What makes a PC a Mary Sue?

What makes a PC a Mary Sue?

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By exhibiting the traits of a Mary Sue, which can easily be read up on with a quick google search

Having all the traits of a normal protagonist while being female.

The story revolves around them, the world is built for them.

being personified wish-fulfillment.

By being a half-human/half-elf/half-dragon/half-goddess/half-kitsune/half-vampire princess.

For me, the difference between a character that is merely OP and a Mary Sue is that a Mary Sue is unlikable and boring. An OP character can be ridiculous, unbalanced, plot-warping, and have no particular flaws, but unlike the Mary Sue, an OP character can be likable, entertaining, and coherently designed.

Mary Sues tend to compensate lack of creativity by cobbling together multiple things to make themselves stand out and become unique, but OP characters don't necessarily rely on that.

Mary Sues force the plot to bend to them in a way that breaks suspension of disbelief. Good OP characters manage to keep suspension of disbelief.

The first post here is a pretty blatant Mary Sue, if you want an example.

Gary Stu's are just as bad as Mary Sues.

A Mary Sue PC is a character that relies on GM or player accommodation, rather than mechanical competency, to exist, survive and assert itself in the game.

>Mary Sues force the plot to bend to them in a way that breaks suspension of disbelief. Good OP characters manage to keep suspension of disbelief.

This is a way I've always thought of it. A Mary Sue is an author stand in who may or may not be perfect or super powerful, but above all else is the *absolute center of the story to an illogical degree*.

Everybody must be paying attention to the Mary Sue, thinking about them, having an opinion about them, living their lives around them. This is because the Mary Sue is the authors wish-fulfillment stand-in, and the author has not put thought into anyone elses feelings or motivations except this character.

>For me, the difference between a character that is merely OP and a Mary Sue is that a Mary Sue is unlikable and boring. An OP character can be ridiculous, unbalanced, plot-warping, and have no particular flaws, but unlike the Mary Sue, an OP character can be likable, entertaining, and coherently designed.

This. The MC from Kaiketsu Zubat is literally the #1 man in Japan at everything. The various hired guns for each episode will think they're the best at their specialty. Ken's still better than them. Every damn time, at any damn skill. You aren't the best lethal thrower of plates in Japan, he is.

Here's the thing though, it works here because he's a fun character, the whole point is for him to show off.

Only DMPCs can be mary sues, because it involves the author designing the world and narrative around how cool the character is, this can only be done by the person running the game.

The one exception is the backstory, if you have an extensive backstory you can use it to Mary Sue your character in it. But it will be exposed to reality as soon as the game starts.

Sinbad is fine because he isn't a main character. His story is already over by the time Magi starts.

>Sinbad isn't a main character
That's like saying Sasuke isn't the main character in Naruto. Have you read the Magi manga? Sinbad becomes the single most important character in both the world and the story itself. The plot also turns to shit, but that's besides the point.

Wait does he play as a girl during that part or is it a straight up trap, I don't watch SAO so I wouldn't know.

>What makes a PC a Mary Sue?
If they can do anything, and I mean anything, they are a Mary Sue.

The extent to which the character embodies ideas that you, the person judging it, do not like.

Frequent contradictions in their character and backstory, little to no plausible narrative causality, cliches for the sake of cliches. Although I feel liked I've described just what makes a bad character rather than a Mary Sue.

>character is elegant and composed all the time
>never makes mistakes and has no real flaws
>the best fighter ever. Even better than those who have been doing it longer than them
>A blatant incarnation of the author/writer's fantasy of an ideal mate

These are some of the things that make a boring MS character for me. I think a lot of the aspects are debatable and a character doesn't need to tick every box to still be a Mary sue.

Pic infinitely related

to continue on this

>their incredibly abilities are either never explained or explained very poorly

BRAIN LIGHTNING!xDD

The consent of the DM.

A sense of unease and a resemblance to their creator.

Is your character:
>a flawless self-insert?
>a flawless insert of someone you're crushing on?
>a flawless insert of your ideal sexual/romantic partner?
>a flawed version of any of the above, but in ways where you have to explain to other people why it's a flaw?

If you said yes to any of the above, it's a Mary Sue.

This is a great smug face.

>Only DMPCs can be mary sues, because it involves the author designing the world and narrative around how cool the character is
I disagree, GMs can cooperate, and I've seen this happen many a time.

