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 Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:29 pm
First off, part of why I'm doing this is because I haven't managed to work up enough energy to address all of the stuff in the critique thread (nor has Krome, so yeah). But overall, I just thought it'd be fun and potentially helpful ^^
I'm going to organize this into categories as follows, at least for now:
General guidelines
Name
Age
Appearance
Personality/History
Hip hip.
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 2:52 pm
General Guidelines.
The first--and most important, for that matter--item in this section, is that your characters need to be people. People. Not characters.
This means that complex is good. A variety of weaknesses and strengths is good. A sense that this character is real is awesome. That's a really short version, I know, but keep it in mind as you read the rest of this.
Also, I consider grammar important, at least if it's a player I'm going to have to deal with later. Don't do anything that makes you look completely stupid, at the least, and also try to avoid typos. The latter makes it look like you didn't really care about the profile enough to even read it over once before submitting.
Keep in mind balance, too. Yes, some people in real life are amazingly intelligent, awesome fighters, and attractive to boot. That doesn't mean your characters should be. Really, I would consider about two to three percent (or maybe less) of the roleplaying population capable of playing a character like that well. (And almost all of the ones thus capable of writing such a character have moved past the desire to do so.) In all other cases, the character quickly becomes a combination of annoying, overbearing, and idiotic.
Avoid the "only" syndrome also, whether for positive things or negatives. Don't have her be the only mage powerful enough to stop time. Don't have him be the only kid picked on at school. This is because, the majority of the time, "onlys" are either too powerful and/or an excuse for angst.
Overall, there will be some things your character is good at. There should also be some things they suck at. In general, avoid making either the good or the bad off-the-charts extreme. Balance.
Finally, I'd like to include a few example snippets here of characters that struck me as awesome. Or one at least, for the moment. *Grins* ^^
Of the lovely Panpear:
A man strolled through city streets. He wore a dark blue cape that, if it were windy, would billow and make him look very impressive. As there was no wind, all it did was hang there, and keep his back warm.
Dorian Wesselbee sighed. There never seemed to be any wind that would make his cloak flare out dramatically. And it would be too much work to try and think up a spell that created aforementioned wind.
Only the first six sentences, and already there's an excellent sense of what kind of person this character is.
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 3:03 pm
Name.
Names are important, yes.
You want the name to fit both the character and the world you're playing in, of course. Most people don't have much issue with the first; the second, on the other hand, I've seen many a time.
Often it's because the player is recycling a character over again without really considering the details of how he or she is going to fit into this new world. Personally, it bothers me when people submit characters with blatantly Japanese names, for example, to a roleplay that's supposed to be set in a fantasy world. Be more creative than that.
There's also the Pretty Name syndrome, which thankfully I don't see a ton here. (It's quite common with fandom Mary Sues, though.) Usually these run something along the lines of: Isabella Asaeandra Maria Fallahan. And of course, the character's name in this case would be abbreviated to Bella, to remind everyone in every single post just how beautifully breathtaking she is. *Sighs*.
As a general rule, I would say that bad names are another symptom of bad roleplaying, as opposed to an isolated problem.
Yoder wrote: I had an insight about character naming.
It applies more to elvish characters, because it deals with combining word to form a last name. I will show an example of how using certain words can create different and possibly conflicting meanings depedning on who is reading it.
Consider the last name of a generic villainous character: "Shadowbane." The term bane was never meant to be combined with other words, because it can cause confusion. This last name could mean that he is the bane of all who oppose him, also mentioning his shadowy aspects (Shadowy-bane). The same last name could also carry the meaning that he is the opposition of shadows (Shadow's-bane). The second meaning would seem strange for an evil character, now wouldn't it?
As for the above, I would say the general version is if you're going to use names that mean something or have some special significance (the latter is not generally recommended), know what you're doing. Same with a lot of words, actually--I can't count the number of times I've seen thee and thou used improperly, for example. (Not only are there parts of speech issues, but originally-originally thou was less formal than you, not moreso.) So yeah.
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 3:12 pm
Age.
Why doesn't anyone ever play a forty-two-year-old? Or a seven-year-old?
Thankfully, there are people out there who do. The vast majority of players, however, create characters somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. Some players branch out all the way to thirteen and twenty-one or so. But that's usually the limit.
Why? Well, there is the fact that most players themselves are young. When I was thirteen, I wouldn't have felt like I had the ability to roleplay a forty-two-year-old; I had no idea what it was like, after all. For beginners, at least, this is a valid argument.
