Making a New Character and Fitting In

[CloudDancing]

"Who are you?! What do you want!? I hear voices! Why are they Welcoming meee?!"

[oldgrayrogue]

I too often send tells to folk I don't recognise, though less often now as I had some seem to take odd offense to a 'welcome to ALFA' PM a while back :/

Must be an elf thing =P

[lakhena]

I must have missed that advice about playing a female lesbian elf to fit in. I suppose it's not too late, since Kisindri hasn't hooked up with anyone yet... >.>

Just kidding. Really.

I have to say the OOC greetings are helpful, as well as the brief IC interactions. However, for my friends and me, it's been the consistent lack of other players at the times we play, besides our own little clique. We don't think the hours we're playing are that odd -- EST evenings. I'm more used to playing on nwn1 servers, and EST evenings are a prime time for most places. It just doesn't seem that way here, on TSM at least.

Has there been any consideration for allowing secondary characters or am I treading on a taboo subject here? It would be great to have two PCs, on different servers, given that the small population of ALFA players is spread out across three servers now. I think that would solve some of the frustration I have at the moment.

Barring that, my pc will be moving to a more populous server, per the advice of a multitude of players here.

[Castano]

I too often send tells to folk I don't recognise, though less often now as I had some seem to take odd offense to a 'welcome to ALFA' PM a while back :/

Must be an elf thing =P

no that's an ******* thing (7 letter word). Whoever is doing this please stop. My housecat breaks my immersion more often that any tell

[Ithildur]

TSM's not quite as US player friendly these days Lakhena. Half the regulars are euro's, and the other half are high lvl/long established PCs that you may or may not have enjoyable interactions with on a regular basis.

Your best bets are OGR, DanielM's new toon, Miz's hin, and a couple of others that are US players that aren't superheroes yet. That's not a very long list, so I understand if you feel the need to move to BG, although as I hinted, if you stick around TSM you (and fen/lyth/fasthd if those guys decide to return) may have plenty of DM attention soon. I know there's folks like Dergon, Boggs, JLM, and a couple others DMing regularly on TSM now; if you exercise a bit of patience and use resources available you will find game on TSM these days. It's not like it was last year.

[johnlewismcleod]

*points up*...what Ith said.

[maxcell]

The server count thingy in the upper left of this page is your friend. If you dont like logging into an empty server and rping alone it is somewhat accurate in reporting the server occupants

[Ithildur]

IRC is better. But I think Lakhena is allergic to IRC

[johnlewismcleod]

Many of us are, Ith

[Ithildur]

Aw, come on, it's not 5% as bad as what it once was back in the day.

And it looks like Lakhena finally got some game with other peeps tonight.

[Sidhe]

and the other half are high lvl/long established PCs that you may or may not have enjoyable interactions with on a regular basis.

This pretty much highlights a problem if you ask me.

[Blindhamsterman]

and the other half are high lvl/long established PCs that you may or may not have enjoyable interactions with on a regular basis.

This pretty much highlights a problem if you ask me.

Elaborate on that? or are you just 'shadow owling' as Veilan said previously?

[oldgrayrogue]

and the other half are high lvl/long established PCs that you may or may not have enjoyable interactions with on a regular basis.

This pretty much highlights a problem if you ask me.

Elaborate on that? or are you just 'shadow owling' as Veilan said previously?

Bogs can speak for himself, but IMO part of the reason new players feel like they have nothing to do and no one to do it with is because there are not a lot of new PCs starting out with them. We have quite a few PCs who are long in the tooth so to speak. That's not a knock on them, they have been successful. Its just the reality of the situation. If the main or only source of "new" PCs is newly joined players, new players have less to do and less players to do it with. Higher level PCs probably are not going to get involved in low level content for various reasons. IMO turnover of PCs is a good thing. Alternatively, allowing an alternate PC could address this, but we all know the reasons why we don't do that. Frankly, I'd love it if we offered a PC "sabbatical" so some of our high levels could try out a new concept. It would have to be of limited duration, at the end of which the player chooses which PC to play and which to retire. Who knows, high levels might end up choosing that new concept over old reliable in the end.

[paazin]

Has there been any consideration for allowing secondary characters or am I treading on a taboo subject here? It would be great to have two PCs, on different servers, given that the small population of ALFA players is spread out across three servers now. I think that would solve some of the frustration I have at the moment.

There's been discussion of allowing an Underdark character and Surface character, for those interested.

I'd suspect a plurality of people would support that idea.

[Ithildur]

and the other half are high lvl/long established PCs that you may or may not have enjoyable interactions with on a regular basis.

This pretty much highlights a problem if you ask me.

Elaborate on that? or are you just 'shadow owling' as Veilan said previously?

Bogs can speak for himself, but IMO part of the reason new players feel like they have nothing to do and no one to do it with is because there are not a lot of new PCs starting out with them. We have quite a few PCs who are long in the tooth so to speak. That's not a knock on them, they have been successful. Its just the reality of the situation. If the main or only source of "new" PCs is newly joined players, new players have less to do and less players to do it with. Higher level PCs probably are not going to get involved in low level content for various reasons. IMO turnover of PCs is a good thing. Alternatively, allowing an alternate PC could address this, but we all know the reasons why we don't do that. Frankly, I'd love it if we offered a PC "sabbatical" so some of our high levels could try out a new concept. It would have to be of limited duration, at the end of which the player chooses which PC to play and which to retire. Who knows, high levels might end up choosing that new concept over old reliable in the end.

Right, there's no need for you guys with high lvls to get defensive. I don't think anyone is being accusatory towards high lvls in the sense of 'You guys are all snobby SOB jerks if you don't go out of your way every time you log in to babysit a newb'.

I think people understand it's just the way it is sometimes; the high lvls are more often involved with ongoing plots/hooks/events and it's understandable if they can't always go out of their way to interact with the new guys. Your situation currently is a perfect example Blindy; I'm sure you'd be glad to RP with Lakhena's elf but your guy is tied up in a DM plot and not free to do so. Even if they're not necessarily literally physically unable to interact with the new folks, often their established situation/circumstance may mean it's less likely. Not to mention the bit OGR mentioned; for any number of good reasons high lvls might choose to not participate in the adventures that low lvls go on.

I'm actually starting to come around to the idea of having a single 'limited playability' alt character in ALFA after seeing this situation; none of our PCs are [edit: oops, fixed] able to interact with Lakhena and company currently because we were fortunate enough to get involved in an ongoing weekly thing. I was concerned enough for the new players' sakes that I actually considered dropping out so I could better interact with the new folks. In the end I opted for what was most IC, trusting that the people that will enjoy ALFA will stick around regardless of whether I'm available to RP with them or not, but it wasn't an easy choice, and it may have possibly cost us a player or two along with a bizarre DM/player interaction playing a part as well...