@Selira

IT'S FINE.

And now an unpopular opinion:

My character page doesn't stand out!

Well, it's not supposed to. A wiki is ideally a centralized location for information, not a website host. It's reference. When you're looking up something in a book or on a site, you expect certain information to be in certain areas and you expect it to look like similar content in the rest of the book or the rest of the site. Think of a cookbook. Imagine if every recipe page had a different colour scheme, different fonts and font sizes, and this one cake recipe had a giant artsy photo of the cake as a background with the name of the cake written in huge white letters in a fancy font spanning two pages. That would be fucking nuts.

Sorry. Organization of information is kind of a peeve of mine. Part of my day job is essentially getting paid to enforce it, like a tiny book dictator, and helping people find the information they need as easily as possible. AND I LOVE MY JOB, BRO.

Just in general, can confirm there is a place for squishy nerd characters who can, say, solve riddles. I just got stuck at some places that required jumping or climbing or other physical things.

Also? Having a healer is big-time helpful.

I felt very useful as a non-combat character.

@Arkandel

I try to start my pose with my character's name in a big scene so it's easy to see who the hell is doing whatever my character is doing, but I'm not a slave to it.

You probably don't want your log template to look like it got splattered by a fucking rainbow, so here's the template sans background colours:

__NOEDITSECTION__ __NOTOC__
{| width="70%"
| style="width: 100%; text-align: center " |
<div style="text-transform: capitalize">
<div style="font-size: 1.3em">{{{title}}}</div>

<div style="font-style: italic">{{{subtitle}}}</div>
</div>
<br>
{| style="width: 100%; text-align: left"
|- style="width: 40%; font-weight: bold" |
| Cast
| style="width: 60%; text-align: right; font-weight: bold" | {{{gamedate}}}
|- valign="top" style="padding-right: 300px"
| {{{cast}}}
<br>
| valign="top" style="padding-left: 20px; text-align: justify" | <div style="float: right">{{{summary}}}</div>
<br>
|-
| 
|- 
| colspan="2" style="border-bottom: 1px solid gray; font-weight: bold" | {{{location}}}
|-
| colspan="2" style="text-indent: 21px" | 
{{{log}}}
|}
|}

[ [Category:RP Logs]]
{{#ifeq: {{{categories| }}} | | | [ [Category:{{#dplreplace:{{{categories}}}|,|  Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}}{{RB}}{{LB}}Category: }} Logs{{!}}{{BASEPAGENAME}} ]] }}

Careful with the category code above. The forum likes to eat square brackets that are next to each other, so it had to be faked out with an extra space between the left square brackets. They should be snuggied up to each other as usual for this to work.

@JustNobody

I tend to be a character flipper myself. So, things that help:

• Remember it's OK to drop a character if they're not working out.
• Remember that going out in public to do random scenes on the grid is probably not going to be super great all the time. It's actually going to be kind of painful sometimes.
• Sometimes, applying into an RP group is a good idea. It seems like families are a thing on NWOD games these days (and on Buffy MU*s, once upon a time). Usually, people in RP groups like that want to meet other people in that group and it's a nice 'in' for your character - a built-in reason to RP.
• Sometimes, applying into an RP group is kind of awful. Maybe they're cliquish, maybe they're insane, maybe they've gone way off the concept you thought you were going to play. Remember you can go rogue.

More specific ideas:

• Friendly PCs. Characters who like to talk to random people and will talk to random people. Chatty types. They're just easier.
• Do go to big scenes, but concentrate on finding and including newbies or other people who seem to be on the fringes. That's easier than trying to keep tabs on everyone all at once. Also, newbies are usually eager to RP and super happy when someone notices them.
• Characters with jobs that involve meeting random people. Excellent occupations for this include coffee shop employees, mechanics, bartenders, pool hall owners, and so on. Cubicle farm workers? Not so much. Now I kind of want to play an electrician.
• Give your goods. You spent a long time on that background, so if something comes up where you can share it, take the plunge, even if it's your character's 'secret'.
• Have a wiki page, if the game you're on has a wiki. Yes, it's a pain, but having a list of things your PC is interested in can really help other people find reasons to RP with you.
• Drop the pencil. Man, I love that this is a term now. Come up with reasons to talk to other people in public areas. Lose a cell phone, lose your wallet, look for one of your earrings. Be three cents short when you're buying something. Get splashed by a passing car, slip on ice, deal (briefly!) with a jerky NPC, look for interesting things in people's @descs and then compliment them on them or ask about them ('those shoes are awesome', 'where did you get that necklace', 'is that a dog collar you're wearing?').

I have found Fallcoast, which is NWOD, to be pretty welcoming. Like I've had people page me out of the blue because of something on my wiki page.

Thread necromancy, but I am suitably impressed, so:

I really like the depth of the plot on Arx. There's stuff to do on the surface, but once you get into investigations and @clues, there is so much lore to be discovered. Crazy amounts of it.

The code is definitely a pain in the ass, but I have also found that people are quite friendly (in general, and also in helping people with the codey aspects).

Anyway, what I'm getting at is if you're put off by the code (as I was), it's worth poking into anyway.

Character page templates! Character page templates can be tricky because they have to a) look nice and b) be simple enough that most people can fill them in easily.

(Then you get into the problem of people wanting their character page to look nicer than the others and fooling about putting things like banners and image-based layouts. Which, yes, more 'interesting' pages, but also sometimes results in really awful looking stuff that's difficult to read. Some people know what they're doing and can turn out really lovely things. Some people do not know what they are doing, copy and paste complicated things, and wind up not understanding WTF the code does. So on one hand, yay, creativity, but on the other hand, I worked hard to make stuff cohesive, thanks for tossing that out the window to have dancing alligators all over your bright purple page, you special, special snowflake.)

