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.: Essays - Font Color="Red" (Editing Bios) :. |
Font Color="Red" (Editing Bios)
I am very hard on bios that are submitted to my game. That's both a statement of pride and some embarrassment. I am often accused of taking the game too seriously, and being too demanding of entrants. The reasons I do this are two-fold. For one thing, I genuinely feel I have wasted large chunks of my finite life span explaining my expectations at length in the rules when people ignore them. It's offensive, and it's rude, and when I encounter that kind of behavior, I respond in kind, which is usually the case with my more venomous bio rips. For another thing, I work very hard to keep the writing level and maturity high, because it makes the game run smoothly internally. I do not like to do hard moderating. Because it's hard. I do not like thinking of things for people's characters to do. I do not like following every little detail of the game in case someone is doing something crazy that has to stop. I do not like tiptoeing around sensitive arteests who can't handle criticism or take direction. I do not like disciplining players. I do not like mediating arguments. I find that making the gateway to the game hard to get through is a good way to block problems on the front end. The people who will make me work usually won't make it past an initial bio submission.
My philosophy of bio-vetting seems to be, while certainly not unique, somewhat rare in the X-Men RPG community, and I field a lot of questions about it from other admins and players, and especially from potential players who are working to get a bio in. Most questions relate to what I'm looking for and how I approach bios. What will get me to reject a bio, how do I explain my rejections, what makes me be civil about one bio and then a frothing lunatic about another, what sort of things am I hoping to see, how do I draw my inferences about a player's ideas and style from a bio...all that sort of thing. Since it's been a successful, though limiting strategy thus far, I thought I'd try to put down some of my ideas about how I work on bios, as a reference and a guide. The caveat is that I am very human, and many of my answers will be highly subjective, but I do promise that, just like when I go over a bio, I will try to be as objective as possible, and note when I know I'm being simply persnickety.
The first thing I do takes place before anyone submits a bio. Right from the start, I try to be as thorough as possible in setting down my rules and game design. This results in a rather high number of rules for my game. I have rules for joining, rules for creating a bio, rules for playing, and rules for interacting with others. I find many of them overlap, because often a rule about how to treat someone's character is also a rule for etiquette. In addition, I try to maintain a FAQ of questions I've been asked and difficulties I've run into as an admin corralling players. I try very hard to give a solid picture of the game's environment, IC and OOC, via these rules. I have storyline summaries, past and present. I have pre-coded bio formats. I keep the accepted player bios up for perusal and encourage players to update them regularly, adding another historical resource for the game. I offer essays (like this one) on character creation and RPG that can also be used to understand the process and help players get into my game. I can never cover all the bases, but I go all out in the effort. The goal is to make sure that players have all the components they need to get a bio past me. Failing that, I provide numerous ways to contact me in the event of a question that isn't answered or seems to be answered incompletely in the rules. And I have never faulted someone for asking me something that was already covered in the rules. I'm not going to lie and say there are no stupid questions, but I would always prefer to answer a quick, stupid question shot over AIM than spend twenty minutes writing a detailed explanation of why a section of someone's bio doesn't work. Bio-checking is time consuming, and it is unbelievably boring. I do as much of it as I can on the front end, and even if my efforts are ignored, it makes one thing about looking over a bio very easy. A bio will be rejected, period, if a rule is broken in it.
When checking a newly submitted bio, I read it three times. The first time through is strictly a visual scan. Presentation is a factor in how I grade. I offer pre-formatted bio templates ready for use, and give instructions on everything from filling out the bio to how the title of the submission post should look. I prefer the game's bios to be uniform so someone coming in will know where to look to find any information on any character or player. I scroll looking for incomplete work, out of place text, odd colors, and pictures, none of which belong in a bio. I also look for extraneous comments from the author, which may do more harm than good to the overall work, depending on the tone of the comments. Sometimes they can be unintentionally arrogant. I received one bio with instructions to "Approve, please," in the title, a small but unappreciated addition. Another had patronizing translations of contextually obvious Portuguese words used in the bio. I would never have rejected those bios outright because of these things, but I would not be human if I didn't admit they colored my initial approach to the bio, setting off my internal alerts that I should be looking closely at this person's work. I am searching for elite players, not elitists, because I already know the latter will not work well in my game.
