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piper90
APPLICATION
Player Name/Handle: Kelly
Plurk Handle:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
tinybro
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: N/A
Invited by: YOUUUU
Character Name: Dave Strider
Fandom: Homestuck
Character Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
turntex
OU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: End of canon, pre-credits and epilogues
PB: N/A
SETTING BACKGROUND
Homestuck is about a group of kids who escape the end of the world and tother play a game with the potential to create a new universe. Dave is originally from Houston, Texas in the year 2009, in a version of the world that is generally the same as real life aside from a few oddities like gaming abstractions (a very literal inventory system, restrictions on equippable weapons, etc). After Earth is destroyed, Dave and his friends play through the game that functions as the propagation system for reality until it becomes clear that their session of the game is unwinnable. Working with a group of aliens from another universe who'd played the same game, the friends try to wring survival and success out of the broken game.
HISTORY
- Dave is created in the future, already within the game, via a batshit time paradox cloning process, and baby Dave is sent back in time to crash land in Texas where he was picked up by Bro Strider.
- Bro raises Dave with a unique style of not-parenting that largely boils down to neglect, mindgames, and "training". Dave idolizes Bro and styles himself after the man.
- Dave meets his online friends John, Rose and Jade at some point, and when they're all thirteen a game called SBURB comes out and they decide to play it together.
- The games turns out to herald the end of the world and Earth is destroyed by meteors. The mechanics of the game allow the kids to teleport themselves and their houses into the Medium, where the game takes place.
- The kids play the game to the best of their abilities, gaining powers and developing relationships with the trolls, a group of aliens that had previously played the game. Dave fucks with a lot of time travel due to his game-designated title of "Knight of Time".
- A series of shenanigans and fuckups by various people ends up creating an unbeatable final boss. Bro is killed fighting off said boss, Jack Noir, and Dave struggles with his feelings about Bro and his own role as a "hero".
- To survive, they plan to exploit a "glitch" in the game and effectively reset it. To do so involves a suicide mission that Rose plans to do using her dreamself – effectively an "extra life" by the game's rules.
- Dave helps Jade with another aspect of their plan until he's killed by Jack. He's resurrected as his dreamself by a kiss from Jade.
- Rose is also killed and resurrected, and she and Dave fight over who will carry out the suicide mission now they they're out of extra lives. They end up going together and are both killed. Because their dreamselves were killed on their quest beds, they're both able to ascend to Godtier, a more powerful level beyond the regular advancement that would otherwise be possible.
- Dave and Rose meet up with the surviving trolls and join them on their vessel, an abandoned lab built into a meteor. The meteor is launched through the time-space fuckery known as paradox space on a course to meet up with the others in a new session of the game.
- The journey takes three years. Dave has a lot of personal growth in that time, isolated from Earth culture and free of Bro.
- Everyone eventually reunites in the new session and they meet up with the players originally meant to play that particular session – young, alternate-universe versions of the kids' guardians. Dave and Dirk (aka young Bro) have one hell of a heart to heart. Dave finally calls his upbringing out as the abusive shit it was but relieves Dirk of any responsibility for it.
- The whole squad has their final battle with all the various final bosses that cropped up over the course of everything. In their fight, Dave has to kill Dirk to take out their targets, but manages to save the body so their friend can resurrect him.
- With the battle won, the group finished the process of creating a new universe. They use some of their godly powers to effectively terraform a post-apocalyptic Earth into something livable and drop it into their new universe, setting things up for the development of civilized life on it before jumping into the planet's future to claim their prize – in theory, a peaceful life on their new world.
PERSONALITY
Dave grew up with a brother that he eventually described as "a hyper-aggressive lunatic of a guardian", and it significantly affected his personality and development. For the majority of the canon, Dave tries very hard to be stoic and unflappable and "cool" all the time, relying on "irony" for humor and basically being extremely guarded about everything. He let his guard down a little, to varying degrees, with his friends, but for the most part he tried to keep a specific persona. Back then, he seemed to idolize his Bro and likely learned these habits as a result of trying to gain Bro's approval. The fact that he was raised in the most ridiculously unsettling and hostile environment probably didn't help matters.
