Costache Mircea

[Costache Mircea]

The Character Sheet:

Race: Human.

Physical Description:
6"00 and 197 lbs, muscular body. Has long, brown and curly hair, grey eyes, slight 8'o clock beard.


Possessions:

Long, black trenchcoat, along with a cloth hat and a dark grey scarf he uses to cover his face while "hunting". An iron dagger as small as his forearm, an iron crossbow, a wooden stake, two silver crosses, one he carries around his neck on a chain and another he keeps in his trenchcoat's pocket, a bag of wooden bolts with silver tips. Costache also always carries a clove of garlic in one of his pockets.

Powers or Strengths:

Courage: There's one thing Costache avoids more than the fangs of a beast; it is fear, though he can't completely run away from it, or even keep it away, he musters up and gives fear a slap to the face, by acting anyways. He thinks fear is a recipe for disaster when dealing with danger.

Determination: Once he starts a hunt and has enough reasons to believe he's hunting the right person/thing, it is extremely hard to convince him to stop, he will generally stop at nothing to get the job done, even if it required extreme conditions and sacrifices, heck, he would keep the hunt going on even if he was left with no arms and legs.

Logic: Costache has a logical mind, he can link clues together, squeeze information out of people just by chatting them up and putting everything together, he knows everybody leaves a clue of themselves everywhere they go and in everything they say, be it voluntary or not.

Good shot: When he focuses, Costache can either load his crossbow up to three times faster than usual, giving him an over the edge, but inaccurate shot every two seconds, or can take his sweet time to deliver an accurate shot.


Weaknesses and Flaws:

Courage: Costache's best strength, is far from being the most loyal, when courage turns into stupidity, when he's risking his life and the lives of others just to eliminate one small threat, the very thing that makes him a good fighter and saves lives, can be his undoing. Costache just doesn't know to live to fight another day, when somebody first told him that proverb, he calmly replied: "There's no time to live, only to fight."

Determination: Again, one of his best strengths proves to be one of his worst flaws, his inability to let go, to accept defeat, may put in risk hundreds of lives, including his, who would've thought need for accomplishment could have such a harmful and dangerous effect on someone.

Logic: When something inexplicable, supernatural, unsolvable, illogical happens, that's what really weakens Costache, the thought that something cannot be explained, that he can't analyse a situation to know best how to approach it, irritates him, distracts him from his objectives, makes him vulnerable.

Tiredness: Costache spends the night hunting, or looking for a hunt, and the days preparing for what's to come, setting up traps, planning his approaches, training.. The few hours he gets to sleep everyday are not enough to keep Costache in good shape, most of the time this can have negative impacts on him.


History:

"That night, that horrible night, I remember it as if it was yesterday, everything seemed so peaceful, so calm, the weather wasn't too bad, we were preparing for the usual evening meal. We thought we were safe, hidden away from all of this, I had never left our farm, I didn't even suspect things like those could lurk outside of our gates, I didn't even think something like that would even exist.
That night, when my sister didn't return from the farmhouse, I could have expected anything, anything but this. Mom and dad left me in the garden and went inside looking for her, I remember the screams that followed, the agonizing screams. I didn't know what was happening, didn't want to know, I ran as fast as I could, as far away as I could, I spent the night outside, in the cold, the dark, the unsafe. Heh, unsafe, funny name for a place that was at that moment, safer than my room.

When I got back the next morning, I had to witness the mutilated corpses of my family, I was 8! Can you imagine? 8! These beasts didn't care who they were hurting and killing, they just want their sweet blood.
That night, I swore, I swore to God that I will have my vengeance, and that I will do my best to keep these beasts from slaughtering another peaceful family. And I WILL have my vengeance, because nowadays it's the other way around, now, it is me who wants their blood, and it is me who is careless about which one of them I am hurting or killing, it is me who is merciless towards these.. Things. I am doing it for myself, I am doing it for my family, I am doing it for justice, in the name of God. I am sleepless so that others may sleep, I am hunting so that innocents are not hunted, but most importantly, this is a personal Vendetta."

[Stella]

As hilarious as that movie is, you should probably not use those pictures for your avatar/physical description. When people recognize things so immediately from popular media it brings them out of the setting. It's the same reason why we don't allow anime avatars.

I'd also like more of a physical description than the two sentences you've provided. Describe him as if you do not have a picture of him. I can think of a hundred types of people with brown hair, grey eyes, and stubble.

Crosses and other references to a Christian god are really not allowed here, as Christianity as we know it does not exist. The cross would not be used as a religious symbol. Most people worship one of the Changers and the proper noun "God" is usually avoided and replaced with "Changer." This is, again, to avoid bringing people out of the setting.

So, does Costache hunt vampires? Vampires in this setting are rare, and if he hunted them he would probably know that garlic doesn't do anything, driving a stake through one's heart only paralyzes them, and silver has no effect on them and makes for stupid weapons because silver is a soft metal. If he hunts werewolves, that makes a little more sense because he might not know about the garlic thing.

Courage is not a real weakness, although I like that you tried to balance it. Nor is determination or logic. It's good that you describe these strengths and their fallbacks in detail, but they are still primarily strengths. He's a courageous, determined, logical pro at crossbows. He's also good at using his dagger, I would assume, else why would he carry it? That would be something to include. He's sleep deprived but that's it. Maybe you should expand on his determination as a weakness and turn it into obsession, which is a real weakness.

While his history is short and easy to read, it's exactly what I would expect from a character like this. "MY WHOLE FAMILY DIED. REVENGE!!" is a very common archetype and most people have seen it a hundred times. You should expand his history and make him less of a reason to kill things and more of a character.