After I do the first scan over the bio, I go back and read it over. I look at problems in each individual section and note anything that doesn't look right solely within that section and under the rules and guidelines I've provided for each and begin to write comments inside and under each section. I prefer to take things in small bites, although if there are major problems with a bio that extend to multiple areas, I will make a note at the top to explain, so that the author understands the thread of the comments. Sometimes I repeat myself, when I come across the same issue again. I may leave those in if I feel it's important; I may take them out if I feel like hitting it once was enough. I not only read each section for regular editing (grammar and spelling, word usage, structure); I also look for certain things in each section.
Our bios begin with some basic player information and then jump to the character information. The first details about the character should provide a simple overview of their identity, using a few markers by which we define people on the surface level. Some mods have a problem with ages, specifically with characters being too young. That has never bothered me. Others have problems with occupations being too outlandish. I don't care, so long as it's properly backed up with a well-planned history. My pet peeve is name. I cannot be clearer on my personal aversion to Y's and I's tossed in to names, as I expressly put it into my game rules. Someone once told me, when pressed to give a valid reason for spelling "prism" with a Y for a character's alias, "Well, English is a funny language." Not that funny. Ever.
Some common problems in basic character information: Female players are the major offenders in this area, usually in a rush to make readers understand how beautiful their character is. Players often submit incorrect height/weight ratios (invariably too low) for the described or commonly portrayed body type of the character...which is why I don't ask for weight, but some people just put it in anyway, for the fun of making me look it up for accuracy, I suppose. The word "slender" is perhaps the most misused word in bio creation, often paired with antonyms or near-antonyms, such as "curvy," "voluptuous," or "athletic." Shades of eye color and hair color do not really need to be poetic, and certainly should not be redundant—if the eye color is "cerulean," one need not add "blue" to the description. Hair should never, ever, cascade, or fall, or be in locks, if for no other reason than that those clichés are already overused to the point of being painful.
The detailed personal description is the first big chunk of the bio, with a two-paragraph demand. In the rules, I give multiple suggestions for what I'm looking for in this section, and broadly they amount to "as many details as possible." I'm looking for layered descriptions that complete a picture of what their character looks like, so that my character can interact capably with them, notice things about them and generally respond to their appearance. This section is almost always a mess of one kind of another. Often when someone has difficulty getting this section together, I will recommend that they go back to basics, get organized, and create a set of full paragraphs, each with a main idea and supporting sentences. No one has ever taken my advice to do so, no matter how much of a disaster the description was.
Some common problems in personal description: The biggest problem is always not getting enough information. Either it's a lack of what's actually been written, which is typically an easy issue to remedy, or it's a lack of information with precious few details sandwiched between overblown adjectives, which is a much harder fix. Sometimes a player just gets hung up on making sure everyone knows how cool his character looks, or how beautiful she is, and stops telling you what they look like and starts telling you how you're supposed to see them. Some hints that this is going on are flowery language, the aforementioned cascading hair, smoldering or bored expressions in their eyes, pouting on their lips, detailing their bra size, or more work describing their clothes and jewelry than their actual physical person. Sometimes they'll come right out and tell you how beautiful or handsome everyone thinks they are, rather than even bother getting bogged down in describing their character. Rewrites are the only cure I know for this stuff.
Family is a section that typically only comes into play on the third read-through and actual editing on the bio, and with the exception of checking the information for accuracy against the character's canon, or making sure any relatives being played are aware they have a sibling or parent entering the game, there's very little to do here.
The section on character powers is another story. The ability/mutation area of a bio is a breeding ground for bio rejections in any X-Men game, but what errors you find is really dependent on how you approach the information. I've found the best way to pick apart this section is to look at it from two aspects. First I have to look at it only from the aspect of the game. I ask if it breaks any of the game's rules on power levels or numbers of powers. I imagine how this power might function in play and whether it would necessarily impose on other characters. I look at any plans the player seems to have for the power and if that's valuable to the game or not. I look for objective metrics that describe the character's full range of abilities well enough so that anyone should be able to play against them. Next, I look at it from the technical side. I check into what the power is and how it is described. What they're calling the power should be accurate. The player should demonstrate some knowledge about what the character's power does. I don't necessarily need all the science, but if their character's power is something like controlling hormone levels in other people's bodies, I want to see some proof that they spent a few minutes on Google investigating what that would actually do.
