Characters

In Ephemeral Space, characters are entirely randomly generated. This includes their name, appearance, background, relationships to other characters, traits, job, and mask. This is in stark contrast to almost all other forks, where advanced character creation options can be a draw on their own. However, we really truly believe that the benefits of doing it this way are monumental, that doing it can unearth intriguing and engaging gameplay that would otherwise be impossible, and that the concept deserves more exploration in SS1X design than it has currently received (almost zero).

Some restrictions on the randomization will exist--see "Naturally, Selecting" below, but the gist is that though we encourage branching out and separating yourself from your character, we want just enough player input for people who are bothered by it to avoid potential OOC-discomfort like gender dysphoria.

The main benefits of doing it this way are as follows:

Metagrudging is essentially eliminated outright, if it was even a real issue at all. It might theoretically be possible to discern who is playing a given character with knowledge of job prefs, habits, or speech quirks, but this is not nearly as reliable as just checking if someone's playing the same character they always have. With randomization, we can pretty much just eliminate the administrative burden that metagrudging claims bring.

Random generation pushes people to play in ways they might not have otherwise, and leads them into more varied roleplay as they inhabit a character and improv using scaffolding provided by the game. It's fun to explore the dynamics and background of a single character you craft yourself! However, SS1X is rarely a vehicle to actually make this process interesting except in environments that reorient themselves entirely to cater towards it, and most people get their fix from other places like TTRPGs or text roleplay. Rather than half-assing it, randomization, in a roguelike-improv way, forces people to "roleplay around" the character they're given and introduces variance that would otherwise not exist with most people running static characters, especially as the vectors of character randomization increase in quantity and complexity.

Random generation enforces a clear separation between "character" and "player" that's healthier for players and the community, and opens up designspace as a result. It's common to see people get extremely attached to the characters they've created in game--so much so, that often there's no clear delineation between the player and their character, and some people become genuinely upset when their character is put in situations that they as the player don't want to be in. This is a problem for design: we want people to be put into weird situations for them to roleplay in, and people objecting to it on an emotional level like this makes it kind of difficult to do complex, interesting things without alienating people. Mindswapping/bodyswapping mechanics, or really anything that involves taking over someone else's character, are despised by some players for forcing "their character", which they desire to have some kind of authorial ownership of, into the hands of others who might--gasp--do things the original player wouldn't. Randomization means less salt, less unhealthy attachment, and more interesting designspace to work within.

Traits and other forms of mechanical variance for characters can be much more interesting and have much higher levels of variance because of randomization. If players can choose traits freely, whether through a point-based system of positives and negatives or select-any-neutral-traits, you naturally are forced to pull your punches in design because people will naturally optimize the fun out of things given unrestricted choice. This is a lesson roguelikes learned decades ago, and we may as well take the wisdom from it. Imagine a trait that gives your character a massive amount more strength, mass, and unarmed damage: simple example, but it could be really interesting to have some superhuman in the regular crew every once in a while with all the implications that brings. However, if you can pick from every trait, everyone is obviously just going to pick the trait that makes you stronger. Randomization lets you frequency-balance mechanics with ease, and as a result opens up so much design space. Lovelylovely variance and contrast!

The subpages of this doc go into far more detail on the specifics, but let's explore some of the broad-level things we'll be doing with randomized characters.

Naturally, Selecting

When you spawn into cryosleep on the arrivals shuttle, you'll be given a choice between 3 randomly generated characaters: one gendered male, one female, and one nonbinary. Traits, mask, and job will all be the same, so you're really just selecting a desired appearance and name for the round. This is done for reasons mentioned above--avoiding discomfort some people might experience while encouraging them to still branch out and try new things--as well as allowing players a lite form of optimizing for funny names or appearances by generating 3 characters-per-character, in a way.

Your character has a really funny name and you'd be sad to see it only last one round? Good news--if your character lives to the end of the round, they have a chance to appear again in future character selections! Bad news--if you die, that character is lost forever. This acts as yet another disincentive to death and incentive to completing your troupe objectives and surviving to the end of the round. Due to the nature of the game, it's unlikely your characters will make it more than a few rounds at maximum, and they won't come up again often enough to pick multiple times in a row, so we don't expect people to get too attached and freak out if a character dies. Ideally, it's just a fun thing to play around sometimes if you like a random character. Maybe you'll let your scientist "Dr. Pepper" live this round and hope to play them again on a rainy day.

Space Celebrities

Everyone has seen a "Walter White" chemist ingame. Everyone has seen at least one thousand of them, because every new player thinks they're the first person to come up with the idea for some reason. The thing is--the first time you see it, it is actually pretty funny. These types of characters only really become lame when they're overdone, and they're always going to be overdone because every single player can customize their character endlessly for every round.With randomization, we lose out on these kinds of interactions, which can be fun when done in moderation.

Introduce: Celebrities! Randomly, perhaps occurring one in every 3 or 4 rounds as a baseline, a player will be given the option to create their own character for this round. Not only that: almost all restrictions on things like base appearance and markings are removed! Players are encouraged to go wild with these "celebrity" characters and treat it like they've been given a free pass to engage in a silly little gimmick of their choosing.

Like with traits, randomization actually allows you to have more freedom in character customization--as long as that customization is a relatively rare opportunity, rather than something anyone can do at any time. When custom characters are rarer, they're far more meaningful and provide more contrast in a round.