ANYWAY.

The best way I have found to get things to align mostly how you want them to on MediaWiki pages is to use tables. The following code is your garish teachable moment; for the non-crazy just-give-me-the-template-learning-is-for-nerds version, skip to the post below.

__NOTOC__
{| width="100%" style="background: lawngreen"
|- style="vertical-align: top"
| width="100%" |
{| width="100%"  style="background: turquoise"
| 
= Character Name =

== Overview ==

== Hooks ==

== Contacts ==

== Potato ==

== Logs ==
|}
|
{| style="background: teal"
|
{| width="100%" style="background: yellow"
| colspan="2" | [[Image:CPage_Main.jpg|250px]]
|-
| class="left" | '''Birthdate:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Virtue:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Occupation:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Played-By:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| class="left" | '''Clan:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Covenant:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Auspice:'''
| Potato
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| colspan="2" | 
<center>
== Soundtrack ==
</center>
|-
| colspan="2" |
'''Song Title'''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''
|-
|}
|}
|}

What we have here are four sections.

1. containing table – lawngreen
2. character information – turquoise
3. infobox shell – teal
4. main infobox – yellow

The 'NOTOC' up there at the top keeps MediaWiki from automatically generating a table of contents despite all those headings.

Anyway, section by section again:

1. containing table – lawngreen
   This is the entire table's background. It's set to be 100% of the page width, though it doesn't look it in that screencap because I modified the window's size so the picture wouldn't be as wide. The character information and the infobox are both nested inside this yellow outer portion. You could specify a different width here, or add a border with rounded corners, or whatever. The 'vertical-align: top' part is important: otherwise, MediaWiki will center text vertically in the table cell, which looks stupid if one side's text takes up a lot more length that the other side. That's how you get an infobox floating halfway down the page to the right. That stinks.
2. character information – turquoise
   All the long-form character information goes here. It starts off with a large heading for character name, and then smaller headings for the next sections, which are usually things like overview, RP hooks, whatever. Treat this section like its own little regular wiki page, because it kind of is. Just having headings and text makes it simple and hopefully easier for rookies to fill out.
3. infobox shell – teal
   This is the right column, where the infobox is. This teal part holds the smaller infobox table in place. It will go right down to the bottom of the page, because its length will always be the same as the length of the main character information text.
4. main infobox – yellow
   This is a smaller, two-column table that keeps shit arranged under a picture.

Under all that is category junk.

Some notes:

• Keeping the tables simple wastes some space, namely anything under the infobox. In order to have the main part's text wrap around underneath the infoxbox, we'd have to float the infobox instead of making it a table cell. This would probably be nicer, but in the interest of simplicity and not making a tangle of style divisions (divs), we just made it a static part of the table.

I recently read a romance novel that referenced 'his eggplant emoji'. Like, 'his pants were tight but not so tight his eggplant emoji could be seen' or something along those lines.

And now without the rainbow barf:

__NOTOC__
{| width="100%" 
|- style="vertical-align: top"
| width="100%" |
{| width="100%" 
| 
= Character Name =

== Overview ==


== Hooks ==


== Contacts ==


== Potato ==


== Logs ==
|}
|
{| |
{| width="100%" 
| colspan="2" | [[Image:CPage_Main.jpg|250px]]
|-
| class="left" | '''Birthdate:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Virtue:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Occupation:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Played-By:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| class="left" | '''Clan:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Covenant:'''
| Potato
|-
| class="left" | '''Auspice:'''
| Potato
|-
| colspan="2" | <hr>
|-
| colspan="2" | 
<center>
== Soundtrack ==
</center>
|-
| colspan="2" |
'''Song Title'''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''<br>
''Lyric''
|-
|}
|}
|}

@Selira

IT'S FINE.

I am rooting for JURASSIC PARK.

Just in general, can confirm there is a place for squishy nerd characters who can, say, solve riddles. I just got stuck at some places that required jumping or climbing or other physical things.

Also? Having a healer is big-time helpful.

I felt very useful as a non-combat character.

@peasoupling said in Let's talk about TS.:

Could this be humor? It sounds like humor. Which is a thing in some romance novels!

The book didn't take itself too seriously!

I recently read a romance novel that referenced 'his eggplant emoji'. Like, 'his pants were tight but not so tight his eggplant emoji could be seen' or something along those lines.

Usually the tragic aspects of my character's' backgrounds never even come up ICly. They just colour how the characters react to things and their outlook and motivation. I find someone who is interested in poking in another PC's past is kind of rare.

Thread necromancy!

Is there a way to change the default location of Potato's logs? I keep mine over in subfolders in my Documents folder in Windows 10.

Most common:

1. Earnest scholar. Often shy. Sometimes stammery. Librarian types, but the good librarian that wants to help you find what you're looking for and helps empower people. Sometimes has a tragic/traumatic past, but is least likely to of the archetypes on this list.
2. Sociopath that can fake seeming normal at least most of the time. Tragic/traumatic past. Doesn't let people see the 'real her' very often, because it is scary. Straight-up murderer or at least completely capable of it.
3. Standoffish person, likely with resting bitch face. Guarded for reasons (see: tragic/traumatic past) and generally hiding a good person under all that. Cares more than they let on. Prickly. Rude to people to help keep them at arm's length.

Many of my characters are sarcastic.

Du Pepsi. C’est tout fucké.

I got annoyed at @investigate and @helpinvestigate being two different things yesterday, but at least now I know they're two different commands.