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Mary Sue characters in PBEM games

Barb of PBEM2.com posted a very interesting piece about “Mary Sue” characters. A “Mary Sue” character is described as a character create to be a better version of the player himself. Such characters tend to be too perfect and without flaws. While creating a character for your PBEM game based on yourself is fine, “Mary Sue” characters are often bordering to godmoding.

You can read more about it here: Recognizing the Mary Sue character and learning how to avoid her


This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under PBEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.



2 Responses to “Mary Sue characters in PBEM games”


  1. Onion Says:
    August 21st, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    I have definitely seen this type of character before, but until I read this article I never knew there was a name for them.

    When I first created a character in a PbeM game about 8 years ago I think I too made the mistake of creating a Mary Sue character. :-S

  2. Jon Bray Says:
    December 30th, 2007 at 5:33 pm

    Sounds interesting. I can’t read the article because neither Opera nor MyIE2 (effectively IE6) nor Firefox can access it (Firefox complains it can’t access news.pbem2.com)

    I’ve certainly created “Mary Sue” characters in the past - mainly in things like Rifts where characters basically are “perfect” to start off with. This seems to be less of an issue with GURPS etc because you get points back for disadvantages, but is there not a tendency for picking disadvantages we find easy to roleplay?

    I’ve had a few pregen characters foisted upon me, and they generally aren’t as much fun to play as the ones I’ve created from scratch.



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