Tentative application... I hopped on the Roll 20 forums to get a taste of the kinds of games I can find online, and I am drawn to this game because of the description. A lot of what you're going for here resonates with me... The time works out for me--although five hours is a lot of time for me to commit to. I'll have to iron out some technical details to get a camera online. I'm not confident with how long term I can be committed to a project like this, but I'm willing to talk further with you. - Age : 29 - Timezone : Pacific (GMT-7) - What made you interested in this campaign? : The idea of sharing a powerful story with a wide audience. Having a great love for my characters and wanting to find the right place for them. - Do you have experience with role-play prior to this? : Quite a bit. In 2015 I played in a few online sessions, which I recorded. The longest lasting of those sessions is a Stars Without Numbers campaign. - Things / elements you like in role-play (D&D, SWN etc) campaigns : Exploring the self from the perspective of an imaginary character given free-will. I've gained profound philosophical insights and presence of mind from examining my character's perspective towards a fictional world. For example, my Monk from Dungeons & Dragons helped to drive home a principle, "to not covet", or to pursue moral integrity while remaining detached from an outcome. My character gained possession of a Rod of Security, allowing them to be transported to an extra-dimensional plane of your wildest imagination--on occasion I have trusted the item with others, or risked losing it while maintaining the perspective that "it has a life of its own". I think that there is a lot to learn from your characters, in addition to having fun with them and having the opportunity to bond with others in a unique way that opens up a lot of room to get to know others in ways out of the ordinary. Imaginary worlds such as in role-playing are a fantastic medium to explore our feelings about similar real-world challenges and experiences. - Things / elements you dislike in roleplay campaigns / do NOT want to play at all. Triggers apply here too : Sacrificing character integrity for game playability. Often I find myself sacrificing aspects of my character to help them to fit in with a party, or to have them choose courses of action that are aligned with the spirit of the game rather than the spirit of the character. This is no doubt a fact of the medium, in contrast to writing a story for yourself. Conflicts are fine--they can be difficult emotionally at times, although they often add an incredible amount of depth to the story... Another aspect of role-playing that can be difficult to manage is how to prioritize communication, and how game-play unravels from communication styles at the table. While it is a challenge, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing--that just makes it more of a learning experience. Finding a party that communicates well is certainly an attraction. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of role-playing games that I have typically not enjoyed is the sense of power-scaling. The health scaling, for example, in most role-playing games, may be difficult to explain narratively--why, for example, the same shot from a gun will deal less damage relatively to a level 2 character than a level 1. The other issue is the matter of how character scaling may invalidate content and lead parties on very linear paths from weaker content to stronger content (bringing up the question of why characters scale in this way and how that contributes to the game or story). I find it more important to ask myself how I can validate the game's system rather than how I can work against it, so to me these "dislikes" aren't as important as what I can learn and achieve from role-playing. - Do you like storytelling / writing? Yes. Last year I gave National Writing Month (a 50k word challenge in one month) a try. I wrote about 22k words for a fan-fiction set in the Dune universe. I quite like what I wrote, although other things in my life have been taking priority, and I haven't often revisited my work. I am an aspiring writer, although at the moment my writing efforts have been directed towards writing about the future of Artificial Intelligence. - Character idea(s) you’d have for this campaign . : The character that I have had on my mind I invented while trying out a web-based role playing game titled Tau Station. The description that I came up with for them is: "A hermaphrodite with amnesia inexplicably drawn to artwork." This character's name is America, and she is a buxom hermaphrodite with a talent for political conjecture. She (they) are extremely empathetic, although her life experiences (As a child she was tortured, and she experiences retrograde amnesia as a result.) has instilled within her a dramatic disregard for life. While she is able to "put anyone six feet under" ( anyone ), so to speak, she is willing to do whatever good she can for others given the opportunity. (This aspect of her character was invented while considering using her for a Dark Heresy.) The one area in life where she is unwilling to compromise on her values is when it comes to a matter of preserving artwork. Some pieces of artwork are more valuable than others, but to America, nothing is more valuable than a piece of artwork, particularly a painting. The mere sight of a beautiful painting inexplicably brings her to tears. Another character that I've considered, although I don't feel as passionately about now, is Vaughn Sergie Coz, a character invented for a Shadowrun RP. Vaughn, Sergie, or Coz (he goes by any of these names) is a haunted and confused young man. Born into an aristocratic family, when he moves in on his own, the facade of an ordinary life begins to fade away. Nothing seems real to him now. Invested with dormant magical powers, Sergie will wake up from nightmares of oblivion, chaos, and destruction, his skin searing and his bed sheets catching on fire. Invisible claws raking across his body, staining his sheets with blood. Every day he looks at himself in the mirror and sees a stranger, burned and scarred. In the story that I had going for him, one night while smoking a cigarette in an alley, Sergie sees a priest approach a beggar to pay alms. Lifting up his hood and seeing that the man is blind and afflicted with leprosy, the priest lays hands on him and cures him of his ailments. Inspired, Sergie feels a sense of hope for himself. For once, he feels as if there is something that he may truly believe in--the power of healing. He wakes up crying the next morning, and approaching himself in the mirror he reaches a hand out and watches as his scars melt away.
