Activity Check Results / HMD

[lucetimods]

The results for the Activity Check are in. Please note that the following characters were either inactive, didn't post to the activity check, or failed to speak to a moderator about their activity. Also added were characters who have dropped recently, for your convenience.

Copy-paste the following here:

manage_circle del_read absolutewill manage_circle del_read brokenpromise manage_circle del_read chibifalenas manage_circle del_read devilsuppressor manage_circle del_read eyesofremorse manage_circle del_read faithfulstudent manage_circle del_read fowlplots manage_circle del_read gungho manage_circle del_read hark_a_suicune manage_circle del_read silpheed manage_circle del_read smackmywitchup manage_circle del_read tenerezza manage_circle del_read tibias manage_circle del_read trashed manage_circle del_read silpheed manage_circle del_read holyknights manage_circle del_read airbound manage_circle del_read sharpness manage_circle del_read penstabby manage_circle del_read chainedraven manage_circle del_read bereavement manage_circle del_read nikori manage_circle del_read divinacommedia manage_circle del_read mythmaker manage_circle del_read burningdownfate manage_circle del_read powdersup manage_circle del_read happierdays manage_circle del_read selfinteresting manage_circle del_read dogboy manage_circle del_read thelittlemacthatcould manage_circle del_read cladinthedark manage_circle del_read skyborne_mage manage_circle del_read former_third manage_circle del_read kindhearted manage_circle del_read abetteryoda manage_circle del_read handmotions manage_circle del_read returnthyname manage_circle del_read fearless_leader manage_circle del_read reversible manage_circle del_read illusionarymoon manage_circle del_read consultsdetective

A number of you passed the activity check, but barely. (You know who you are.) Try to pick things up, as it's no fun to character-squat.

If there are any mistakes here, please let us know! Additionally, if your character was removed and you're still active, feel free to appeal to one of us about keeping your character. However, please remember next time to stay active and post to the Activity Check. Thank you!

And as always:

HMD

How's My Driving?

This is a crit post for both the community and game and for your characters. If you have something you'd like to see us improve upon with the game, PLEASE TELL US HERE! Anon commenting is on, but if anything gets really nasty there will be warnings and thread-freezing. This isn't required but everyone is encouraged to take advantage of the advice of your fellow players!

Just some pointers: no taking cheap shots, no dragging personal issues into things and for the love of all that is wise and great, please double check your replies and comments before posting them. Sometimes a change in phrasing can make all the difference between a helpful tone and a condescending one.

ALSO ALSO: We'd like to clarify that HMD means HMD- which means it's okay to have both good and bad crit. Some people have expressed concerns about posting good/bad crit when a character already has bad/good crit posted. We'd like to encourage you guys to do it anyway! You can drive well or badly, and even good drivers make mistakes. So give it a try \o

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

First, I’d like to say how much I appreciate the depth of background you’ve put into Adele. She’s been an incredibly active and involved character in the game, and her threads are always active and interesting. There is, however, an issue that I’ve noticed with her for several cycles now and I wanted to bring it to your attention since I believe you have the ability to take a good idea just that one step further. OCs are challenging for many reasons, but one of the most difficult is that it can be hard to maintain internal consistency when you create the rules. It’s easy to find familiarity or change the nature of the character to get the desired result in a thread and I’ve noticed this tendency with Adele. In the spirit of making this critique as helpful as possible, here are three issues you can check on her consistency with:

- Her paranoia. One example of where I can see this needing to be examined is when she meets new people. I’ve noticed that she can often bond very quickly with new people that she meets, even if only superficially. Either this is contradicting the paranoia you've established for her or there’s not enough introspection for us to figure this bond as somehow a front or a mask for the deeper issues. Here are some other questions worth considering: Is her paranoia applied across the board? Is it applied to male and female characters equally? When does it surface? What are its triggers? Is the paranoia rooted in fear of being hurt emotionally or fear of being hurt physically, and how does that affect her?
- Her medical professionalism. You’ve chosen for Adele to be a trauma surgeon and surgeons work in very different, specific skillsets than general practitioners and doctors practicing internal medicine, don't they? But in Luceti I’ve seen her dispensing drugs and while I recognize we don’t have an official medical aparatus in Luceti, why does she feel comfortable with this? Is she advancing her medical knowledge in the game to make her into more of a general practitioner and psychiatrist? What effect, if any, does her hippocratic oath have on her willingness to kill? In a situation where triage is required, how does she make calls as to who should be treated first and when; is it by the severity of the injury or by other necessity? Would a competent medical professional use a drip IV to self-medicate for sleeping problems, or is this ‘slipping’ something that’s supposed to be noticed and call her competency into question by her coworkers and others?
- Her civilian status. Recently I’ve seen Adele claim that she is someone who does not know how to fight back. This contradicts her behavior during the Kin’coran event, particularly her behavior when Cloud Nine was attacked. Some things to take into consideration when applying this qualifier to her: Can she shoot a gun and hit someone squarely between the eyes from a few feet away? Can she swordfight? Has she participated in life-and-death situations? What does it take to change someone from a noncombatant to a combatant? How does her paranoia play into this? How is she beginning to see herself and the changes she’s made in Luceti?

If you create firm guidelines and stick to them in all elements of her character, as you have in externally realized characters from other canons, it will strengthen your roleplaying and make your character even more well-rounded. So I hope you evaluate some of these questions and look forward to seeing more in the future!

[fleurdesel]

Thank you for bringing this to my attention; I have felt that in continuing her development in the village I've lost a bit of what made Adele who she was in the beginning, not through what she's done and experienced but simply because that particular thread has slipped away. It's a large part of why I sent her on a mission for two weeks, so I could go over and read through her earlier threads and find what's been missing. The paranoia in particular. If anything in the more recent months she should have been more worried for her own safety and those she cares about after the Apep plot, due to the fact she was off and on bombarded by worst case scenarios in which they died. I played up the fear, but not the anxiety as much as I should have. Her paranoia has mostly been situational- that whatever happens will happen in the worst way possible, that people will some how find out about her time with Unger and what she did in his compound without her trusting them enough to speak of it.

I've been lax in her introspection as of late in favor of quick, concise threads and a great deal of what I should have been putting there has been lost, and changed the way she behaves around newer characters. While she's a bit more comfortable with those she's recently met she is not as trusting offhand as I've made her to be, and I'm taking steps to sort that out. I think it's less that she's no longer paranoid and more that she's gotten better at hiding that paranoia now, and I really need to put that in her introspective text to bring it across. This is a failing on my part.

In regards to her tasks at the clinic: Outside of the surgical ward she is not very comfortable practicing internal medicine since it's been so long since her medical residency. Adele went through the same four years of medical school as any other medical professional and learned about diagnostics and treatment. I wouldn't expect her to be able to recall all of that right away after having done specialized work for many years, but there's no reason why she wouldn't be able or qualified to dispense generalized medical treatment especially of a first aid variety. She'd been working closely with people in the ER all the time, so she would be way up on that aspect. While it's not her usual skillset and while he was yet in the village she relied heavily upon consultations with Willock for clarification and brushing up on what she may have been fuzzy on. After he left she has come to place a similar level of professional trust in Ami, because they are general practitioners and would be more up to date in their knowledge. I've attempted to limit what she does outside of surgery in the village because of this discomfort- and if that has not come across plainly that is entirely my fault. I'll take steps to make it plain in the future.

Most often when she's working her clinic shifts she's reading through the literature that Law has compiled there for reference purposes to learn what she'll need to treat those in the village, and has been spending a good chunk of her free time researching every option available for her treatment of Gregor. She is in no way the sort of doctor he needs, but she is the one he came to for help. She feels obligated to do what she can for him and delayed treatment until she was informed enough to offer what she has- and she continues to do research for his case specifically. Were anyone else that she did not know or care for as much come to her with a similar problem she would turn them away. It's not her area and she is painfully aware of it.

