Technosoldier

Making characters feel alive.

Sorry for the radio silence lately, getting into school is so much fun.

Today’s topic comes from banter I’ve had with friends and observed in the WoW Rp community. The heroes of Azeroth are a hearty bunch, having survived everything from the cataclysmic battle at Mount Hyjal nearly a decade ago until the impending invasion of Icecrown. The thing that people don’t seem to realize is that it’s the little things in a character that make them feel so human (or not human, whatever.) Some turn out as the heroes from fantasy legend, the ones that come back from the battlefield without any mental scars to show for it, because that’s what really happens.

Pictured: Something that never happens.

Which brings me to the point.

People who know me are very aware that I play a single character in Warcraft almost exclusively. It’s really not out of a hatred for the pansy mana users and the like, but because he is so much fun to portray, because he feels alive. In which I mean that he has both strong traits and weak traits, and they serve to balance each other out. Perfect people are boring, and trying to roleplay with a perfect character is no different. The balance comes from a variety of factors, how did your character grow up? How did they handle -or not handle- the events of the third war? Hyjal? Outland? What kind of support network do they have? etc. Tif’s world was torn apart after Hyjal, and the world moved on, leaving him without any direction, and it’s shaped how he’s dealt with problems in his life. He would retreat from his pain by fighting as often as he could, as well as learning to tinker in his spare time, more as a hobby at first. Fast forward to Wrath of the Lich King, and Tiforis is the technosoldier, a man dedicated to using technology to wage a new kind of warfare. Sounds pretty great, huh? Too bad Tif never properly dealt with the mental trauma he suffered at Hyjal, and instead threw himself into his work, at the expense of everything else. Now? He’s an elite soldier, but his personal life has withered from neglect. At thirty years of age, Tif has very few close friends, and his love life has amounted to a series of shallow love affairs, with nothing of substance to show for it.

The strong balances the weak.

Tif is mechanically brilliant, but put him in any social situation, and he’ll look at you and tell you that he doesn’t get it. In many ways, the big bad berserker is still the shy, scared little boy that he was in his childhood. And that’s why he feels so alive to me, because it’s a situation that I can relate to. And you don’t need terribly dramatic flaws in a character to get that effect, expand on the simple things, and you might just see your characters as people you could meet in the real world.

-Donski

He was built in a cave.

I’ve been getting asked this question a lot lately, and I thought it was something that never needed to be said: No, Tiforis Sevita is not Tony Stark.

I can understand why one would assume that, what with the obvious physical resemblance and the weapons building, but these are just entirely coincidence. Now sit back and let me blow your mind. The steampunk aspect of Azeroth is one that very few people take seriously in a character, sure, you have tinkers and gnomes. But how often do you see someone who firmly believes that Technology is the future for the world, even one so entrenched in religion and magic? Tif himself was never designed in the capacity most know him as. I was leveling the little warrior, and I wanted a hook to make him a bit more interesting that your average sword-for-hire. That and the fact that he had mining, and I didn’t want to be a blacksmith? He became an engineer.

Tiforis is a soldier, and as such, he is rather keen on building things that can give him in edge in battle. Using guns, bombs, cloaking, mass accelerators, rocket boots and the like to compliment his brawn on the battlefield. I imagine most of these being build right into his armour, which in turn requires a power source of some sort. This is where most of the trouble comes from. Yes, Tif does have a bit of an electrical charge in his armour, no, it doesn’t let him fly, or shield him from every blow. And yes, his armour will crackle with electricity, because it can. It can be silly, but it’s the thing that defines and endears the character to me. He’s the Technosoldier, not Iron Man.

It wasn’t until the recent love triangle storyline that he became involved in that that comparison to Tony Stark become apparent to me. Anything that goes into his RSP from this point out is merely tongue in cheek, even if some people can’t seem to realize that. If you take someone else’s character so seriously, without having much IC interaction with him, or truly getting to know the character? You are doing something very wrong.