What we should really be asking is, what makes a character unfun for everyone else involved.

The main thing that does that is: Any character who's actions (through the player's roleplaying or the way they're created) Take up a significant portion of the time at the table for their own goals, roleplay, etc. Or who can and do solve the bulk of challenges and adversity that the party will face.

Just don't hog the fucking spotlight and you're at worst just a bad character. If you're hogging the spot light you're turning everyone else into an audience member for your autistic one man show (This is something that as a DM you can have a little leeway, but don't overdo it or you're "that DM")

a mary sue deprives the rest of the cast off any meaningful role, because they are the most proficient and most competent. they also warp the plot around them to kiss their feet by having ridiculous luck and invisible charisma.

so from the point of a ttrpg with fixed mechanics and a reasonable GM, a mary sue will only be a mary sue in his/her background story, or a plain min-maxed and hyper-optimized character

Their success is inversely proportionate to the amount of resources that they're spending to achieve their goals and/or they never face any major obstacles that can't be solved utilizing their specialties.

>fantasy samurai

A weighted D20

Serious question: as a GM, should I avoid to make my PCs (all of them, not just one or two of a group) become Mary Sues to the setting in their end game?
>Oh, the paladin Ausil is so righteous and perfect! He forgives his enemies with such honesty they immediately become pious
>Krimmnar the barbarian is the strongest man alive! He can run for miles and miles without ever tiring, as he did when he delivered medicines to the orphans of Mornpass

Using D&D classes because I can't find a group to play anything else...

As long as they have fun, it's really the endgame and they out-Sue each other it's fine.

D&D endgame involves the players practically being gods. Those examples are tame if anything.

My D&D campaigns are usually low magic, so these kind of stuff is pretty renown.

Another serious question: how do you avoid Mary Sues in Exalted?

This, plus the DM is constantly sucking their dick and won't let them fail.

Alternatively, when a character is played as perfect (as envisioned by the player) and the rest of the table is roundly ignored or belittled when they point out his/her obvious flaws, both IC or OOC.

I had one of the latter, once.

the second one is definetely not a mary-sue, a Mary Sue wouldve summoned her 4 winged Pegasus instead of running a marathon which is just a feat of high con and Str which is was barbarians are

By playing the setting as it's meant to be played. Exalts still have all the personal flaws of humans. If anything, Exaltation makes a lot of them worse. A normal person can be greedy and spend their whole life working up to being a bandit king or a Guild merchant prince, but a greedy has centuries to let their greed snowball more and more until they're not satisfied with anything less than plundering the vault of Heaven. Not to mention that along the way there's a good chance you'll hurt or alienate nearly everyone you know. Exaltation takes away a lot of a person's limiters. When a normal person has a bad day, they might destroy some property or, at worst, kill someone. When an exalt as a bad day (and no threat of social consequences to hold them back from indulging in whatever they want) it's like a natural disaster. Don't shy away from how terrifyingly destructive people with a great deal of personal power without a great deal of wisdom or foresight can be.

You are a gentleman and a scholar.

I had a lot of fun with an Exalt of mine being a horribly flawed person the last time I played.

Soaring Dream, a kind polite and warm teacher and doctor who travelled about healing the injured and trying to make the world a better place.

Her major flaw? She's a teacher and a doctor. She was always sure that her idea of 'Right' or 'Better' was the correct option. Her ego was so large that she thought she was a humble teacher without realising just how much she dominated the lives of people about her and twisted them into her own idea of perfection.

After all, people disagreeing with her were not voicing independent opinions. They were mistaken, like children. After all, she'd respect someone's opinion if they were making good (Aka: Dream Approved) choices.

Most horrible compassion 5 person I ever played.

Give examples of lives she ruined, please.

She was an Airfolk and had been a slave in her own life. At one point she turned a slaver (Science of Mutation is a hell of a drug) into a mute, pretty airfolk and left her in her own slave pens. After all, she needed to learn a lesson in respecting everyone's right to be free. It would help her be a better person in the end.

She took guardianship of a dragonblooded girl who was born in the shadowlands. The girl had a hard life and was a very serious girl. Dream ended up basically throwing social stuff at her to force her to act her age/have a childhood despite the girl having zero interest in such things. After all, she was happy in the end being a child properly!