Some common problems in the ability/mutation section: There are of course the players who have almost unlimited powers on their character, have too many powers, or don't give their character a power that's functional for the game. But the main issue I encounter is not enough appropriate metrics to help me understand what the abilities and limitations of the power are. I need to have the rough area of the character's effected zone, I need wattage, I need tonnage, I need speeds. Numbers are ideal. Sometimes the metrics are in less technical terms, and that can cause problems and possibly be more enlightening to a player's motives than they would prefer. I once worked on a submission for a character capable of creating illusions, and the player described her working area as "about the size of a stage." Not only was this not very informative, as stages don't have an average size, but it also got me wondering why she chose that particular metric, and what situation she was planning for that involved a stage, and what that had to do with my game. The other problem is that sometimes people will just not spend time doing research on what they want their character's power to be, or what they want to do with that power. When I see this, it's usually something that just sounds wrong, or confusing, and I have to further investigate the facts myself. Personally, I consider research to be the responsibility of the player submitting the bio, and when they throw that back on me by not being thorough in the first place, that reflects strongly on how independent and considerate the person is.
The weakness section is probably the one that makes me want to bang my head on the desk more often than any other. I have never seen two games with the same definition of a weakness. It is the biggest variable I find between RPGs. Some games demand that "normal human weaknesses," be included, and some demand that they be excluded. Some games ask players to also detail the character's weakness to certain kinds of attacks. Others have a certain number of weaknesses to meet. My game doesn't bother with any of that, and it's just personal taste. I define a weakness as being a debilitating character trait. This includes phobias, self-destructive or compulsive behaviors, diseases, mental limitations or handicaps, physical limitations or handicaps, physical mutations preventing normal human interaction, uncontrollable side effects of powers, and uncontrollable powers. This does not include limitations on the power itself, such as only being able to use the power at certain times, or under certain conditions. This does not include bad things that happen whenever the power is used so long as the character has the option of just not using the power and thereby avoiding the consequences of it.
Some common problems in weaknesses: The worst problem is confusion between what belongs in the weakness section and what belongs in the powers section. A lot of players have difficulty figuring out what qualifies as a weakness, for obvious reasons. So I get things like a recent submission in which a character's additional abilities to discern scents and hear faraway sounds were listed as weaknesses because they made the character also sensitive to loud sounds and unpleasant scents. Only the second half of that should have been in weaknesses, and the positive aspects should have been listed with her powers. Another issue is that I sometimes get debatable weaknesses like shyness, which may or may not qualify. I'll typically send the author back to fix this kind of thing, on the principle that if it's serious enough to be debilitating, it's more than just shyness, isn't it? And other times, players will go into overkill on their weaknesses—I once vetted a bio with no fewer than five phobias, some of which were in direct conflict with one another.
Personality is another big chunk of bio, and is probably second only to the history in how closely I look at it. In fact, I spend most of my time on the history and personality sections on my third run-through, when I look at the big picture to see if the entire bio is in agreement and start writing my edit. But when I'm still looking at the individual sections on their own, I examine the personality for canonical agreement, internal agreement and coherence, and of course, to see if the player has given me a complete understanding of what sort of person the character is. I'm also looking for Mary Sueisms, like a lack of personality flaws, or mindsets and traits that are incompatible with group play.
Some common problems in personality: The most prevalent issue I see is just too little information provided. And organizational issues plague this section of bios. Too often I have a sense that they just jotted down whatever came to mind without any regard for how it all fit together and then dropped a space in between a few lines to make them look like paragraphs. A mess like that is usually symptomatic of not understanding the character or not knowing how to describe their personality effectively, and that disorganization will create sense conflicts, things like saying a character is shy in one place and then aggressive in another. It also makes it easier to forget what was set down for the personality and deviate from those traits in other parts of the bio. Some players will fall into the practice of describing their character in terms of other people, how they treat others and how others see their personality traits. The focus should be on the actual thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the character.
History should always be the longest part of the bio, and it's the part that hangs people up the worst, naturally. I have several rules about creating history for characters that expressly limits the use of any canonical character to only the most miniscule ways, and a lot of people don't understand the purpose of it. I do that because it stops people from abusing my players by making up histories that never happened in the alternate universe of my game, and it tests the creativity and inventiveness of potential players coming in. I'm not looking for backstories that are totally realistic. Realistic backstories are almost impossible anyway, considering that at some point, the character had to develop a superhuman power, and who does that happen to? I am looking for backstories in which the characters all behave like human beings, you know, with genuine feelings and believable motivations and things like that. I'm looking for a progression of events with no unexplained gaps and good story planning.