At his core, Dave is honestly a huge dork. He's chatty and craves attention, he likes photography and rap and apple juice and preserved dead things, he gets jumpy around puppets, and he sincerely cares about his friends and does a lot to help them and try to make them happy (even while masking all that care under layers of indifference and flippancy). And he has a number of issues that he keeps close to his chest, too used to hiding vulnerabilities to be open about shit like his conflict over how he perceives his Bro or his obvious self-esteem problems.
However, over the course of the canon, particularly the last stretch of it, Dave experienced a great deal of personal development. Having spent three years stuck on a meteor with only his sister and a bunch of aliens and dreamghosts for company, he slowly came to terms with of a lot of things about human society and the way he was raised. He's since eased up on the stoicism, recognizing it as a learned behavior because of the culture of masculinity he was raised in (though he tends to fall back on his old habits with strangers and when he's uncomfortable). He had some revelations about compulsory heterosexuality, and at the end of canon was working through how to come out as less straight than originally thought.
All developmental factors and growth taken into account, Dave is a very laid-back guy with an odd sense of humor. He's become much more relaxed and his "coolness" has become less of an adopted persona and more just a side-effect of his overall chill. He's not afraid to do silly things, especially to make his friends happy (and he's less likely to fall back on the excuse of "irony" these days, now just at a stage of "who gives a fuck"). He's pretty happy now, even actually smiling at times (while at the beginning of canon, the closest he ever came was an extra little pixel to make his linefacing into kind of a smirk). Dave's honestly a thoughtful guy, both in the sense that he thinks deeply about things and that he cares a lot about the people he's close to. He's even very chill and forgiving about the things that messed him up for years, as despite all his revelations about how the actually abusive way his Bro treated him and whatnot, he's still conflicted about how he should feel about the guy and manages to get some closure with Dirk, talking out his issues without necessarily holding Dirk responsible for the way his alt-universe self acted. They even hugged. Aw.
On the less positive side of things, Dave's got a tendency to ramble and mumble to himself about complete nonsense, and still gets rather awkward and guarded about certain things. His humor can be straight up mean sometimes (though he's gotten somewhat better about that). He's very needy, maybe an aftereffect of coming to live with people who actually care about him after growing up with a guardian who alternately ignored and was extremely aggressive with him, and can be super annoying when he wants someone's attention. He's nervous about blood and his own mortality, to the point where he got extremely obsessive about making sure his time loops were stable because seeing his own dead body freaked him out so much. He doesn't actually like fighting, despite being really good at it, but he's always way too willing to do what has to be done despite his personal reservations. And he can sometimes fall too hard into the "stoic and cool" mindset to do the said shit that's gotta be done, which lets him do things like decapitate Dirk with barely a moment of hesitation but definitely cannot be good for his mental health.
CANON POWERS
- Time shenanigans. The exact limits of Dave's time traveling powers as the Knight of Time are hard to pin down, but he does have specific tendencies with them in comparison to other Time players (whether because of personal preference or because of their differing classes). Dave seems to primarily use his powers to himself travel through time. Anything in his possession would come with him, but he had to be careful about creating stable time loops in order to prevent offshoot doomed timelines. He mostly used these powers for maneuvering in battle, assisting himself in battle from different points in time, and abusing the stock exchange. He's always had a good head for math and rhythm and timing but it's likely his power over time contributes to that. He can also manipulate the individual timelines of objects and likely people, speeding things up or rewinding them to different states. There were some crazy combos he could pull off with other players and their respective powers, but they're massively complicated and likely unimportant for the purposes of this game without said other players around so MOVING ON...
- Godtier powers. Upon reaching godtier, Dave gained a few extra bonus abilities. He can fly, he gained the Gift of Gab (which canonly allows him to have actual spoken dialogue with other people but fandom often interpreted as allowing godtiers to understand and speak any language), and he became conditionally immortal. The immortality doesn't seem to affect aging (at least up through the adult years we've seen in post-canon material) but otherwise he can't be killed unless the death is considered Heroic or Just by the mechanics of the universe. Otherwise, he's just revived again.
POWER SELECTION
Canon powers. His godtier flight will be nerd down to game standards, as will his more natural "flash-stepping" level of short-burst speed. Time travel powers will be limited to only the immediate future or past, coordinating with mods and/or other players as necessary if used for anything of significance. I imagine the conditional immortality will also be nerfed unless y'all wanna eventually traumatize everyone with a dead teen that gets better.
