is born. they grow throughout the game. and this is still all for the first time i play the game, by the way; for later runthroughs i'll let myself be more creative, especially via spending less time actually playing main plots and more time, like, populating cardboard boxes in an abandoned trailer with clothes and supplies my courier would have accumulated there over her several-year mid-game self-imposed exile. things like that.

is this ok to rb? i appreciate you articulating this

i stopped now.. transitioned my way out of it by listening to mindless self indulgence which. also isnt good. but now i’m normal again

adopt economics is so fascinating to me i love learning more about it from you tbh

i dont pretend id last a minute in like, an actual economics class, but i could talk all day about how weird and niche this market is. closed species versus one-offs. brand names of popular artists. the way a brand can eventually supercede what a design actually IS, it just matters who made it.

HELL YES thank you chiara!!!! aaaahhhhh okay i designed them to complement each other and also to be more of, like ... a fun story than two people who i think would Be Good Together if they existed lol prefacing w that since i know how literally this stuff can be interpreted sometimes

ribbinack is watchful/shadowy, she came to the neath to search for the man who killed her daughter. She becomes a private investigator who specializes in missing persons cases in hopes of tracking down someone who knows something about the murderer. she's usually serious and austere and laser focused on her goal of revenge but she has a lot of fire burning inside her and it comes out occasionally. she's capable of doing pretty dark things to achieve her goals but usually avoids that. She naturally adores learning, loves the correspondence (thats a language that does things like make your ears/eyes bleed when you read or listen to it), devours the history of the neath and begins to love it even though she initially saw it only as a means to an end. She is closely tied to death - the fact that its rarely permanent in the neath gives rise to her most secret desire, which is to find a way to bring her daughter back to life. Shes closest to the tomb colonists and to urchins, orphans specifically.

sieva sol is dangerous/persuasive! shes the daughter of a surface crime lord who came to the neath to make her own name. she quickly realized she has a talent for showmanship and began making a living as a LEGENDARY con artist. her main thing is being a snake oil salesman - coming up with fake remedies and patent medicine and traveling the neath peddling it. Shes fascinated by bodies and anatomy and many of her "cures" actually sedate patients so she can "study" them later. to this end, she is a bit of a serial killer .... though in the neath that's not as big a deal as it would be elsewhere. (she has never permanently killed someone!) she and rib meet while rib is hunting down missing persons who went missing because of sieva. She's unscrupulous and charming and ferocious and sly and she adores devils but believes herself fully capable of outwitting them (BAD idea). Once she and rib know each other rib forces her to stop doing the fake medicine thing and she turns to sleight of hand magic for her livelihood instead.

cocoa you posting about this just enabled me mfdhgkjfdkjhgkdfjgkfd i’m . also