That doesn't, however, mean that you shouldn't challenge yourself to do something new every once in awhile. Even if you don't think you can play someone much older than you are, you should be able to manage younger--you lived it, after all. Part of writing is also using your logic and your imagination to picture what it would be like to do things you've never personally done before. After all, I highly doubt anyone here has ever really gone on a magical quest across three countries in search of the sword that will save the universe. But we have no problem roleplaying that.
You also have to take into account that teenagers are relatively inexperienced in the grand scheme of things. I might accept the idea that a thirty-year-old could be one of the best magicians in the country--but a seventeen-year-old? Not so much.
So overall: Explore. Take a few chances. And be something besides sixteen.
Note from Yoder: You may want to include why people do go over 20 when they do. I find that it is mostly, because they want to be allowed to have their character drink alcohol in the ever-classic beginning tavern scene. The funniest part I find is that the world they're in is a fantasy one. Why would the fantasy world have the same retrictions as our own?
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 3:37 pm
Appearance.
This is usually where everything starts to go to hell. This probably has something to do with the fact that roleplayers in question are using their characters as devices for wish-fulfillment, instead of making them people.
Many, if not most, roleplay characters are either beautiful or handsome. Again, this tends to stem from the fact that the players themselves want to look that way, but since they can't change themselves they're going to make their characters stunning/dashing instead. In order to really progress in roleplaying, at some point you have to let this little preoccupation go. (This same principle, in the form of "I want to be awesome" rather than "I want to look good", has something to do with all those uber-powerful type characters you see out there.)
Allow your characters to be average. Let them be ugly. If you must, at least draw yourself away from the uber-pretty a bit.
I find that some people go halfway on this by making the character average in general but then giving them uber-eyes (or some other half-hidden specialness). I gather that this is at least partially because the roleplayers still want someone to fall in love with their character (which of course won't happen if they're normal), so there must be something special about looking into the character's eyes that will just make that other hot character's heart melt. Or maybe it's the more general version of "there has to be something uber-special and unique about my character's appearance or he/she's just not good/interesting/cool enough."
My response to all that: It should be the person, not the appearance, that leads to this love or this specialness or whatever. You don't need eyes with golden flecks in them to be awesome.
In general, I also find that people need to relax with their adjectives a bit. For example, someone may make the leap to having a brown-haired, brown-eyed character instead of a purple-eyed white-haired one, but to make up for it they have to say "honey" instead of "brown". Or add adjectives like "smooth," "silky," "sparkling," "beautiful". I think in the majority of cases that's all rather idiotic sounding, personally.
Personal pet-peeve, by the way: do not use the names of jewels to describe colors. It's overdone and overused.
I feel I should also mention such things as scars or special necklaces or whatnot that are usually intended to make the character unique. I don't really consider a scar across someone's face all that unique, or for that matter an item that could be in anyone's hands. The fact that they have big ears, sure. Or maybe they have a hooked nose. Or heavy eyebrows. Or unusually long fingers/fingernails. Or scarring across their belly from having the chickenpox a few years ago. Maybe their face is a little wan-looking since they don't get out in the sun much, or maybe they're still sunburned across the shoulders from playing out on the beach a week ago. Forgive me for using 'they' as a singular in this paragraph.
Don't be afraid to make characters that are not striking on first impression. Don't be afraid to make a girl who's not so pretty she won't automatically entice all the male characters into pining after her. It's been done. A thousand, a hundred thousand, a few millions of times. Get it out of your system if need be. Then start roleplaying.
Added on the eighth of April 2007: As for my opinion on using pictures for appearances: I don't like it. Because, for one, most people use anime and those anime peoples all essentially look the same--pretty and less than memorable. Occasionally someone uses something not anime, but it's almost always still unbelievably pretty--and thus suffers just the same problems as the written version thereof.
Added on the eighth of June 2007: I thought I'd add something about when people describe clothing down to the logo on the character's shirt in a character profile--it strikes me as a bit odd, to say the least, considering that it implies the character either has only one set of clothes or else owns multiple sets of the exact same outfit. Going for descriptions of the /type/ of clothes rather than such an extreme level of detail is probably the safer bet here.
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:10 pm
Personality/History.
I combined these two because, personally, I feel they should be related. I think the current hypothesis out there is that, as a general rule, people are fifty percent nature and fifty percent nurture--thus, about half of your character's personality should have something to do with their history.
When defining a personality, you want to avoid making a laundry list of traits like: nice, cheery, happy, and gentle, but sometimes feels lonely. That doesn't have any sense of an individual behind it. A better version of that would be: As it's expected of her as a nurse, Kate usually keeps up a nice, cheery demeanor when in the hospital. This attitude is more fake than natural, however, as she isn't really satisfied with her life and finds it difficult to connect with other people. /Though those lines don't deal with any other aspects of Kate's personality, they give a better sense of a person than the previous ones did. Not only is there more detail, but there's also a better sense of what circumstances have given rise to this particular person.