ABILITIES
- Crazy ninja-esque moves. Dave was an accomplished fighter even before the game started due to Bro's training. Besides being skilled with swords and weaponizing his fetch modus (the latter of which doesn't matter here because the fetch modus is a construct unique to his universe), he's very agile and fast.
- Generally a smart dude. Though he's not the "smart guy" of the cast, Dave is surprisingly intelligent in certain ways. He's extremely good with numbers and he's got general knowledge of everything from pop culture to history and myth. However, he can be a little forgetful, and he doesn't know jack shit about sports.
- Rapping, music production, intentionally shitty art, and ironic hipster photography. Unlikely to ever be useful, but those sure are some skills he has right there.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?
Though he's got a smart mouth and zero filter and will probably get a good number of minor shocks as a result, Dave doesn't like pain or dying and will try to avoid it. He thinks long term and plans carefully to avoid any more dead Daves piling up, so even if pushed to the point of rebelling he'd be cautious to avoid major problems.
➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?
I like to let things develop naturally and see where they go, but I'd like Dave to develop new relationships that he can be open in, especially any with older characters so he can have some decent adult figures in his life for once.
➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?
If it wasn't obvious enough already, Dave's plenty used to action and weirdness and apocalyptic scenarios and will be able to manage just fine.
➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?
Dave can cooperate with others just fine if needed. He may be slow to trust all the random strangers completely, but he'll at least be quick to pick up on the fact that it's all the New Hires against the world.
➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?
He'd definitely want to rebel, but as a Knight his nature is to fight for the sake of others. He can plan on his own but he's accustomed to being a piece in the grander schemes of others, so he's more likely to get in on any plans others make.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
[Lighthearted interview time. Sure, that's the logical next step after being kidnapped and shoved into the corporate equivalent of a potato sack and shown he world's worst slideshow. Let's do this shit.
You’re a new addition to the crayon box, what color would you be and why?
Dave snorts, eyes rolling behind the shades.]
I dunno if you got a glimpse before they stripped me down and shoved me in this adult onesie, but pretty anyone present with functioning eyes – or a batshit sense of smell, I guess – anyway, anyone could tell you red is kind of my thing. Thing with a capital "t". Psychoanalyze that all you want, I've heard it all before and I'm sure it'll all boil down to daddy issues and-slash-or an insatiable craving for dick.
[He pauses for a beat, barely restraining a wince. Fuck, the flippant jokes feel a little less flippant and a little more like oversharing after a few years of soul searching and realizing just how right Rose actually was all along.
The fact that the polygraph doesn't give him shit for it also kinda outs him as more truthful than intended. Ugh. Whatever, next question, can't get any worse.
What are the qualities you like least and most in your parents?
Well, fuck.]
Shit, that escalated quickly. We started off on the ground floor but then you fuckers said "nah, let's ramp that elevator motor up to eleven" and shot us straight up to the fucking roof, no stops allowed. Sorry if you're late for that meeting on the eight floor, gonna have to wait.
[A slight wince suggests a minor zap. Either that rambling getting interpreted as a lie, or someone's just tired of his shit. Dave curses softly under his breath but cuts off the stream of bullshit. Fuck, let's just get this over with.]
Okay, sure. Mom's a teen girl I met once but hey, she seems nice and pretty well adjusted for a chick from the dampest apocalypse ever. Kinda flighty and prone to invasive questions but in my experience that's every teen girl ever so I can't really hold it against her. She's kinda...not motherly, but down to take on the mantle and that's pretty cool.
[A beat, like he's hoping that'll be enough and they'll just move on to the next question, but the next question doesn't pop up yet. Another soft fuck and he pushes forward before they can get another shock in.]
Dad...uh. Bro. Not great at the whole "nuturing" aspect of child-rearing and hey, that probably fucks a kid up somewhat. But, uh... [He frowns, searching for honest words he can manage to spit out for complete strangers.] ...He gets things done, at least. Got shit done. Who cares about how good you are at bedtime stories and doing laundry and shit when you're a goddamn hero, right?
[He's trying not to think of Dirk. That whole interaction is still too fresh and he doesn't really wanna conflate the two in his head too much. Even if he can see the overlap.
Anyway, the next question pops up.
What was a time when you had to work as part of a team?
