I just wish I had more to do more often. My character is not so much the interview-people type. He is a weapon... and he knows it.
Ian Fabian or instance does it all. Granted, he may not be able to potentially handle getting hit a few times by a lobstrosity without taking a ton of damage, but he could still bounce back from it. Whether it's social interactions or shooting, other characters have more versatility in the current story.
So far the five most unused characters are Brian, Mike, Ethan, Melon, and Gloria. Then again, with Gloria it's more an RP thing than anything else. She's supposed to keep her mouth shut.
Melon has a shy /player/ who may take a little bit to be confident enough to really start jumping in. But if she were not afraid of being gang raped by the first group of monsters she came across (hence wanting to take up the sword and mystical martial arts abilities) she'd probably be a bit more confident too.
Mike will probably be overshadowed for a while since he is at a lower refresh than everyone else. Still, his character concept is funny. I wish I could see the ghost more.
The problem for Brian and I is that we don't really do /anything/ unless there is fighting going on. During a fight, /everyone/ else can help out or take action... or take consequences. Sure, the talky people may not be great in a fight, but they can still fight. That is the difference. They are still helping by creating aspects and such. There's a big difference between not being great at something but still being involved (like the squishy characters are during a fight), and being forced to stand on the sideline for 2/3 or more of the story like Brian and I are.
The reason for this is simple - fighting is crunchy. We're using aspects and rolling dice.
The game has mechanics for conversations to be that way too. For instance, if someone were holding out on Marty in an investigation and we had a social conflict, I could do something scary to try placing an aspect of "scary dude behind Marty" that he could then tag.
I actually built Ethan to be decent in social situations ... if we were doing social combat. He has pretty decent social defenses but can be lied to fairly easily. I was kind of figuring that he could not be easily intimidated, but he could be lead astray.
For investigations he's absolutely terrible, though... and pretty much has nothing better to do than follow Marty around.
That said, Ren has said that next session we're getting into little solo adventures and that gives me hope that Ethan will be doing something other than standing around and listening to people.
As for my crappier alertness skills and such, that would not be as big of a problem if I were getting compelled more often and had more fate points to work with. I get Pele compels fairly often... which are awesome and I enjoy a lot.
I just want to be regular-compelled more often in general.
I've actually been thinking about just relying more heavily on my link to Pele since it's easier to fit those type of compels into the story.
That will suck for everyone else though since I'll be burning their evidence to the ground and eating falling foes.... lol.