Many people seem to simply refer to a stock list of personality types when creating a character. I've seen descriptions as brief as "nice, gentle, loving" or "dark and tormented". Seriously. Real people have more dimensions than that, no matter how nice or how dark they may be sometimes--and thus, your characters should too.
For example, the same person can easily be the compassionate, playful parent around her children, the bossy but generally nice coworker, the witty conversationalist around her friends, the woman taking charge in an emergency but the one crying in the corner during a tragedy. That may not be an extreme enough example to get the point across, but the idea is, once again: characters should be complex. The way they act may change upon their situation, and how it changes depends on the personality lying underneath. Sometimes their reactions are logical. Sometimes they're a bit illogical, just like in the real world.
Ideally, the personality of your character should affect the way you write from their viewpoint. For example, when a stern character sees a group of people dancing in the street, his first thought will probably be something about indecency. A playful character, on the other hand, might think immediately of joining in. This may seem obvious, but yet quite often I see every single character initially react about the same way: "He saw a group of people dancing further up the street. One of them was a blond girl with pigtails... etc." Insert yawn here.
I find that the easiest way of creating a character with an idiotic, boring personality is to give them an idiotic, boring past. First, a few key points:
THE PARENTS DO NOT HAVE TO BE DEAD. I had to yell that one simply because it irks me quite a lot. Usually the parents are dead so that the character can be free to move about the roleplaying world. I find that method an extremely, utterly, and uberly cheap way of going about things. You can, and should, be much more creative than that. Maybe the character's already considered an adult in his/her community and is already free to move about as he/she pleases. Maybe she has to run away from her parents in order to go along. The possibilities are endless.
The other reasons for making the parents die (or disappear) early is so that roleplayers can shirk the duty of having to define their character's relationships to other people, much less potentially roleplay them, and to create angst pits. Those aren't good reasons either.
This brings me to the issue of angst pits. It seems almost everyone has one, whether it be dead parents, murdered parents, parents who abandoned them, a sucky childhood, a 'mysterious' secret of angst, a history of abuse, or dead parents. Why?
I get the impression that maybe some of these people are honestly trying to give their characters depth. Most beginning writers aren't really good at dealing with such emotions and making them feel real (as opposed to a pile of angst), though, so I would encourage most of you away from going to such extremes simply to give your character something to talk about when everyone's sitting around the campfire talking about their pasts.
Though I'll come back and add to this, I imagine, for now I'm going to finish with the idea of including logic in a character's past. Does it fit in with the world at hand, for one? Does it make sense? Are you overlooking anything relatively basic? Does it fit with your character? A girl who's known nothing but hardship and the edge of starvation her entire life is probably not going to be happy-go-lucky.
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:12 pm
Miscellaneous, including the actual roleplaying bit.
Edit 5/22/07:
So now that you've got a character with a bit of complexity, how do you go about actually expressing that in the roleplay?
First, keep a sense of the surroundings in mind. Every once in awhile a player will give an excellent dose of description in their first post, but from then on the character might as well be floating about in space for all the mention of the setting there is. Details like mush of wet ground under someone's boots or the rough texture of a grainy wood under someone's fingers work well to bring the physical nature of the world alive without resorting to huge paragraphs of rather uninteresting details.
Description in general can be a double-edged sword; some people go at it a little too much, especially if it's the looks of the heroine they're dithering on about (hehe). Others, as mentioned above, have barely any, and their two-line posts usually attest to it. Keep in mind that, if you're writing from your character's viewpoint, the details that they notice and the way in which they notice them can do wonders for characterization. Consider the following:
A. Her feet sunk slowly into the soft, wonderously cool mud as Eline paused to glance back at her companions. Silly humans. She wiggled her toes in delight, waiting for them to catch up.
B. Her shoes, with three inches of mud caked all around them, were now a good three times heavier than they had been half an hour ago. The extra weight wouldn't've really bothered Darlene if it weren't for the fact that she had to practically wrestle her feet out of the damn stuff for each and every step she took in this wretched place. The woman squinted ahead, searching for Eline, but the elf had evidently skipped her merry little way ahead. Elves...
