The RPlague

[dragoneyes]

I'm embarassed to say that my first ever RPG character was a young half-Elven lady who could use the bow and the knife well and whose parents had died a long time ago. It looks terrible now, but it seemed fine when I first wrote her, just the same as it probably seems to the new RPers now. It is a good was of starting though, the character is easy and enjoyable to play and by looking at the other characters, you may see some aspects you might want to try next time you make a character. For example, my next character was a particularly adventurous woman who was pretty useless at everything except riding and after that I moved onto far more believable male characters.

It may only take one Mary-Sue character until the writer moves onto something else, I think they should be allowed to have this leeway otherwise there would only be half the new RPers.

About half of the people were missing parents

This perhaps would not be such an odd thing in Middle Earth. They would not have had the medicines or the safety precautions we do now so it is quite likely that they would have lost one or both of their parents whether to illness or to an accident with farming equipment or something else along those lines. You have only to add to that the amount of wild creatures and barren land and it would make each long journey a veritable health risk.