Nerd Pride Radio

Alright, I had been planning to play a female character, but it's looking like it might end up being female-heavy (which wouldn't really reflect corporate culture from that period). So I'll give the outline for two characters, one male and one female, and you can decide which one gets played.

Option 1 (Female)
Cynthia Sinclair is a relatively new employee at Nakatomi: she just graduated from Standford at the beginning of summer with her bachelors degree in international business, and started her job at Nakatomi in August. She hopes to work for a couple years, get some experience and earn some money, then go back to school to get her MBA.

Cynthia is from a farming family in Iowa. The only reason she was able to afford attending Stanford was because they offered her a generous athletic scholarship to play volleyball. Even with the scholarship, she still had to work part-time in the dining hall on campus in order to get through school without any student loans. Standing 5' 8" tall, Cynthia is very attractive, although she tries to downplay her looks (to a certain extent), since she wants to be taken seriously for her abilities and knowledge rather than her looks: she typically wears glasses instead of her contacts, wears attire that looks professional but not revealing. And she has been trying to adhere to the principal of not dating anyone from the office. But despite her best efforts, she has had to fend off the advances of numerous male colleagues, including several of the office managers.

Option 2 (Male)
David Fitzgerald, or Dave to his friends, is a mid-level manager at Nakatomi. He has worked there for a little over eight years, a tenure marked by mediocre-to-slightly-above-average performance reviews. Luckily for him, he seems to have worked in a department where the old American practice of promoting incompetence has been able to take root, which has allowed him to advanced beyond a point where he should have been able to advance on skill/knowledge/ability alone. However, things may be catching up with Dave...

Dave is 5' 10" tall, average build, and average looking. He wears department store suits rather than bespoke suits. He brings home a decent income (for the SoCal area), but his average wife and 2 average kids and 1 average dog spend almost all the money he earns, so he hasn't been able to build up any savings or contribute to the company retirement plan. And to make matters worse, he slept with his secretary a couple months ago and got her pregnant, so now he's worried about his affair being exposed, getting fired for inappropriate contact with a subordinate, being sued for harassment, and having his wife file for divorce. This has made Dave even more distracted than usual, which certainly isn't helping matters. Dave has been planning to use the company Christmas party, and the annual company bonus handed out earlier in the day (he only got an average bonus), as an opportunity to talk to his secretary (after imbibing some liquid courage) and possibly pay her off in order to keep her quiet.

As far as my Norma goes, she works just as well as Norman. If gender balance is a concern.

Gender balance is a concern given that we're talking a Japanese company in 1988. If you guys are amenable, I think Mike and Zen should be men, and Tahlvin take the female character he outlined.

Easy. Done.

I can play my suggested male character and let Zen play his female character, if you want. I know how much Zen wants to play a Japanese woman. Although, I certainly can see if Kyle doesn't want Zen's female character due to the whole 1988 Japanese male-dominated corporate culture thing.

Don Levinson is the Vice President of Local Operations for California of the Nakatomi Corporation (a position that today would be referred to as Chief Operating Officer or somesuch). "For California" is a bit of an exaggeration as Nakatomi's California operations extend no further than the Nakatomi Plaza. He is third or perhaps fourth in the chain of command behind CEO Joseph Takagi, as well as the Vice President of Finance and (sometimes) the Vice President of International Operations.

Don is viewed by the people under him as stern and humorless. He is not known for being forgiving or understanding. He is extremely knowledgeable about Nakatomi operations, but if he has any interests outside of that, he has never let on. Half the people here see him as stern but fair. But people who've been on the receiving end of his corrections or reprimands often talk about him as a pompous tyrant. The only thing agreed upon is that no one relishes the idea of crossing him. Don is universally avoided if at all possible.

Don's wife Norma died over a year ago after a protracted illness. People think that he has children (and grandchildren?), but the rumor is that they are estranged from him, because he never talks about them and there are no pictures of his family anywhere in his office. In fact, the only personal pictures he keeps are of two cats, and the joke is that those are just photos that came with the frames.

He is somewhere around 60 years old, thin and wiry, with salt-and-pepper hair showing far more gray than black. His suits all seem slightly too large, and he wears them with pastel colored shirts that always look a few years out of date.

Does anyone have any clue what Nakatomi allegedly does (or what industries it works in) in the film? I can't find anything online, which makes me think there's probably no information about it in the film. The Die Hard wiki I found doesn't seem to have any such information. If there's no indication anywhere, I think it would make sense for a decision to be made by Kyle about what the company does.

If y'all want to decide what Nakotomi does, I'm okay with that. However, I'm going to rewatch the movie this weekend and make sure it doesn't tell us.

In the book it was based on, the building belonged to Klaxon Oil and the terrorists were trying to expose the company's dealings with a Chilean junta. But I think a more appropriate '80s would be an international conglomerate with holdings in a variety of industries: oil/energy, real estate, shipping, financial, etc.

I switched the name of the character so it can be either male or female.

My character will be male.

No pressure, just curious. Is there an ETA on this? I'm just trying to organize my gaming priorities.