He lets out a breath like the question is a relief. It's not a super personal assault on his childhood trauma, so it's better than the last one.]
Fuck, sure. Did tons of collabs when I was a kid. I got real good at taking whatever audio sample my friends would send me and building a whole jam around it. Pretentious-ass violin solo? Sure, sis, I can roll with that. Work in a good beat, bend genres like Beckham, boom. I was a goddamn champion of teamwork way before I was ever syncing up with alien ladies for sick fraymotifs.
[Was that good enough? It's standard Strider bullshit, but apparently no lies were detected, so it appears the polygraph reluctantly accepts it. Thank god, do you really wanna give this kid even more excuse to ramble?]
Prose Sample
TDM sample
ADDITIONAL INFO
It's debatable whether the video game-style inventory nonsense is a natural power of everyone in the setting or an item that everyone has so for the sake of ease and everyone's sanity, let's just say it's either nerfed or taken away and be done with it.
FINAL QUESTIONS
The players won't know what the mods are doing with these questions until sometime later.
➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?
Having been through a few universes and knowing the mechanisms behind reality itself and how universes in general are created, Dave is likely to think this all still plays by the rules he knows. This is either the "new world" he and his friends created and something went horribly wrong when they went to jump into it, or some other shenanigans are at work. Even if Jorgmund takes credit, ultimately everything is part of the machinations of reality itself.
➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?
Reality itself is infamously brutal. It doesn't care about individuals, only the overall endgame. Things that clash with that plan – offshoot timelines and things that create offshoot timelines, for instance – are doomed to be killed/destroyed. It isn't vengeful, just intent on keeping everything tidy.
Player Name/Handle: Kelly
Plurk Handle:
Player Status: New Player
Other characters: N/A
Invited by: YOUUUU
Character Name: Dave Strider
Fandom: Homestuck
Character Journal:
turntexOU, AU, CRAU, Canon OC, or OC? OU
Canon point: End of canon, pre-credits and epilogues
PB: N/A
SETTING BACKGROUND
Homestuck is about a group of kids who escape the end of the world and tother play a game with the potential to create a new universe. Dave is originally from Houston, Texas in the year 2009, in a version of the world that is generally the same as real life aside from a few oddities like gaming abstractions (a very literal inventory system, restrictions on equippable weapons, etc). After Earth is destroyed, Dave and his friends play through the game that functions as the propagation system for reality until it becomes clear that their session of the game is unwinnable. Working with a group of aliens from another universe who'd played the same game, the friends try to wring survival and success out of the broken game.
HISTORY
- Dave is created in the future, already within the game, via a batshit time paradox cloning process, and baby Dave is sent back in time to crash land in Texas where he was picked up by Bro Strider.
- Bro raises Dave with a unique style of not-parenting that largely boils down to neglect, mindgames, and "training". Dave idolizes Bro and styles himself after the man.
- Dave meets his online friends John, Rose and Jade at some point, and when they're all thirteen a game called SBURB comes out and they decide to play it together.
- The games turns out to herald the end of the world and Earth is destroyed by meteors. The mechanics of the game allow the kids to teleport themselves and their houses into the Medium, where the game takes place.
- The kids play the game to the best of their abilities, gaining powers and developing relationships with the trolls, a group of aliens that had previously played the game. Dave fucks with a lot of time travel due to his game-designated title of "Knight of Time".
- A series of shenanigans and fuckups by various people ends up creating an unbeatable final boss. Bro is killed fighting off said boss, Jack Noir, and Dave struggles with his feelings about Bro and his own role as a "hero".
- To survive, they plan to exploit a "glitch" in the game and effectively reset it. To do so involves a suicide mission that Rose plans to do using her dreamself – effectively an "extra life" by the game's rules.
- Dave helps Jade with another aspect of their plan until he's killed by Jack. He's resurrected as his dreamself by a kiss from Jade.
- Rose is also killed and resurrected, and she and Dave fight over who will carry out the suicide mission now they they're out of extra lives. They end up going together and are both killed. Because their dreamselves were killed on their quest beds, they're both able to ascend to Godtier, a more powerful level beyond the regular advancement that would otherwise be possible.
- Dave and Rose meet up with the surviving trolls and join them on their vessel, an abandoned lab built into a meteor. The meteor is launched through the time-space fuckery known as paradox space on a course to meet up with the others in a new session of the game.
