How many positive traits can an NPC have before they hit Mary Sue-dom?

How many positive traits can an NPC have before they hit Mary Sue-dom?

See one of my NPCs has been alive for a very, very long time, he's a lich, but the sort of lich that keeps their body alive to fit in (don't question it too much, it took a lot for him to do, in universe.) and as such mostly fits in with normal people.

Why I bring this up is because, outside of having some sort of PTSD, he lacks any defined negatives, and he's reaching skill levels where I'm concerned he's becoming a Mary Sue.

He's a master of most types of magic, a decent swordsman, and an excellent marksman. He's functionally immortal and extremely politically powerful (though doesn't do much with it due to bad experiences in power).

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Just wondering what's your take on what makes a Mary Sue.

obvious self insert would need to be the primary thing.

He actually has a reasons to be competent so I would give that character a pass.

Chainglaives are fucking cool desu senpai.

Could the character conceivably be a "normal" person in the setting? Exceptional even? Or do they get away with the kind of bullshit only a "main character" could do.

Normal people are fine. Exceptional people are fine. "Main characters" need to stay in anime and videogames. You're a sue when things start to become a power fantasy and the character in question stops being relateable on any level except "hurr, I'm a badass!"

Make him hate/get sad at a great deal of stuff.
It seems he is physically very tough.
Make him emotionally squishy.
I'm not saying a crybaby. But maybe he hates a lot of stuff (I'm abnormally good at sports as a whole, but I personally dislike most of them.)
Or, much better, Make every action remind him of something. He has been alive for a long time, he will have seen a lot of stuff. Make it so that he is so afraid to do anything because he knows it will bring repercussions of major pain to himself, enough to persuade him to inaction.
He can do so much stuff, but he won't, because of the pain he would feel.

Mary Suedom is not about traits; traits are the symptom, when the cause is being too much in love with the character in question.

No more than negative, and negatives have to be actual negatives with meaningfull effects.

>Just wondering what's your take on what makes a Mary Sue

A Mary Sue is a character who is devoid of any unique character flaws and can therefore serve as a direct self-insert for the reader/viewer/player. If it's a written character, physical descriptions are kept to a minimum, and in all cases the character goes through as little change or growth as possible.

Because the aim of the character is to allow the majority of the audience to self-insert as them, anything that makes them unique also prevents a subset of that audience from easily identifying with them, so uniqueness is a no-no.

Obviously, plot armour and power creep are a given.

All you need to do to prevent your lich from becoming a Mary Sue is to give him some traits that differentiate him within your world. For example, what's given him this "sort of PTSD"? What did he do that's causing such severe mental anguish? How does that anguish express itself? Typical PTSD symptoms are flashbacks, sudden violent outbursts and extreme anxiety when reminded of traumatic events, all of which are sure to cause the character to act in ways which prevent him from being a boring self-insert.

Power fantasies and Mary Sues often go hand in hand, but they're not the same thing by any means - a Mary Sue character is, by definition, a relatable character, but they are so because they lack any defining character traits which cause them to be difficult to directly identify with.

>How many positive traits can an NPC have before they hit Mary Sue-dom?
It varies.
You can hit it with just one: "everybody can't help but always like her".

>lich that looks fleshed
ok
>some sort of ptsd
99% of the time its a "weakness" that doesn't show up and does nothing. Be very very careful

>super made, swordsman and marksman
Ok yeah that's going a bit extreme.
Yeah sure you can excuse "he had the time to learn" but still, that's a bit fat of a skillset.

Additional question is: how often do you bring attention to his various powers? If he comes up and shows off often, that's a warning sign.

Honestly I would play up effects of extreme age - him just letting long periods of time slip by.

If you want a good reason for a lich to be powerful yet not mary-sue-ish... Make sure your lich does a lot of astral travel.

Basically, turn him into Dr. Manhattan.

>yeah, i could help
>but... i've already helped mankind 587205 times in the last 10,000 years
>and i want to see beyond indeterminate infinite space in the astral sea
>you wouldn't understand
>because you'd be eaten by astral dreadnoughts

Adding to this... this way he cannot be a mary-sue anymore, because while he's obscenely powerful in "this world", he is just another nameless traveller like so many millions of powerful wizards in the astral sea, where he spends most of his time.

>Because the aim of the character is to allow the majority of the audience to self-insert as them

That's a lot of shit and you know it.

Mary Sue isn't just about powers, m8, despite what people would have you believe.

