Quote:He did post a backstory. It involved someone selling him the moral equivalent of a fully-functioning Autobot Matrix on E-Bay, without including things like the onboard supercomputer or matter transmutation abilities in the sell description. It seriously pushed suspension of disbelief in ways that we had not pushed, and, *as far as I could tell*, were not particularly important to his character concept. I threw together an alternate, suggested backstory that, again, as far as I could tell, would preserve the things that he wanted preserved ('wavium Transformers! Character as Headmaster!) without mangling the world to fit him. If the backstory I wrote is sufficient for the character he wants, great. If it's not, then it, in turn, can be mangled until it is. The point is to let people have the characters they want in ways that fit into the world without breaking it. I'm trying to help work towards that.
*twitches violently* Well, that's one way to know when you're supposed to post a backstory instead of saving it for a moment in the future. When someone else scribbles it down, offhand.
On a different topic, I would point out that as soon as you remove the Haruhi manga/anime from the world, two things happen. First, the uncertainty dies. There is no chance that these are fans of the series slotting into place. There is not even any illusion that these *might* be fans of the series slotting into place. Anyone who knows the series will notice that no one ever mentions it, and know that this is fanfic rather than original - and thus will know about the Haruhi-as-God, etc. Second, it becomes Not Our World. This is no longer speculative fiction, or even, really, science fiction.
Rob: First, with respect to "criticizing characters before they appear", and "why did you say it if you knew how I would respond" and so forth, the point is to make sure that problems don't happen. Pointing them out before they happen is a cleaner way to do that than allowing people to make them first and then requiring fixes. In all honesty, it seemed from what you had written that you had not caught the thematic underpinnings of the world right. You wrote your entire introductory story without making your character deal with a single significant quirk. One of the major themes of the universe is "I have all this cool stuff, but my life is made bizarre by all of the wierdness that the cool stuff makes me deal with." You bought into the "cool stuff" aspect pretty quickly, but seemed to throw out the rest of that theme, citing various explanations along the way (Many of them boiling down to "I won the lotto, so I'm really really rich, so I can go mostly hardtech, and don't have to deal with all the junk that the rest of you less wealthy types do.")
Second, yes, subtlety can be funny - but handwavium is not subtle, or at least is not *only* subtle. Again, going with the idea of "my quirks are subtle quirks, and my flaws are subtle flaws" is a dodge on the "my life is made bizarre" aspect. If you want to do the subtle funny, *great*. Roll with it. Include some sort of unsubtle funny in there too, though - or if not funny, at least unsubtle.
Third, on loyalty. Loyalty is limiting, it's true. It's just not a disad. Look at the characters we're building. Loyalty here is generally two-way, and two-way loyalty is strength. It's still never a disad in bought minions, but that's another matter.
Fourth, the thought tht Kaboomite was wavetech - Well, you gave it a new name. Fundamentally, there isn't much in the way of new hardtech in this universe. It's just a few years in the future, and they haven't had near enough time to really digest wavetech trickledown into things like *chemistry* - particularly not when wavetech doesn't go boom in the first place. Also, you had it piercing and destroying a 'wavium hull when fired from a hardtech barrel. Moreover, it looked like your characters all assumed that this would be so - so it wasn't just a particularly thin raiderhull. It's pretty close to a truism in this world that when hardtech goes up against wavetech, force on force, the wavetech wins. The direct implication was that if the projectore wasn't wavetech, the projectile had to be. This is only *broadly* correct - a nuke will stil ruin just about anyone's day, for example, but I personally figured that if you were firing little baby nukes out of your gun, you'ld have said so.
Fifth, the nearsightedness bit was because the way you'd written them up looked like you were point-balancing them somehow. That's fine, if that's how you work (though a bit worrisome, see below) but I figured if you were, you ought ot bear in mind that nearsightedness wasn't worth much (actually, it just about pays for the "looks cute in glasses" that frequently accompanies it.)
Basically, it feels like you're trying to min/max the system, and that's not how this world is supposed to work at *all*. Even *thinking* along those lines - even having that sort of thing inside your goalspace - means that you won't really fit in right. We've got something of a reverse chic thing going on - the characters are cool because they're not cool. (It's been strained a bit in places, but it's there.) The quirks and disads and sheer bizarre randomness are what make the stories go. They're the *good* part. (It's one of the reasons, on a meta level, that we let the Professor get away with as much as we do - His life is composed *entirely* of sheer bizarre randomness. Also, his life goals basically boil down to "find out nifty things to do with handwavium and do them. Share them with other people, and convince those others that they are indeed nifty". These goals tie in neatly with our goals as authors, and the GM always lets you get away with a little more when you're the one who keeps pushing the plot where it's supposed to go. (That, in turn, is another one of those thematic issues. This world is pretty much *about* handwavium, and what people do with it, and how it affects their lives. You've built a character who's largely 'wave-poor. We include Dane characters from time to time for the contrast and the outsider view, but that's not what you're doing either. You've just made a Fen who happens to not use handwavium all that much, and that doesn't really fit all that well.))