- The journey takes three years. Dave has a lot of personal growth in that time, isolated from Earth culture and free of Bro.
- Everyone eventually reunites in the new session and they meet up with the players originally meant to play that particular session – young, alternate-universe versions of the kids' guardians. Dave and Dirk (aka young Bro) have one hell of a heart to heart. Dave finally calls his upbringing out as the abusive shit it was but relieves Dirk of any responsibility for it.
- The whole squad has their final battle with all the various final bosses that cropped up over the course of everything. In their fight, Dave has to kill Dirk to take out their targets, but manages to save the body so their friend can resurrect him.
- With the battle won, the group finished the process of creating a new universe. They use some of their godly powers to effectively terraform a post-apocalyptic Earth into something livable and drop it into their new universe, setting things up for the development of civilized life on it before jumping into the planet's future to claim their prize – in theory, a peaceful life on their new world.
PERSONALITY
Dave grew up with a brother that he eventually described as "a hyper-aggressive lunatic of a guardian", and it significantly affected his personality and development. For the majority of the canon, Dave tries very hard to be stoic and unflappable and "cool" all the time, relying on "irony" for humor and basically being extremely guarded about everything. He let his guard down a little, to varying degrees, with his friends, but for the most part he tried to keep a specific persona. Back then, he seemed to idolize his Bro and likely learned these habits as a result of trying to gain Bro's approval. The fact that he was raised in the most ridiculously unsettling and hostile environment probably didn't help matters.
At his core, Dave is honestly a huge dork. He's chatty and craves attention, he likes photography and rap and apple juice and preserved dead things, he gets jumpy around puppets, and he sincerely cares about his friends and does a lot to help them and try to make them happy (even while masking all that care under layers of indifference and flippancy). And he has a number of issues that he keeps close to his chest, too used to hiding vulnerabilities to be open about shit like his conflict over how he perceives his Bro or his obvious self-esteem problems.
However, over the course of the canon, particularly the last stretch of it, Dave experienced a great deal of personal development. Having spent three years stuck on a meteor with only his sister and a bunch of aliens and dreamghosts for company, he slowly came to terms with of a lot of things about human society and the way he was raised. He's since eased up on the stoicism, recognizing it as a learned behavior because of the culture of masculinity he was raised in (though he tends to fall back on his old habits with strangers and when he's uncomfortable). He had some revelations about compulsory heterosexuality, and at the end of canon was working through how to come out as less straight than originally thought.
All developmental factors and growth taken into account, Dave is a very laid-back guy with an odd sense of humor. He's become much more relaxed and his "coolness" has become less of an adopted persona and more just a side-effect of his overall chill. He's not afraid to do silly things, especially to make his friends happy (and he's less likely to fall back on the excuse of "irony" these days, now just at a stage of "who gives a fuck"). He's pretty happy now, even actually smiling at times (while at the beginning of canon, the closest he ever came was an extra little pixel to make his linefacing into kind of a smirk). Dave's honestly a thoughtful guy, both in the sense that he thinks deeply about things and that he cares a lot about the people he's close to. He's even very chill and forgiving about the things that messed him up for years, as despite all his revelations about how the actually abusive way his Bro treated him and whatnot, he's still conflicted about how he should feel about the guy and manages to get some closure with Dirk, talking out his issues without necessarily holding Dirk responsible for the way his alt-universe self acted. They even hugged. Aw.
On the less positive side of things, Dave's got a tendency to ramble and mumble to himself about complete nonsense, and still gets rather awkward and guarded about certain things. His humor can be straight up mean sometimes (though he's gotten somewhat better about that). He's very needy, maybe an aftereffect of coming to live with people who actually care about him after growing up with a guardian who alternately ignored and was extremely aggressive with him, and can be super annoying when he wants someone's attention. He's nervous about blood and his own mortality, to the point where he got extremely obsessive about making sure his time loops were stable because seeing his own dead body freaked him out so much. He doesn't actually like fighting, despite being really good at it, but he's always way too willing to do what has to be done despite his personal reservations. And he can sometimes fall too hard into the "stoic and cool" mindset to do the said shit that's gotta be done, which lets him do things like decapitate Dirk with barely a moment of hesitation but definitely cannot be good for his mental health.
