RPGs get funny the more people you have involved, reaching a kind of critical level of foolery with MMORPGs.  The basic old skool unit of RPG is a few bozos and a GM, or in video games, a few bozos you control vs. designed world/story.  In the original Final Fantasy you control the prophesied ‘warriors of light’ who have come to save the world, because crystals.  A small number of important bozos can be main characters without pushing believability too much, but what happens when you have thousands, running around doing dances?  When everybody has one black wing and one white wing and an eyeball that leaks golden sparkles and the death scythe of wunkred +20?

Perhaps in response to that vibe, I wanted to make a character that looked like an NPC in the one MMO I ever played, The Secret World.  Unfortunately the name I wanted was out, so I gave up.  Just as well, it’s all wasted time.  Fine Paper Gifts the NPC-turned-PC was not meant to be.

But as I’ve been turning over a story idea in my head, this feeling was coming back to me.  When you have adventures, romances, thrillers filling the libraries and virtual storefronts of the world to the brim, you’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of specialest people in the whole world.  Even when they try to cut against that grain, the circumstances surrounding them make it clear that isn’t true.  Just because you have brown hair doesn’t mean you’re not special, when all the sexiest dudes in the world want to make you their faerie queene, or when you have a certain set of skills that lets you save tha white house from nucular terrorizzin’.

This is a variation on “why write when there are already so many stories?  why does mine matter?”  Probably just the feels of any artist during some grey time between here and there, nothing deep.  But I’m kinda like this.  If I make another special bozo to launch like a solitary molecule into the specialbozosphere, they better not cloy.  They better not annoy.

Best way to avoid making people feel the teeming masses behind your characters, I think, is to have a better story.  You’re not going to out-batman Batman.  That problem solved, well, we just have to figure out how to tell a better story.  That shouldn’t be difficult, right?

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