The Mare in the Moon OOC

Alright, loyalty switching to generosity, and going to switch combat to aoe based.

Hmm, I suppose the Mane Six being regulated to background pony status means they won't have quite the influence they do in the show? Or am I wrong?

No that's about right. Instead, you guys're going to have what minor influences they have. Though, Pinkie's still primary party pony.

Right now I can easily include Lightfoot's character into the Summer Sun Celebration as a guardspony, and can get the NPC (Thoughtful Heart) to visit him readily.

Dusk Raven wrote:Well, I'm probably going to be making a... I dunno, I'm going with something nature based, lots of woodman skills. Not sure about race or gender, probably male earth pony. Hmm, should we be aiming for the same racial proportions that there are in the show? (Gender ratio's probably going to be a lost cause, heh)

Well, I'm making a female earth pony, because none of my characters (changeling, pegasus, dragon, ancient spirit bound to the material plane, bat pony) are female, so it might not be that much of a lost cause, although an opposite of the mane six where all the ponies are stallions could be an option worth exploring...

If you don't mind me making a suggestion for your nature character, I'd suggest some build involving Brawn and Horse-Sense. Athletics is always nice, and Endurance helps with the kind of hardships in the wild, while Persuasion is useful (especially if you want Animal Speak but not Animal Magnetism), Perception is Perception, and most GMs will allow Streetwise checks to identify creatures and natural features and whatnot. As long as you don't get stealth checks thrown in your face all day, you should be fine...

Nature, or... well, we've already got two pegasi, so I'll rule out the weather-crafter route.

My main problem is having some role or personality overlap with the mane six... my own character is going to have some overlap with Fluttershy, for instance, thanks to his animal affinity...

Hmm, as for combat, I think I'll go the conjuror route. Fits with my character's theme... which will, in essence, be about finding strength and purpose in friends... for mine is a pony who, though talented with animals, feels useless without them...

Well, like I said. You can have some overlap as long as you're not a direct genderbend or something.

Your guy? Maybe he's a vet or something instead of a zookeeper (Comparatively) and maybe personality wise he's a lot different.

Dusk Raven wrote:My main problem is having some role or personality overlap with the mane six... my own character is going to have some overlap with Fluttershy, for instance, thanks to his animal affinity...

Hmm, as for combat, I think I'll go the conjuror route. Fits with my character's theme... which will, in essence, be about finding strength and purpose in friends... for mine is a pony who, though talented with animals, feels useless without them...

I agree with Logan. Don't worry about overlapping personalities. The Mane Six cover a broad spectrum of positives personalities, so it's hard to make a character which doesn't incorporate some traits from them without making your character , especially when the one of the core mechanics of the system that defines your character is based on the personality traits that define them. If it helps, have a quick look at this TVTropes List of Characters as Device and pick two or three that look good...

I do agree with that conjurer build for combat though...

It also doesn't help that I'm making sure you guys have "Shows and values X" as a prominent enough personality trait to be accuratley represented as an element of harmony.

LoganAura wrote:It also doesn't help that I'm making sure you guys have "Shows and values X" as a prominent enough personality trait to be accuratley represented as an element of harmony.

Well, I've got that part down. My character's true to themselves and their ideals, and will fit as Honesty nicely, I feel.

Awesome!

Might be good to put down my personal idea of the elements.

Magic: Wether magic like unicorn magic, pegasi magic, or Earth pony magic, of the magic of Friendship or Love or whatever.
Honesty: Exactly what Dusk said
Loyalty: Being there for, defending, or wanting to protect a person, or a cause.
Generosity: Willing to give something up for another, time, money, something physical.
Kindness: Empathy and compassion
Laughter: Optomism, positivity, joy and such.

Maybe all of us can say our opinions?

Well, had I taken Magic, the explanation would have been Science, so if the explanation of magic is, well, magic, might as well take Laughter instead...

Well, the primarily thing is that Magic is, well, Magic. It's hard to have it be anything but. You could probably do Magic as science if you do it well.

Well, I think the element of Magic is "The spark that brings the other five together." What that means is open to interpretation.

That's a good point. I did Magic involving the element alone, rather than as a whole. That fits the "Leadership" thing at the end of S3 better too.

Like, Magic is the one who gets the ponies together...

You know, I could quite conceivably go for the Generosity route, since as I'm building my character I seem to keep going for "assist" skills. I'm getting the picture of a character who failed to live up to his parents' hopes, and sees little skill or value in himself... only in assisting others.