CANON POWERS
- Time shenanigans. The exact limits of Dave's time traveling powers as the Knight of Time are hard to pin down, but he does have specific tendencies with them in comparison to other Time players (whether because of personal preference or because of their differing classes). Dave seems to primarily use his powers to himself travel through time. Anything in his possession would come with him, but he had to be careful about creating stable time loops in order to prevent offshoot doomed timelines. He mostly used these powers for maneuvering in battle, assisting himself in battle from different points in time, and abusing the stock exchange. He's always had a good head for math and rhythm and timing but it's likely his power over time contributes to that. He can also manipulate the individual timelines of objects and likely people, speeding things up or rewinding them to different states. There were some crazy combos he could pull off with other players and their respective powers, but they're massively complicated and likely unimportant for the purposes of this game without said other players around so MOVING ON...
- Godtier powers. Upon reaching godtier, Dave gained a few extra bonus abilities. He can fly, he gained the Gift of Gab (which canonly allows him to have actual spoken dialogue with other people but fandom often interpreted as allowing godtiers to understand and speak any language), and he became conditionally immortal. The immortality doesn't seem to affect aging (at least up through the adult years we've seen in post-canon material) but otherwise he can't be killed unless the death is considered Heroic or Just by the mechanics of the universe. Otherwise, he's just revived again.
POWER SELECTION
Canon powers. His godtier flight will be nerd down to game standards, as will his more natural "flash-stepping" level of short-burst speed. Time travel powers will be limited to only the immediate future or past, coordinating with mods and/or other players as necessary if used for anything of significance. I imagine the conditional immortality will also be nerfed unless y'all wanna eventually traumatize everyone with a dead teen that gets better.
ABILITIES
- Crazy ninja-esque moves. Dave was an accomplished fighter even before the game started due to Bro's training. Besides being skilled with swords and weaponizing his fetch modus (the latter of which doesn't matter here because the fetch modus is a construct unique to his universe), he's very agile and fast.
- Generally a smart dude. Though he's not the "smart guy" of the cast, Dave is surprisingly intelligent in certain ways. He's extremely good with numbers and he's got general knowledge of everything from pop culture to history and myth. However, he can be a little forgetful, and he doesn't know jack shit about sports.
- Rapping, music production, intentionally shitty art, and ironic hipster photography. Unlikely to ever be useful, but those sure are some skills he has right there.
SETTING/SUITABILITY
➤ How do you expect your character to respond to the setting? Even if they plan to rebel in the long term, will they be able to at least obey enough to not get shocked to death?
Though he's got a smart mouth and zero filter and will probably get a good number of minor shocks as a result, Dave doesn't like pain or dying and will try to avoid it. He thinks long term and plans carefully to avoid any more dead Daves piling up, so even if pushed to the point of rebelling he'd be cautious to avoid major problems.
➤ What do you hope to do with your character long-term?
I like to let things develop naturally and see where they go, but I'd like Dave to develop new relationships that he can be open in, especially any with older characters so he can have some decent adult figures in his life for once.
➤ Does your character currently have skills that would allow them to adapt, survive, and do the heroic things being asked of them? If your character doesn't, do you think they'd have the capacity to learn quickly?
If it wasn't obvious enough already, Dave's plenty used to action and weirdness and apocalyptic scenarios and will be able to manage just fine.
➤ If they're not used to cooperating with others, what makes you think they'll be able to adapt to cooperating with the group?
Dave can cooperate with others just fine if needed. He may be slow to trust all the random strangers completely, but he'll at least be quick to pick up on the fact that it's all the New Hires against the world.
➤ Will your character have long-term plans to rebel against Jorgmund? If so, how? Will they betray the other PCs and cooperate with Jorgmund? If so, how do you plan to handle the negative CR that might arise?
He'd definitely want to rebel, but as a Knight his nature is to fight for the sake of others. He can plan on his own but he's accustomed to being a piece in the grander schemes of others, so he's more likely to get in on any plans others make.
SAMPLES
Network Sample
[Lighthearted interview time. Sure, that's the logical next step after being kidnapped and shoved into the corporate equivalent of a potato sack and shown he world's worst slideshow. Let's do this shit.
You’re a new addition to the crayon box, what color would you be and why?
