*How do you Create a Character?

[Jiggly_333]

Hi there!

So, this looks like an explanation on how to create a player. That's something that you should probably know already and there's so many different tutorials around the site that can help you do that. It's honestly next to impossible to fuck up creating a player because there will constantly be Rookie Mentors, DSFL GMs, and just people in general who will be available to help you out with that. But what none of them will help you with is the "other side" of sim football leagues.

Simulation sports leagues are marketed to sports subreddits as "Madden Career Mode, but with story." I got a slightly different pitch that I think changed the way I view the entire experience of this league:

"It's like DnD, but Madden."

Now that sounds fun to me. But how is it different? Well, it's more descriptive to me. Because even if you've never played DnD, I'm sure you've encountered the spectrum of DnD players. On one end is the pure min/maxer, the person who will make a character specifically to have the greatest benefits to break the game and win dungeon crawls. On the other is the drama kid, the person who plays DnD to tell a story and make decisions that will probably hurt them in-game, but make sense for their character.

When I look around at the NSFL ISFL, I see a lot of people who show up for the experience of just playing Madden with a bunch of people all together. That's nice, that's fun. But then there are people who evolve into the min/maxers who talk about "metas" and write massive articles with just numbers. It's interesting, but I personally don't find it that fun. I'm more on the drama kid side. You can probably tell from the bias in my voice talking about the difference between min/maxers and drama kids.

I joined the NSFL ISFL three years ago with the intent to help find a better voice when writing fiction, specifically sports fiction. I was and still am an amateur sportswriter. I used to cover mainly men's soccer, but over the past two years I've focused more on the women's game. As somewhat of a journalist, in the loosest sense of the term at this point, I got to become friends with actual journalists, beat reporters who write for major newspapers. And I started reading more of their stuff and talking to them about their articles. And I started noticing the way that articles aren't written with the purpose of providing information, they're done to provide entertainment. You tell a story. Pure statistics mean nothing in a vacuum, without context there is no such thing as analysis. Even if it's as simple as saying a player is doing better now than they did at this point in the season last year, that's story. That's a plot.

This is the reason why I sort of look down on "stat-based" articles. They annoy me a bit and I know that I've done a couple of them before and I just felt like shit afterwards because I knew I didn't provide anything to the reader. There's still a lot of work to put into it. My "Ranking Every Player in PBE" series takes me around half a week of data entry and then another half a week even putting it down into the formatting. So I understand the work that gets put into this sort of thing. I just feel like it's got no soul.

But we've gotten incredibly off course here. I'm here to tell you about how to create a character. All that introduction stuff was to tell you these three things:

1. I'm a writer, I like writing. Sometimes I'm pretty good at it.
2. I don't like lazy writing, even from myself.
3. I want to help YOU figure out how to write cool shit!

That's the point. I'm not just gonna sit around and let you guys tire yourselves out writing boring power rankings every week. I want to help you develop more of a voice for your characters not just in media, but in PTs where you really do need to think on your toes if you're like me and don't actually pay attention to the games and would rather just write about your character and what they're up to and how they're interacting with the world that's been created.

I just realized that this is now over 700 words and it'd be way more cost-effective for me to just split this up into multiple parts and collect the extra bonuses because that's how you min/max as a drama kid. So go to Part Two to see the actual start of how to start building your character.

[slate]

I just realized that this is now over 700 words and it'd be way more cost-effective for me to just split this up into multiple parts and collect the extra bonuses because that's how you min/max as a drama kid.

You actually missed out on about $540,000 worth of payout by splitting this into three articles, by my count.

[SchwarzNarr]

I just realized that this is now over 700 words and it'd be way more cost-effective for me to just split this up into multiple parts and collect the extra bonuses because that's how you min/max as a drama kid.

You actually missed out on about $540,000 worth of payout by splitting this into three articles, by my count.

I think 2501 words is the optimal, due to the bonus. Could be wrong, been awhile since I did the maths on it.