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[OOC/New War Spoilers] How are you going to RP your new {Spoiler)?


Lokryn

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How are you going to RP your Drifter? This may be difficult since we haven't gotten Duviri Paradox yet but I'm curious how you guys view the Drifter.

Here are some of my thoughts on the Drifter.

  1. They can hold their own in a fight. Remember that they did not receive training in the same way the Tenno did yet they were able to engage and defeat the Grineer with a pistol, dagger, and gadgets.
  2. They are confident. When the Drifter turns to walk away from Hunhow as if they can take on the Archons themselves, I knew they were a badass.
  3. They are tall. If you compare them to Warframes and other humanoid NPCs, both male and female Drifters are around 6 ft. tall. Of course that doesn't matter, you can RP whatever height you want, just an observation.
  4. They are a quick study. They seem to be very skilled at infiltration, even hacking the Sentient's consoles. I'm sure it's more gameplay reasons but they picked up how to use the Warframes, Railjack, Orbiter, etc. relatively quickly. I'm sure they learned a lot from Ordis and the Orbiters Codex though.
  5. The Operators may be teaching the Drifters the Tenno Ways. Once the Drifter gains void powers and connects with the Operators, they can bounce back and forth between the Void and normal reality with ease.  It may be a cool RP device that the Operators could be teaching the Drifter the Tenno Ways, i.e. the 5 schools.
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  • 1 month later...

This is something I've been thinking about and haven't really been able to figure out. There's a lot of important questions that haven't been answered yet.

Is the Operator and Drifter a single entity experiencing itself subjectively? Or are they two individuals who trade places in the prime reality? Have their memories and experiences converged into the now?

The Drifter doesnt really have a connection to the Lotus or the Warframes, are they simply running their own missions while the Operator deploys a Frame into combat? They're more capable of fighting solo than the Operator, but they lack the finesse of a purpose built god machine spinning through the air obliterating everything in the way.

Is the Man In The Wall/Hey Kiddo Operator actually us still trapped in the Zariman? Or was that the Drifter trying to contact our reality?

 

The way I've been playing it out is that the Operator and Drifter both exist simultaneously, but obviously have wildly different skill sets. The Operator fights as normal, using Warframes and void powers in high kinetic situations, while the Drifter works directly with the Lotus(Marghulis) to keep things running behind the scene.

Personally, my Operator rejected the Lotus after she left us, using her Cephalon to execute missions as she sees fit. There's no point in waiting for permission when there's simply too much work to be done.

Conversely, my Drifter has accepted Marghulis as the mother she never had. She follows Marghulis' directions to gently tip the power balances to keep everything in line, using the cool stolen Corpus ship to get where she needs to go.

The two rarely interact, partly because they never have a reason to cause paths, but also because converging timelines causes headaches and nose bleeds and it scares the Warframes.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I try to keep it simple and stick to what the game tells me. For example - DE can't decide if they treat the tenno as a singular chosen one or "a people". I excuse it by claiming that the events that have to be either-or are just a mesh of realities created by wall-man where every tenno experienced it as we played it, after all the results are the same. In short, space magic.

 

The drifters can hold their own in a fight? Sure, they can. The big difference, in my eyes, is that they're survivors, not warriors. There's a huge difference in mentality and choices between 'waging war' and 'getting by'. When a drifter is overwhelmed they'd retreat, reassess and plan, they're very utilitarian. A tenno can call his powers, warframe and other tools to overpower resistance. At some point a tenno will have to use tactics but those are more akin to fighting techniques and methodology (thinking about the insanity that is reaching level cap in endless). There are a couple of changes when the drifter gets the bow though - 1: he got a weapon good enough to mount resistance with and 2: he's running out of options. Once he got the tool he needed making the choice of fighting back is easy.

 

When it comes to operator-drifter relations, they said themselves that while in the zariman it was possible for them to meet, since it's in the reality-mess we call void, they can't exist together outside. That's what I'm going with - now they're psychically linked so they can swap, one of them in our reality at a time, and not both. Communication between them is something we know nothing about so it's free game. Something to note though - the connection of the tenno to the void is extreme, the tenno themselves are natural empaths and in tune with the will and course of everything around them when they put their minds to it, as we're told while getting umbra to work with us. Thus, it's highly likely they maintain some form of communication with those they're linked to.

*I was surprised when I finished the quest that umbra didn't have a say, for example.

Then again it's possible to play it off as always being at the edge of their consciousness, so they can never truly communicate. I don't know, right now DE doesn't know either. I'd bet there's communication at some level, if you asked me.

 

About their height and approach to tech - I do think they're game design decisions. If my guess is right the drifters have the same skeleton as warframes which is why their height is about the same.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...

When Second Dream/Operators came out, most RPers I'm in contact with decided to go with the approach that the old "armor-style" warframes/tenno and the new Operators represented different 'generations' of technological advancement in warframe-tech: At first, they had to suit the Tenno up in the frame to make transference work (neural probes in the helmet or sth, void-stuffs *handwave*), and after a while the Transference chair that TSD introduced was developed. 
The Sacrifice shows how impractical hollowing out a warframe to serve as armor would be, but for the sake of people being able to continue to play their established characters if they wanted to, we just rolled with what we had. 

With Drifters, I'd choose a similar approach: Even if Drifters & operators come from the same 'root' person (a kid onboard the Zariman), they've clearly lived vastly different lives, even if we don't know what exactly the Drifter has been through/will be through. Duviri Paradox might shed some more light on it, but there'll always be mysteries and plotholes, so my primary goal would be to enable maximum creative freedom without contradictions in _most_ situations: 

During TNW, there was at least one event that tore open the Albrecht Membrane (wall between void & realspace) enough for a parallel-world's Zariman ship (remember: The Zariman of 'our' original timeline (which I like to call 'Origin') was recovered with only children aboard & Tenno made from them) to pop halfway through. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that this may've released a number of Drifters from the Void itself or other parallel timelines into Origin-Sol.

RPing them is risky, since we know so little about their past before this event - so I honestly wouldn't advise it. But if you really want to, there are many ways to handle that problem: *

  1. make something up and deal with the fallout later.
  2. memory loss
  3. they just don't talk about it, dodge or rebuke questions, etc
  4. Some Trauma / Void sickness stops them from speaking about it even if they wanted to.
  5. Their memories are muddled by the transition between world so whatever they _believe_ their past to be is actually not fully true. (this can be a variant of 1).

The Drifter we played in TNW seemed to have no memory-related issues, but the void is clearly a very individual experience (feeding on individual fears, materializing feelings, etc) so there is plenty foundation to assume that it would affect some people more severely than others. 

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I don`t like the fact that DE is not giving operators void melee coz they don`t want them to play the same as warframes, meanwhile they show the drifter using melee.

That makes no sense, this is something ppl have been asking for ages plus operators can't defend themselves on their own and removing void blast was a stupid decision.

Proof:

Spoiler

 

 

Just imaging this being a thing

Spoiler

Operator Narissa with blades 1. by Aaronj-c

 

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