Dream was also rather a hedonist and got an Immaculate Monk pissed off at her (Without the monk knowing she was a solar.) for being such when she ran into Dream lazing about smoking opium. Dream decided to teach her a lesson about enjoying life and actually living rather than just existing. Did you know that exalted has negative (Yay extra points) mutations to reduce virtues like temperance? Science of Mutation, ho! Enjoy being temperance 1, Monk! We turned those negative points into +Appearance mutations for you. Really, she's sure that if they ever met again she'd thank Dream for helping her learn a valuable lesson.

Dream did a lot of playing up the 'Yes, Social Charms can be horrifying changes' aspect rather than just the 'I'm talking good' aspect and I had zero illusions about her being a good person. Just one running on a seriously misplaced sense of compassion, very little sense of 'Proportional Responce' and an ego larger than her wings.

Oddly enough, the other players never really caught onto it as they took her at face value with her talk of compassion and wanting to teach people how to live kind lives.

She sounds like the most horrifying villain I've ever heard about.

Thank you! You understand her better than most of the other players did.

I expressly asked the GM (And got his approval that it would be ok) to play the sort of solar that the Immaculate Monks are 100% right about. She was a fucking horrible person but she fooled herself with talk about how she was helping people and teaching important lessons as a responsible teacher should.

>An OP character can be ridiculous, unbalanced, plot-warping, and have no particular flaws, but unlike the Mary Sue, an OP character can be likable, entertaining, and coherently designed.

My guy

>D&D endgame involves the players practically being gods
FUCK
OFF
youtube.com/watch?v=X9vECzikqpY
>B-but if you weren't meant to play it why did they have rules for higher level characters?
It's for the benefit of DMs to create NPC, not as a goal for players

I don't see how that's a Mary Sue.

Dude, No I've watched that in it's entirety and tim kask never once says it wasn't for players, just that he and Gygax and their group didn't understand why people kept playing after level 10 or so, because they retired their characters as adventurers and I think put them as kings or rulers of many stripes in war games like Chainmail.

>Conan is extremely strong, fast, charismatic, intelligent and wise. Most righteous people like or at least respect him, those that dislike him are usually stupid or cowardly. He is a descendant of a proud warrior people who are in tune with the primal world in ways that weak civilised folk are not. In most respects he is a stand in for the author's philosophy and is almost always in the right. We get to constantly hear about his volcanic blue eyes and panther-like physique.

>Elric is a powerful sorcerer and the emperor of race of evil magical dragon people. He is Satan's favourite dude and has the best magical sword ever. His entire life fluctuates between pulling off feats of cosmic power and being fucked over. He broods a lot and talks about how evil he is but usually ends up being a cool guy. We get to hear about how pale and sardonic he is.

These guys are some favourites on Veeky Forums but if a player came to the table with them we'd probably reasonably call their character a mary-sue.
They wouldn't work in the context of group table-top adventure but they do work very well as pulp adventure heroes. That's not to say they are perfectly written characters, their authors to to jack them off a lot but they are at least make for fun reads most of the time.

But they aren't characters that can function well in groups. Elric has so much backstory baggage that any adventure with him will end up being about the Cosmic balance and keeping Strombringer from killing the rest of the party. Conan pretty much always ends up taking command of any group he's in and doing whatever the fuck he wants. He doesn't really compromise and any instance of subordination is totally temporary and on his own terms.
That shit works great when the story is supposed to be about that character but sucks for a group oriented game.

It's not about the characters themselves so much as the context they are presented in.

Can a PC really be a Mary Sue if the DM doesn't play along and make the universe bend over for them?

Yes, absolutely. It happens all the time.

>tfw shitty Dwarf guy I made became a huge mary sue because almost everyone including the DM thought he was badass.

Could you go into more detail because I can't really see how it would happen in a game without the DM enabling them.

Continuing with context.

Magical-unicorn-vampire princess would be a shitty character to have in your low powered AD&D crusader game. But she would probably be fine in a Secret-Friendship-Police- Magical-Girl game where everyone is some crazy mix of magical creatures has over the top sparkle powers. That is assuming she left room for other characters to express their archtypes.

Now if a player came to my SFPMG game with a grizzled pure human knight guy who hated everyone and had no time for this friendship shit, that would be pretty questionable. If he went around solving all the party's problems with murder and a no-nonses attitude instead of magical-friendship, generally overshadowing the other characters and undermining the setting then he would be a mary-sue.