The only recent situation when more than one wounded was apparent in the village was the most recent with Loki and Clint Barton- the call she made there as to who to treat was made under emotional duress and the knowledge that she would not be able to keep herself from being emotionally compromised if she went to Clint. While at the time he meant little to her as a person- he greatly resembles Rick Doyle who she cared for deeply. Seeing him wounded like that would effect her ability to treat him- so she chose Loki. In a situation where there is no emotionally compromising elements- treatment goes to the most severe injuries first and foremost. The IV situation was a place for someone to question her ICly, I've been asked about it before on plurk and I'd best put my answer here as well: with her patients Adele takes the care to treat them properly and with every consideration for complications. She takes no such care with her own health when she is under extreme stress. The past few months she's been more and more reckless and this was one other instance in which she took a risk simply for the possibility of having one night without night terrors. Questioning her on this would force her to take a look at her situation in a more critical light and I would love the opportunity to write that out.

Whether or not she's willing to kill is an entirely situational ordeal- prior to her situation with Unger in her canon, she hadn't because of that oath. Due to her experiences there and the fear she had not for her own life but of the boys she was treating and her own family, she set it aside in order to kill. It was a traumatic and bloody experience that has effected the way she looks at it in the village- if it must be done? It must. If someone else's life is on the line and in danger because of X person and X person will not be reasoned with and will in fact kill them? She has no compunctions over taking the shot. This leads into the Kin'coran situation and your next segment of questions.

Whether Adele is a noncombatant proper any longer and whether she considers herself one is a question I'm still trying to sort out. She has and will continue to think of herself as a civilian, that even if she knows to defend herself and protect herself that it is not her place to fight because of her lack of experience. When she does fight it's when she sees no other option available. She knows to shoot- has taken time at a range in her own world for stress relief and at the battle dome in a simulation to keep her aim as precise as she can manage. And while she will never be on par with a military sniper or an individual that has had longstanding training in the use of guns hitting someone from a few feet away, when Archie's life was at risk, was a shot she could and was willing to take. Were Archie not injured in the situation, she would not have fought.

She has trained with Jack Sparrow, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and made use of notes left over from the AU event by the version of herself far more familiar with Makashi than she can remember offhand. Most of her afternoons before her clinic shifts are spent drilling what she knows in the Battle dome. That level of experience, as little as it is, versus a tired, angry, unorganized mob with help on the way combined with a propensity for fighting dirty and using every resource available to her to not die. In her canon she's handled her experiences with the criminal underworld well enough and the night before she arrived in the village- where she had to fight or die to get to Unger's office. And she handled that poorly, even if she got there with enough blood left in her to take the few shots available to her. She's more accustomed to life and death situations since she's come to the village by proxy than personal experience- as it doesn't happen often. And when it does she tends to come out worse for wear because she's not an experienced combatant. While she may be capable she is not at all of the mind to go out looking for a fight. More often than not she would rather avoid it.

I think that's the key, there. It's a question of mentality and experience that would push her from one side to the other- and she hasn't had a reason to think of herself as anything other than a woman that knows what end of a sword goes in the other person rather than a fighter proper. Even with her paranoia urging her to learn more ways in which she could protect herself in a combat situation, it's the reason she's been learning as much as possible in the time she's been in the village.

I don't think she's stepped back enough to take a critical look at herself and what she's done in Luceti until very recently- during her two week mission, and she's still sorting out what she's noticed of her own habits and actions. She's going to be fairly quiet and contemplative for the next few weeks- the draft won't help but it'll give her work, and in November I've a player plot that might help her learn to cope with things in a more healthy manner.

…

Now that the tl;dr is over I'd like to thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. While she's developed in her time here I do want to remain true to the nature of the character as I apped her months ago, and having these points to consider will help me a great deal with consistency. I appreciate you taking the time to offer this critique and to give me incredibly useful pointers and questions to keep in mind while I write her. Thank you.