2013 RP Retrospective

So! For some reason I've decided to go ahead and write a bit of an observation on how things went one way or another during RP, since I didn't have enough material to scrap, much less enough to make a cutting room floor! Instead you get my thoughts about how my characters developed.




Samus turned out to be in a much different direction than I anticipated. Originally, she was going to be my main character! As in "most-used". I think that's part of why both of my plots revolved around Metroid enemies - that, and ease of setup. Don't really need anything fancy, and Ridley was already hanging around anyway. But back to her being the main character. Now, one of the two reasons she ended up less used than she did was thanks to the inadvertent rise of General Cleft and Utsuho.
And the other, of course, was her hilariously, amazingly bad luck.
Seriously, it's like the tractor was deliberately out to sabotage her reputation or something! Offhand, I can think of seven times she lost her suit (BBB3, vs. The Mutants, Ogre, Ridley, the Society battles, Mikey's Shadow did enough damage to need replacement, and Dr. Satan fite trashed it. Pointless statistics! :eng101:) Of course, it's not just the running gag of her suit. There's also her two straight losses in fite club, having Utsuho pull her weight for most of the Ogre fight, the hilarious clusterfuck that was trying to infilitrate the Society base... I could go on and on. It's kind of funny when you think about, the intergalactic hero regularly performing far worse than everyone else. But at least in the end she still made a good support role, so that's a good result.


General Cleft surprised me spectacularly. I had just thrown him in at the last minute to bulk up the numbers, with no other good ideas that I wanted to use just then I went with my old go-to OC.
Then he goes and wins the brawl. What am I supposed to do? To be honest, part of why he ended up appearing less than he could have was a legitimate lack of ideas for him - I think the main issue was that he didn't really have much connection to the plots when he did appear, serving mostly as a hired gun. He also didn't really have anyone to bounce off of like Samus and Utsuho did with each other, so I had some trouble developing him beyond "PATRIOTISM" at first. He got sort of better about this near the end, what with involvement in OSI plot. Hopefully next year I can give the champ the treatment he deserves.


Utsuho. Holy crap, Utsuho. I just threw her in the lotto after Gooper suggested it thanks to me having mentioned her as an idea back when I was reading 2011 stuff. Had she not gotten into the Brawl, I'm fairly sure that woulda been the end of it, and she would have been absent from ZFRP forevermore! But she did, and she placed third of forty. After a performance like that (plus her fite club and slight casual stuff), I was definitely down for bringing her back, but she honestly didn't do much other than show up and beat down stuff. And interact with Samus.
Aaaand then Pit rolls a 21, catches her, and they pull off a team attack. Which they do again against Utsuho's sin and that results in the team fite. The speech post-fite sparked the Pitsuho jokes and I sort of ran with it and SK did too and by the end of the year I've wound up with Utsuho being my breakout character and Pitsuho being canon. Just goes to show that you never know what's gonna happen in RP, whether that be for better (as in this case) or worse. (Also, it turns out I can write cute, despite never having tried before. Or so popular opinion seems to be, hahaha!) I'm certain I'll have a lot of fun writing her next year, especially since I'm quite looking forward to her associated plot.


Victor was originally a considered idea for the BBB3! But I didn't really have any good way of doing stuff for a Red Mage, especially on such short notice. So I tossed him out and General Cleft in and that quite clearly worked out. I didn't really think much about it, until much later when I thought about adding in an Orvancian character. Pull up an idea, dust it off, and I've got a Red Mage who wants to become a master of magic despite Red Mages being master of none types.
Of course, Victor turned out to be another case of unexpected tractor results! Making skill rolls for his picking up magic when he started training under Kalisha resulted in a bunch of high rolls, and I just ran with it. Now Victor has some sort of innate skill at picking up magic, and I'm gonna be running with that next year too. Plus, thanks to the summoning he has a teammate who he can play off of - Frostbite's certainly been a useful addition in multiple ways. Overall, I think Victor can go places, and it'll help if next year Orvance RP is more alive (if we go with the idea of merging the topics). He was really hampered by coming in two-thirds of the way through the year.


Dr. G. Nerique was kind of a hilarious accident. All I did was give him Sheep's suggested name as a joke, and events play out such that... well, he's still minor. But he was originally supposed to be a one-off, so his becoming a recurring character in the medbay was certainly a surprise. Tom Turbine, meanwhile, was actually more of a development gag than anything else. He was one of my oriiiiiginal choices when I thought about RPing (all the way back when I was marathoning early 2011), so I felt like throwing him in as a cameo of sorts. Patchouli was a good enough choice for the Fite Commentary, even if she didn't skew that close to canon. Expect to see her back next year, but don't expect to see her outside the studio.

And that's pretty much it! That's my rambling thoughts, and look forward to seeing offseason shenanigans of my major characters whenever I get around to it!