It's about how much everything bends to focus on and them special, flawless and the centre of everything, and that those who would deny them this are irredeemable villains. Usually this means giving them retarded levels of power to facilitate this, but it's not always the case.
Consider Bella Swan, the ultimate Mary Sue in a published work. Her actual personality is horrendous, and arguably genuinely psychopathic, and her powers are utterly insignificant compared to others of her kind. Yet the narrative treats her as if the sun shines out her every orifice, and everything and everyone goes out of their way to make sure she is the most important thing in the world, and that she MUST have everything she wants. All those that try to deny her are co sidered wrong and to be corrected, or outright evil.

If your original character is grounded, has a reason to exist, doesn't dominate everything for no reason and can do things that will be considered wrong by NPCs, they can never stray so far into Sue levels that they can't be redeemed

>focus on them being special*

What are you talking about? That's literally the definition of a Mary Sue.

Give him personality flaws such as arrogance.

OP here, sorry I disappeared for a bit
He's exceptional, but not more exceptional than you'd expect. He's got the perfect storm of traits that led to his situation. His magical alignment, where he was, and his particular situation aren't exceptionally unique, but the combination of his traits, led to this.
That was what I was going for. He was a knight for quite a while, and he had to live through the great war, which as an immortal, he survived, but had to watch a lot of his friends die painfully.
>What did he do that's causing such severe mental anguish?
He started his life off as a knight, thinking he's going to be this noble bloke who goes gallivanting off about using magic to save people, and then he witnessed both World Wars, which seriously changed his opinion on war, and realized that the things that he was proud of were actually monstrous atrocities.

And yeah, he expresses his PTSD mostly in anxiety, and violent outbursts. I've been trying to keep him going through character changes, as one who'd been alive for hundreds of years would.

His skillset mostly, as you've said, comes from experience. The difficult was that I could really justify saying he DIDN'T have these skills, given what he's done, so I just tried to make it tragic with the angle of, "he's got these skills, but laments their use", which honestly may just end up making it worse.

Would be a good idea, but there's no astral travel in setting. There are things much more powerful than him, (think Lovecraftian entities) but they don't appear for a good long while, properly anyway.

One of the things I try really hard to do is make everyone justified. People are justified in hating/opposing him because he's an imperialistic (literally, he was a soldier of the British Empire) mass murdering, borderline psychopath. Bit difficult when the bad guys are the Nazi's but hey.

Except for the actual arrogance, that one is shit that only makes sues more annoying than flawed.

What purpose does this NPC serve? is he an ally to the party? an antagonist? or just a random spanner you throw in the works?

>"he's got these skills, but laments their use",
That doesn't really work out dude.

If you're going with it you could at least do something like "yeah he learned all the things, but he didn't involve himself in real combat and so his knowledge is more theoretical and showmanship than practical combat ability".

Even if he started as a knight with proper experience, it would've deteriorated over the ages.

Again, the issue is I couldn't justify that, he has copious amounts of experience, he spent most of his life a soldier.

I tried to balance it out by making him a jack of all trades. He's good at a lot of things, but isn't exceptionally good at anything. For example, as you've said, his swordsmanship has deteriorated, he just relies on his immortality to cheese most fights with more skilled opponents.

Pic related, a Mary Sue who is also a good character

>anime

kys

The experience was a century ago.

Alternatively, could go with him knowing so many things, he has a hard time picking any specific to use - so if he gets involved in combat, he skips turns.

>Good character
>Weeaboo anime power fantasy garbage

Funny joke, no really, 2/10 right there.

Veeky Forums thinks every main character must be a mary-sue because the plot revolves around them for some reason.

It's like they're a main character or something.

>How many positive traits can an NPC have before they hit Mary Sue-dom?
All of them, every single one. You can have an ideal, perfect, infallible philosopher king (or philosopher queen, if you really want to push the suspension of disbelief to its edge) and still not have a Mary Sue. You know why? Because as long as the players remain the central actors, those who decide the fate of the world, it doesn't matter how great or how horrible the NPCs are. The infallibility of the philosopher-king just cements him as "that good guy we listen to" to the players. Now, if that perfect king gets off his throne and stabs the BBEG in the dick by himself, then we have a problem.

>He thinks the DMC anime preceded the games
You need to be 18 or older to post here.

>he thinks the games aren't weeb shit for cancer kiddies

Oh, when it comes to crunch, he's decent, but I'm certainly not worried about balance. I mean, in a 1v1 he's probably going to win, on account of not dying (he can be disabled, but it'd take some serious shit to actually kill the fucker). But his crunch stats are pretty much just whatever it needs to be to do the job he needs to do. I'm mostly worried that, as a character, he comes across as Mary Sue-ish.

>I'm mostly worried that, as a character, he comes across as Mary Sue-ish.
That mostly comes down to how much you show off his awesomeness. If he doesn't wave his undying dong in players' faces, then he's most likely ok.