DerpRavener

Apologies in advance if this was all rhetorical, and people weren't supposed to respond to it.

I think there's no shame in sticking with FFA.  There's a lot there that can't be done elsewhere, and it's no less valid a part of the site than any other.

After reading through this though, I am wondering: is there no way you could adapt any of the characters you're invested in, to fit with CC or WoE?  I get the idea of not wanting you use characters you aren't attached to, it's why I basically only used one character for a while, so with that in mind is it possible to make alternate versions of some of the characters, which preserve the really important bits?

This might be a bad example, as I don't want to make you change anything you don't want to change, but why is Avery an alicorn?  How does he use that, and what about his character requires that to function?  Him being Celestia's offspring would probably be hard to manage, but if the goal is to have a connection to nobility and having him go missing, that could probably be accomplished by having him as a long lost son of a noble family.

I think this approach has a lot of positive points.  Knowing the subject matter as described is a great way to get the most out of a character in combat.

The one thing I don't like about it, is that is has the potential to be kind of limiting.  Take me for example: I've never even been in a fist fight, and my only interaction with a gun is firing rifles at a range a few times (probably at fairly pitiful ranges too).  The closest I've gotten to something like combat is I've tried boffer fighting with friends.  So if I'm using my own experience, I'm basically limited to non-combatants.  Now, I could expand my proposed knowledge base with games I've played and movies I've watched, but if the goal is a more realistic approach to combat that presents its own problems.

My approach instead tends to focus on two questions: 'does this character's action make sense in context?' and 'how is my character affecting other players?'.  For the first question, I find that if you keep things vague, and then take into account things like traits of the other characters,  So using sample character you came up with: if our sniper is just shooting a training dummy, even from a long way away, I don't think a lot of people will demand to know what the windspeed was or how she accounted for bullet drop.  However, if you sniper is shooting at another character, this character might be very agile, and so either more time (posts) are needed to line up a shot or shots will miss.  Alternately, maybe it was previously established in the thread that the area everyone was in was covered in heavy fog.  Then, either from having a general idea of what fog is and/or seeing how other characters are reacting to it, we conclude that visibility is reduced, and our sniper has a harder time finding or aiming at targets accordingly.

The second question comes down to this: in roleplaying, but especially forum RP, it's about telling a story.  Even if two characters are fighting each other, their respective players are still working together to make the story happen.  They aren't competing, or at least not the way the characters are.  The goal is for everyone to have fun, and part of that is making and running characters that don't hamstring each other.  This is where the god-modding issue comes in: if you make your character too capable, (either on their character sheet or through their actions in a thread) you're not giving anyone the chance to play it out.  If our sniper ends up in a thread where a team of REA is trying to take down a rogue mage, and the moment the mage is seen she immediately shoots him and ends the fight, I don't think a lot of participants will leave that thread satisfied.  It's fine if she tries, but there has to be something to prevent her from landing a lethal shot (it could be she aimed too quickly and missed, it could be that she suddenly saw another threat, it could be that she fired but the mage had shielded himself).  I'm writing this quickly, so my specific example here might be a bit off, but the point is: when making a combat character, it's good to think about how they compare to others in combat situations, and to ask oneself whether the character will be fun for others or annoying.  And in many ways I think that's more important than accuracy.

It also hits me that a lot of things I've written here could be addressed in other parts of the guide, so some of this might be covered elsewhere.  Largely I'm writing it to provide another option, particularly if people want to try out a character outside their general knowledge or for dealing with characters who don't really have a real world analogue (i.e. combat mages).

Welcome back.

Disclaimer: gratuitous amounts of headcanon ahead, so this is all speculative and I'm not asking anyone to agree with all of it. Also, incoming wall o' text.

My first thought is that outlive is possibly being used in a few different senses here. What I am taking it to mean, for reasons I will discuss below, is that it means none of the mane 6 (and this probably applies to most characters as well) will outlast any of the others over the show's duration. All of them are around at the end, and presumably anything which happens or is implied to happen after the show is finished will be left unaddressed.

The reason I think this makes the most sense unless certain events happen (which themselves will be discussed further below) is that even if we assume Twilight's lifespan hasn't been lengthened, by all accounts I expect Spike still would, given that he belongs to a species which hibernates for centuries at a time. So simply assuming Twilight will pass on at about the same time as her friends doesn't really solve anything.

As an aside, I do think there are at least two broad types of alicorns, which I refer to as 'greater-' and 'lesser-' as a way to differentiate them. Basically, greater alicorns such as Celestia and Luna have domain over something (the sun and moon, respectively) while lesser alicorns such as Twilight and Cadence, though very powerful and having a particular area of proficiency do not have the same sort of sphere of influence. It's entirely possibly that the two types have different lifespans, though as mentioned above that wouldn't solve everything.

My final thought is that it's entirely possible that the whole mane six will become alicorns as the show progresses, which would solve the problem in an inverse manner (they would all have the same life span, just now it would be because all of their lifespans had been augmented). Personally, for some time now I've been operating under the assumption that Twilight was always being groomed for an eventual leadership position, and as the show went on it's seemed to me like the rest of the group had gotten more and more involved in that process. As such, it would not surprise me if the whole mane 6 were eventually ascended into alicorns (though this is by no means certain, either).

I'm not convinced it's as bad as it sounds. Yes, Twilight will likely continue to live while the friends of hers that we have come to know will pass on, but the thing is she will make new friends. And they will pass on, and more friendships will be formed, etc. So, to say that all of Twilight's friends will pass on is not to say that she will lose all her friends, and I could easily see the gains making the losses bearable.

I have lived through the deaths of several beloved, pet cats. Unless something goes catastrophically wrong, I will live through the death of at least one more, likely several. Maybe I'm being presumptuous in comparing the two cases, but I've found that the companionship provided to me and the good I can do for them generally outweighs the knowledge that I will have to watch their last moments, painful as they may be.

Absolutely, though I'll likely need a few days to scope out the idea and come up with characters.

On a side note, if I were to try and start something Skyward-Pirates-esque, would you might if I borrowed some concepts from this one? There would be a number of major changes, but it would be a good starting point. (Might not be for a while, I've got some other projects, but I figure I'll ask now.)

I'm actually kinda glad to hear that Skyward Pirates is over. While I enjoyed, it had started to move rather slowly, and it seemed like a very ambitious project. I don't really want it to end here, but if it is going to be discontinued I prefer getting some kind of official statement in that regard.

My one request might be to put this somewhere in the thread itself, just to let people know it isn't continuing.

It's a potentially interesting species, and I like how (in my opinion) it seems to match the flavor of the show to a degree.

That said, I think there would need to be more of a specific personality and maybe something of a history, vague as they'd be, before it would really function as a character. As it is, this seems more like it describes the general tendencies of the race rather than any one individual. Here you've created a species, rather than a character.