[Costache Mircea]

First off I'd like to thank you for your quick reply, I really didn't expect you to answer today there's some RP forums in which I've waited a week or two before a reply.
And thanks for pointing these things out, I'll make sure to change these things when I have some free time later today. About your question considering whether he hunts vampires or werewolves, he hunts "beasts", he really doesn't know what really killed his family and just wants to kill whatever creature could pose a threat to simple, innocent people. It could pretty much be anything including goblins, vampires, werewolves...
About the garlic, wooden stake and silver not being effective, I thought to make it so that my character doesn't know that, when he decided to start killing "beasts" he just went with local folklore and legends he's heard from his father and sticked with those ever since.(thing I should have included in the history, my bad.)
About my char's history, I know it's a pretty cliché and common story, but that was exactly what I had in mind when I was creating my character and it was that kind of character pushed by vengeance I wanted to roleplay as. I'll have to think of something new, do you have a few ideas?

[Saruna]

Hey there! Before I forget, whenever you make any changes please leave a reply in this thread so we know to look at it. If you have any questions you don't want to address in this thread, feel free to pm a staff member or hop into chat.

Now then. Character ideas!

I think what Stella is trying to get at is that there's a lot of ways you can corrupt or twist the stereotype to give us something unique and interesting. Too, a good way of making the character sympathetic is to give us a good before and after via the history. Let us see who he was. What sort of personality did he have before the event? How did he change after? What are the things he's had to do to survive? Let us see him struggle. Let us see him on the brink of giving up. Let us see his scars, his wounds, his uncertainty, his determination. That, more than a simple revenge story, will make us want to love him. Anyways, here's some of my thoughts on the matter!

Death to writers is a tool. It can be used to great effect: to pull us closer to the characters, to make us feel, to help us understand how dire the situation is. However, the thing about starting with a character to whom the death has already happened is that you have to do that much more development. We don't know how it affected him, how it changed him, what happened. You wind up having to add more to the character so that he stays interesting and sympathetic; while we like to see revenge characters it's typically because we just expect them to go on killing rampages. It becomes not at all about the character, but what he's doing. IMO, that's why the recent Batman trilogy was so good for so many people -- it really dug down into the character and gave us shinies to keep us interested in him. His emotional struggles, how the contradictory duality of his life affected him, his relationships with those around him: it was serving pathos up to the audience.

So if you really want to keep the deaths, you're going to have to dig deep. Give him quirks. Give him tendencies, emotional weaknesses and pitfalls, describe how capable he is at forming relationships and trusting other people. Describe how well he does with other races. Make him deeply flawed, while at the same time showing that he thinks he's doing the right thing. It's always interesting to watch a character paving the road with good intentions.

However, if you want to try something new, here's a few ideas:

Rather than killing everyone he loved, have them still be alive. Have one of them be crippled, and your character is the prime breadwinner.

Now, the hard thing about having a crippled character -- be it mentally or physically -- is that you can have it majorly affect your character. You can have the dual exchange: how being crippled has affected the character in question, and how watching that person struggle has affected yours. Perhaps he feels guilty because he could have saved the person. Perhaps he feels guilty because he thinks he could have saved the person. Perhaps that person is in a spiral down, and it fills your character with rage because it's the total opposite to who that person was before. If there is a mental handicap, it's even worse: the person is right there in front of you, but it's really not the same person. Just a familiar face who you love, but you'll never be able to have a conversation with him or her again.

So not only does your character have to come to grips with the changes of that character in question, he's also having to make money and balance his need for revenge. He might constantly be on the brink of doom. He'd probably be exhausted all the time. He'd likely have anger issues, where he risks hurting those he loves because of the way he lashes out. He might be constantly on the verge of a breakdown, or losing it all. He might constantly be putting his life on the line, because as much as he wants to kill all the monsters in the world, he also wants to forget.

Another thing you can do is have had someone dear to him have passed away and left him some sort of memento. If he treasured that memento because it was the only thing he had left and some rampaging monsters destroyed it (and possibly his livelihood, or the livelihoods of those he loves too), that could be a great start to a revenge story. It's interesting to me because he still has a lot to lose. There's people at home depending on him. Maybe it starts out as the farmers trying to take out these beasts on their own, and he gets included in the hunting party. Maybe he discovers that that well of rage down deep goes a lot further than he thought. Maybe he likes killing the monsters. Maybe it's just an excuse to start him on a rampage of death and destruction that he can't stop despite his family wanting him to come home. And at the heart of it is his anger, his sense of justice: how dare these things think they can ruin the lives of so many people? And his grief -- he has nothing now to remember that person with. Perhaps he has a hard time forming relationships with others, so all he can do is keep pushing harder and harder to keep killing.

Maybe he turned tot he profession out of a desperate need for money. And maybe for awhile that's just what it was about -- money -- except over time as he saw the horrendous things these monsters do to people, he began to develop a sense of revenge. Only it's not just a personal revenge, it's vengeance for all of mankind. Perhaps it begins to blind him, so that over time he does not discern good from bad -- all he sees are that monsters need to be destroyed. All of them. Perhaps he even gives up old principles and morals that he held dear. He has an unshakeable belief in himself; the sense that he's always doing the right thing. The typical development from there is to introduce an event or series of events where he's forced to take a look at what he's become. There's lots of interesting directions you can go from there.

So that's three ideas! Hopefully they've helped spur some more for you. I wish you luck, and if you need more help brainstorming, chat is always a fantastic option if you see more people in there. Or we can keep discussing your character in here -- up to you!