Dave snorts, eyes rolling behind the shades.]
I dunno if you got a glimpse before they stripped me down and shoved me in this adult onesie, but pretty anyone present with functioning eyes – or a batshit sense of smell, I guess – anyway, anyone could tell you red is kind of my thing. Thing with a capital "t". Psychoanalyze that all you want, I've heard it all before and I'm sure it'll all boil down to daddy issues and-slash-or an insatiable craving for dick.
[He pauses for a beat, barely restraining a wince. Fuck, the flippant jokes feel a little less flippant and a little more like oversharing after a few years of soul searching and realizing just how right Rose actually was all along.
The fact that the polygraph doesn't give him shit for it also kinda outs him as more truthful than intended. Ugh. Whatever, next question, can't get any worse.
What are the qualities you like least and most in your parents?
Well, fuck.]
Shit, that escalated quickly. We started off on the ground floor but then you fuckers said "nah, let's ramp that elevator motor up to eleven" and shot us straight up to the fucking roof, no stops allowed. Sorry if you're late for that meeting on the eight floor, gonna have to wait.
[A slight wince suggests a minor zap. Either that rambling getting interpreted as a lie, or someone's just tired of his shit. Dave curses softly under his breath but cuts off the stream of bullshit. Fuck, let's just get this over with.]
Okay, sure. Mom's a teen girl I met once but hey, she seems nice and pretty well adjusted for a chick from the dampest apocalypse ever. Kinda flighty and prone to invasive questions but in my experience that's every teen girl ever so I can't really hold it against her. She's kinda...not motherly, but down to take on the mantle and that's pretty cool.
[A beat, like he's hoping that'll be enough and they'll just move on to the next question, but the next question doesn't pop up yet. Another soft fuck and he pushes forward before they can get another shock in.]
Dad...uh. Bro. Not great at the whole "nuturing" aspect of child-rearing and hey, that probably fucks a kid up somewhat. But, uh... [He frowns, searching for honest words he can manage to spit out for complete strangers.] ...He gets things done, at least. Got shit done. Who cares about how good you are at bedtime stories and doing laundry and shit when you're a goddamn hero, right?
[He's trying not to think of Dirk. That whole interaction is still too fresh and he doesn't really wanna conflate the two in his head too much. Even if he can see the overlap.
Anyway, the next question pops up.
What was a time when you had to work as part of a team?
He lets out a breath like the question is a relief. It's not a super personal assault on his childhood trauma, so it's better than the last one.]
Fuck, sure. Did tons of collabs when I was a kid. I got real good at taking whatever audio sample my friends would send me and building a whole jam around it. Pretentious-ass violin solo? Sure, sis, I can roll with that. Work in a good beat, bend genres like Beckham, boom. I was a goddamn champion of teamwork way before I was ever syncing up with alien ladies for sick fraymotifs.
[Was that good enough? It's standard Strider bullshit, but apparently no lies were detected, so it appears the polygraph reluctantly accepts it. Thank god, do you really wanna give this kid even more excuse to ramble?]
Prose Sample
TDM sample
ADDITIONAL INFO
It's debatable whether the video game-style inventory nonsense is a natural power of everyone in the setting or an item that everyone has so for the sake of ease and everyone's sanity, let's just say it's either nerfed or taken away and be done with it.
FINAL QUESTIONS
The players won't know what the mods are doing with these questions until sometime later.
➤ Will your character suspect some kind of guiding intelligence has brought them to the game? Or will they think it was random or done by Jorgmund?
Having been through a few universes and knowing the mechanisms behind reality itself and how universes in general are created, Dave is likely to think this all still plays by the rules he knows. This is either the "new world" he and his friends created and something went horribly wrong when they went to jump into it, or some other shenanigans are at work. Even if Jorgmund takes credit, ultimately everything is part of the machinations of reality itself.
➤ If they think it was something other than Jorgmund, like God or some other force of fate, what character traits do they think of that intelligence as having? Is it cruel or kind? Capriciously punishing them or doing it for good reason?
Reality itself is infamously brutal. It doesn't care about individuals, only the overall endgame. Things that clash with that plan – offshoot timelines and things that create offshoot timelines, for instance – are doomed to be killed/destroyed. It isn't vengeful, just intent on keeping everything tidy.