Some common problems in history: The main problem I see in bio submissions is simply poor plotting. It takes a few different forms. The first is in unrealistic situations, and by that I mean specifically how people relate to other people. People should react rationally to the character, and should never just do things to move the story along. People shouldn't suddenly change without provocation in order to create a dramatic situation—loving parents and healthy families simply do not turn into abusive ones the instant they know their child is not normal, although they can certainly be misguided in their efforts to help their child. People shouldn't behave as if they know your character is the star. They won't ignore or accept your character treating them poorly just because that character is rich or beautiful (or obviously the star of the show). And I think I have read all the bios I can stand to read where someone attacks the main character out of insane jealously over them winning a contest, or being more attractive or wealthy or talented, or just being such an all-around wonderful person. If you want someone to attack your character, give them a reason to. If that includes having your character do something bad, suck it up and write it. The second way poor plotting comes up is in the resolution of each event, the outcome of a given situation being blown off because the author can't figure a more rational way through it. All too often, a villain appears in the story to create tension for the main character, and once they've accomplished their mission, they vanish, as if they know they're extraneous to the plot now, and everyone seems to forget they were ever there. Sometimes crimes are committed, against the main character or by them, and there are no legal repercussions. I've seen fights end with the character suddenly using their power for the first time, but no one getting medical attention or getting into any sort of trouble for their actions. A history should be a progression of events. And if one situation doesn't work out the way you want it to, you can't just drop it and hope no one notices. The point is flexibility. Transitions are hard. You can only make it harder on yourself if you're not willing to rethink what you had in mind when logical plotting fails you. If you're flexible, you can toss an idea if you can't figure out how to get there naturally, and then move in another direction that will keep the integrity of your characters. If you won't do that, you're stuck with leaving gaping plot holes or making characters behave weirdly to move the story along, and more likely both.
Once I've got an understanding of each section, I go back to the top and do a read-through of the bio for the third and last time, but instead of looking at the strength and functionality of each independent section, I'm looking at how the different sections connect. I refer to it, when I'm bio-checking, as "agreement." I'm looking at the character's name and the names of their family members to see if John and Marsha named their kids Joe, Bob, and Twilight, and if there's an explanation for that. I'm looking at the character's occupation and age and their history to see if they've done enough schooling for the job they're supposed to have. And I am looking at the description of the character's personality and making sure that he or she behaves according to those traits in the history. I want to see them acting on their flaws and strengths, or at least not doing anything directly contrary to them. I often read depictions of a good and caring person, and that same character goes on to mistreat others throughout their history, assaulting people, being jealous, narcissistic, or self-pitying, using their family for money or prestige, using their friends for companionship or sex, mocking everyone around them, or using their powers to do cruel things, all with little or no provocation, no repercussions, and no conscience. The reverse is also true; characters that really should act that way all to often do not, because the author starts to get nervous about them actually doing bad things, thinking the readers won't like the character anymore if they do something really bad. I'm also looking to see that things that happen to the character in the history are expressed in the personality, and are expressed accurately. If, for instance, your character comes from an abusive background, do a modicum of research on abused children and adults raised in abusive families. Don't guess at it, and don't use a Lifetime Movie of the Week as a source. And the cardinal rule of trauma in a bio is, if you don't want to be bothered with getting it right, don't saddle your character with it. The big picture has to make sense. In order for a bio to be complete, it all has to come together.
After all this, if there are major problems with a bio, I don't receive a reply, nine times out of ten. I typically leave a bio rip up for twenty four hours before deleting the thread itself if I hear nothing back from the player. In the two years that this game has run, we've had a handful of people come back and attempt a rewrite. Almost every person who did try to fix their bio eventually made it through the process. I don't believe I've ever seen a character concept that was not salvageable, although I admit have seen some player attitudes that turned me off so much I requested they stop submitting applications to my game. I am willing to help anyone if they are willing to work on it. I am open to discussion on my suggestions, but not debate; if I perceive something as in need of correction, explaining it to me isn't going to get us anywhere. I perceived it that way because that's how the bio is, so the bio needs to change, one way or another. The key is, again, flexibility.
Every admin has their own style. Each wants their game to be fun and run smoothly. This is just one way of doing it. And even knowing that I am uncommonly stringent about by bio rules, I know it is not impossible to get a bio past me. It does require that you be careful and conscientious about your work, that you communicate clearly and effectively, and that you edit thoroughly. However you prefer to build your character concept, make sure that it's coherent and multilayered, and that you're bringing story arc ideas and plotlines to the table with it. And just approach the game with the same kind of respect you'd want for your own work.
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