This information is valid for players wishing to create a profile for a standard pilot character of the League, AEU or Fringe alliances.
If you want to apply for a special application, or play as a Mutuality character, please see HELP ADVANCED PROFILE and HELP MUTUALITY PROFILE, respectively.
Please note that occasionally one of the three major alliances may be special app locked for OOC player population control reasons. In this case a special application will be required for a temporary period until the player populations of the alliances equalise.
1) CHOOSING PLANET OF ORIGIN
Whatever alliance you as a player choose for your character will be where your character is born, and picking a planet is a good start.
LEAGUE: Old Earth, Mars, Luna, Centauri, Vesta, Callisto.
FRINGE: Chetumal, Candelaria, Ars Magna, Cardenas, Champoton, Tenosque, Tikal, Ticul, Pital, Frontera, Ardsley.
AEU: New Earth, Hyperion, Telex, Bikura, Endymion, Aenea.
The planets in the above lists go from largest population to least, in sequence per alliance. Old Earth, New Earth and Chetumal are the most populated worlds in their alliances, while Callisto, Ardsley and Aenea are small colonies.
2) THE DECISION TO PILOT
For most people, anything before the age of about 11-13 will be irrelevant to the character, unless something major happened in their life at that time. Between the ages of 12-16 can usually be summed up in a couple of lines or a paragraph relating to schooling or family life.
A person's family would do their best to convince them not to become a pilot. Pilots are severely limited in non-pilot interaction, primarily due to the fact that the sheer amount of money they are able to accumulate would allow a single pilot to devastate an economy with one single shopping trip. Thus, becoming a pilot will mean that your character is only able to enter areas that are able to deal with such people. This would result in being cut off from your home, being only able to visit a small number of towns or cities, usually connected to a spaceport. Contact with friends and family is likewise cut, with any mail or letters being carefully vetted by the government before being passed along in either direction.
Considering this, why did your character want to become a pilot? There are plenty of reasons. Fame, fortune, exploration, defense of the alliance, alien encounters, etc.
3) PILOT TRAINING PRE/POST OUTSIDER
The in-game year at the time of the opening arc is 2309.
If your character gained their licence before the in-game year 2305, they would have experienced the full pilot-league curriculum regarding training - simulator use, ground school, flights in real starships and complete combat training. (This merely means that your character would know HOW to do something, not that they're perfect at it.)
If your character gained their licence after the in-game year 2308, they would have only used simulators due to Outsider mandate, and there would have been zero mention of combat in any training lesson.
4) OUTSIDER SUBJUGATION OF HUMANITY
The Outsider subjugation of humanity in 2304 set in motion the almost total collapse of human civilisation. Your character will have experienced this in some manner, and it should be addressed in your profile.
5) THE GAP
This section only applies to characters that were pilots during the Outsider subjugation. Once the Outsiders crushed the human resistance, pilots had little choice but to live on planets along with everyone else, unable to fly. What did your character do during the three or so years between 'now' and when ships were banned?
COMMON TROPES TO AVOID
For whatever reason, a very large number of players all want to write the same kind of profile, and for that reason if nothing else, there are certain cliches you'll want to avoid in your profile:
- "My parents were pilots and raised me to be a pilot too." Although there are always exceptions, most pilots are loners by nature and tend not to form stable relationships.
- "I was born on a ship." This is likely to be true only for some Mutuality pilots. In this world, advanced medical help is widely available, and travel through space is very swift, so most of the time a ship can be making landfall in seconds regardless of its original location. The vast, vast majority of people are born in a hospital.
- "My parents were tragically killed." Starship rescue pods have a history of being 100% foolproof, except for a certain incident during the defense of Chetumal during the Outsider War. Between the advanced medical care mentioned above and virtually foolproof safety devices, only in exceptional circumstances does anyone die before their time.
- "My parents forced/encouraged me to be a pilot and/or paid for my flight school." Although certainly possible depending on the parents, most families would strongly discourage their children from becoming pilots. Pilots in this world are roughly equivalent to merchant seamen in the early 1800s: they can make a lot of money very quickly, but most people regard the profession as something that a decent person would not do.
- "I graduated at the top of my class." For obvious reasons, this would be a rare thing. Showing exceptional piloting ability is something that's more likely to show up in a special application/profile. Also, because combat in this game is largely based on the actual skill of the person behind the keyboard, you'll want to be sure you can really pull off good flying before you talk about it in your profile.
- "I rose through the ranks / was promoted to [rank] / served on a navy cruiser." Civilian pilots are not part of their alliance's navy and have no ranks. That said, it is possible that a naval pilot makes the transition to civilian piloting, and this is something a profile would have to go into detail about.
Note that you CAN write about any of these common tropes... IF you can write about it well. If you want to scrape by with a profile a paragraph or two long and short on details, you definitely want to avoid these cliches. On the other hand, if you're going to write a detailed profile fully fleshing out your character, you can include whatever you want as long as it makes sense in the story.