Without Making colter change his character again, that to me feels more Kindness than Generosity.

I'll finish my character (and write the backstory) tomorrow, but for now, here is how she is currently looking. Everything can be subjected to change of course, but it's good to get it out there for opinions...

Ooops, I didn't realize Colter had taken Generosity, never mind that, then.

I might be interested, but something you said stands out:

So no Element of Magic becoming a princess Alicorn. That's still Twilight's destiny.

So, Twilight is not one of the elements, is not a main character, is not particularly heroic or productive, and, if I understand what you said about sideplots, will pretty much be ONLY doing the actions that make things go horribly wrong... but she still becomes an alicorn princess at some point?

It's mostly the fact that Twilight got her cutie mark and was being trained in all ways shaped and form to be the Princess. The segregation with the campaign and the show comes in the first episode, where instead of Twilight going, it's somepony else- though the warning is still told and discovered.

So Twilight's still Celestia's student, and is still being taught Magic... Just she isn't told to learn friendship until a bit too late.

So she doesn't quite have the magic of friendship, but is still has such latent magical energy that she's Celestia's student anyway?

Kinda makes me wonder if the Mane Six will be having adventures and such wherever we're not.

Meanwhile, I think I could best describe my character as a druid. Not just in the sense of affinity with animals, but also in the sense of having empathy with the land itself. Each race has their own magic, after all, and the earth ponies have such ineffable abilities as Applejack being able to buck a tree and make the apples fall into neat little piles, and Pinkie Pie being Pinkie Pie. My own character will have an... odd sort of connection to the Earth itself. I'd almost call it shamanistic. How I'm actually going to represent this I know not yet...

Holy shit if you can do that well I'd freaking love your character.

I suspect it's also partially because we're trying to avoid expies of the canonical M6, even if their adventures never happen. It's still kind of Twilight's arc, even if she's not a main character here.

As for me, I think I've got the idea for a fresh PhD student that's travelled out to Ponyville to do her thesis on something like The Resolution Of Low Intensity Non-Celestial Heavenly Bodies Using Optical Interferometry. Rents somepony's loft to get a good view of the night sky, spends all night meticulously recording results and reading journal papers, first response to Eternal Night: "YES! Suck it mules this little pony's getting her PhD! Oh, er, I mean oh nooooooo..."

So, on the conjuror tangent, something so amazing came up I simply had to share it.

So, I wanted to take the Conjure Fire Giant talent, simply because having something on the players' side that's physically more powerful than a PC sounds pretty awesome. At first I simply intended to call a powerful animal like a bear, but then I decided I should summon an elemental of some sort. We already have the Timber Wolves, and I wondered what another animal puns I could use.

The answer was as simple as it was terrible. Earthwyrms.

The enemies, and the ground will tremble should my character get 9 PiPs in battle.

About my earlier thing, Twilight apparently got the wings from stealing some energy from the elements, hence my wonder about how exactly she's still got the same thing in her future...

I guess my issue is that while I like the idea of the other five hanging around Ponyville, doing their things, "Ultra-powerful magic user, protege to the 'big good', and apparently fated successor to an ageless princess" are not things that fit well into the background (ESPECIALLY in an RPG) - they're either qualities for 'that one character' from one of your players, or a really good choice for an antagonist for the players to totally annihilate at later levels - couldn't we JUST have Twilight as Ponyville's (still magically powerful) librarian? (Same exact backstory otherwise, she simply had her entrance exam one day BEFORE RD's first Sonic Rainboom and as a result, didn't get discovered by Celestia.)

Either way, this seems like a decent enough campaign upon which to unleash my first character made: Coppertop Crackle
I figure he could be at the festival for some advertising, maybe he volunteered to provide some equipment... or maybe he was just hired for his perceived organisational skills.

Admittedly, I might need to retool the combat...

I think you're fixating too much on Twilight. I figure the point is that they still exist as people, they're just not the focus, so to speak. Like Twilight still comes to Ponyville, she still sets up shop in the library, she still gives her warning, but she's just entirely unimportant - it's not that big a deal, one of Celestia's previous faithful students (see IDW Mini-Series #1) is living quite comfortably incognito and right up until her coronation Twilight wasn't even a blip on the Canterlot High Society radar.

The whole reason they still exist is to avoid the need to figure out 'Wonderful Life' contingencies. So AJ still exists, she still owns Sweet Apple Acres, Sweet Apple Acres still exists and every year they run out of cider before Rainbow Dash can get any, much to her chagrin. It's just not their stories.