Now if the SFPMG universe is written FOR the grizzled knight guy to fuck up then that's another matter. He's the main character, the world is set up with a flawed parody and there are no players being forced to take faceloads of jizz as our author vigorously masturbates to his cool guy fucking up that stupid girl stuff.

Now if knight-guy was a fan-fic insert into the SFPMG universe he would fall back into the mary-sue class. Not for fucking up other players but for generally fucking with the work and world of another author by breaking the tone, philosophy and established rules of that author's universe.

The thing that makes pic related inifinitely more pathetic is the fact that the author insisted on attributing this hypercompetency to one of the only japanese folks in the show. I could sort of let it slide if there were more walking around at least. Pretty sure Levi's got some similar shit going on.

>I could sort of let it slide if there were more walking around at least. Pretty sure Levi's got some similar shit going on.
Levi is. He's an Ackerman, she's an Ackerman, only Ackermans get to pull off superhuman bullshit. Her Asian specialness is mostly because the brainwashing didn't affect non-Eldians, so her Asian ancestors got persecuted.

>What makes a PC a Mary Sue?

Being a PC.

A PC can only be a Mary sue if the GM allows it.

Most mary sues are in fan fiction or original fiction (in which case Author self insert probably applies better).

I don't like this game anymore.

This is true

>These guys are some favourites on Veeky Forums but if a player came to the table with them we'd probably reasonably call their character a mary-sue.

Because, and here is the stark difference and thing you're overlooking:

These are protagonists of novels/comics/whatever. They are not player characters in a game where the spotlight has to be shared and things have to be roughly balanced so it's "fair" between the players themselves.

No ones feelings get hurt if Conan comes in swinging his big ol' meaty protagonist dick and Mary Sue-ing his way all through a novel chopping down eldritch God's and banging every big titted woman that throws himself at him. People at a table get rightly pissed if an actual player is wildly wiping it's ass with everything at the table and they're all useless in comparison.

Yes, that's what the rest of his post is saying

What if I happen to be reading a fan/original fiction and a character
>comes in swinging his big ol' meaty protagonist dick and Mary Sue-ing his way all through a novel chopping down eldritch God's and banging every big titted woman
and I still get irritated?

That just means your a faggot user.

No, since there can be a player who is either forceful and the GM lacks a backbone to say no or refuse, or the player sucks the GM's dick for more attention.

Yes, there can be Mary-Sue/Marty-Stue characters even in original fiction.

Much of it is based around how much a character distorts the story/world the story is set in.

I-I am no such thing!

>Being a PC.

Most true statement in thread.

You must be a faggot, or you wouldn't have come here.

Second is just a high level character.
Herakles is not a Mary Sue.

The Ackerman line is implied to be some inhuman anti-titan weapon at a couple points.To quote the wiki:
>The Ackerman line exibits physical abilities far above the average soldier and human, such as superhuman strength, speed, agility, accuracy and coordination. The origins of these abilities are unknown except for the fact that they are a "byproduct of Titan science".
I'm not sure if being the WW1 equivalent of a Space Marine counts as being a Mary Sue.

This, pretty much. I played a War-supernal Dawn caste that turned into a widely-feared breaker of nations. After a major campaign of conquest, he was personally surveying territory and came across cities that had most of their young men conscripted to fight against his armies and who were subsequently slaughtered.

The shock of the desolation and the dire straights of the mostly innocent people left behind shook him to the core. From then on he tried very, very hard to sue for peace first.

The other PCs and the NPCs treating said character as flawless and beyond reproach, despite their obvious shortcomings.

>Space marine
Space marines are mini mary sues led by bigger mary sues led by the biggest sue in the universe.
In fluff at least, they're just stronger and better equipped in tabletop.

This is most likely the "Veeky Forums" answer, considering it's dull wit.
This is closer to my own definition.
It remains any character that is great because the creator SAID they were great, is special because of what they are and not who they are, is capable and accomplished before the game even began.
The traditional definition of a "mary sue" does not actually apply to rpgs in the slightest.

>implying anyone in that show ISN'T a Mary Sue

Only the GM can make a PC a Mary sue.

The character in OP's pic is literally a male mary sue.

seconded

That's really some intense smug.