That more or less brings me to my next point, which some of you may have heard before: don't tell it, show it. For B, I didn't need to state outright that Darlene hated the area they were travelling through and didn't much like Eline either, as I showed it instead. This method can also be the gateway for some of that complexity I was talking about. If you say that Sam is nice and gentle and that Molly is nice and gentle, there's not any particular difference between them. But, if you show Sam helping a kid that got hurt but chastizing him for being reckless in the first place, and show Molly fluttering over the same kid and calling for help but not knowing how to actually help him herself, then we've got some differences.
I should pause for a moment here and touch on the actual mechanics of roleplaying. Don't control other people's characters, for one--it tends to a bit irksome. You'll probably have to find ways to engineer a interaction or conversation at first, if none is immediately forthcoming--don't expect other players to do it for you. Don't create non-player characters just to have them fawn over your main character or to be stupid/idiotic/clumsy so that your main looks better in comparison.
But back to the writing aspect--the counterpart to description would be dialogue/action, more or less, though ideally the two are interwoven to the point that they're inseperable. If there are lines in your post that could be completely removed without any adverse effect on the post as a whole, you should probably question why that is. Is it a detail that's not really all that interesting (or necessary), a redundant piece of 'tell-type' (as opposed to 'show-type') dialogue, or what?
Writing action in a roleplay can be more difficult than it is in regular writing because of the whole not controlling other people's characters thing--depending on the situation, you usually have to stick to one main action per post so that other characters have a chance to respond before you move on. If you grab the money and run out the door in the same post, then you're not giving that policeman character any reasonable chance to catch you before you escape--which is actually a form of controlling another's character, heh.
On a bit of a random note, conversations in particular can get kind of wonky; some exchanges end up along these lines:
Post of Character 1:
dialgue comment on subject A
dialogue comment on relatively unrelated subject B
dialogue comment C along the same lines as B
Post of Character 2:
Reply to A
Random shift to reply to B
Yet another random shift to reply to C
Whereas a real convo would go A, reply A, B, reply B, C, reply C. Kinda weird. I've done it, I know, but it still bothers me XD.
As for actually dealing with it. Well, for one, Character 1 is only going to make that many unrelated comments in a row if for some reason no one's interrupting him and/or he's droning on even when people are trying to respond. Whatever the good or not so good reasons for the first post, Character 2 is more likely to respond as a whole to everthing 1 has said, rather than specifically remembering each line and responding to it individually.
The general point of that especially detailed comment would be: dialogue, like everything else, is better when it's real. Pay attention to how people talk; there's a difference between "Shall we go to the ball now?" and "How about we head over to the party now, eh?"
As of now, which happens to be 1:30 a.m. on a rather lonely monday (tuesday), I've no more comments on this particular subject XD. We'll see what the morrow brings ^^.
Galadri: Maybe a warning against "purple prose" in a romantic scene would be a good idea. I can't tell you how many throbbing manhoods and moist feminine caverns have thrown me right out of an otherwise perfectly good plot device. I don't know how involved love scenes in these RPs get, but it's a hassle nonetheless. It makes the scene comical rather than arresting. You end up wincing through the whole great romantic scene, rather than tapping the down arrow frantically as you read like you never read before.
Added the eighth of June 2007: Warning, extreme detail on a very narrow subject follows. I thought I'd touch on the use of popular songs and brand names in roleplay for a moment. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, really, but it seems whenever such references pop up they're almost always the views and preferences of the roleplayer rather than the character. In fact, when a roleplayer has been relatively undescriptive and then suddenly produces a scene like:
Sarah, tears running down her cheeks, slammed the door and then collapsed onto her bed. The sounds of My Chemical Romance's *insert name of song here*, her favorite song of all time, blasted in her ears as she turned up the volume on her iPod.
I can only conclude that that song is actually the writer's favorite song of all time and that she just thinks it would be so awesome to make it her character's favorite song too. That would be a good example of the writer making the character an idealized version of him- or herself rather than a person all her own. The other problem with this, however, is that not everyone is going to recognize every song name, or even if they do, know what kind of song it is the roleplayer is trying to evoke. Thus, in my opinion the better alternative to referencing specific songs or artists is to describe the /type/ of music instead--especially rather than, god forbid, typing out the lyrics. (Anyone ever heard that quote about how anything too idiotic to be poetry can still be made a song?)
It's the same general thing with brand names, just much less prevalent. Take the iPod, for example. Rather than just saying my character was listening to her iPod, I would focus on details like the motion of her thumb on the wheel and the sound of the actual music in her ears, and I might not even mention specifically that it was an iPod she was using--because the second is more evocative of what it's like to actually use one. Because the feeling of what it's like is more important than the brand name (in the vast majority of cases, at least. One exception being some kind of school-wide war between iPods and mp3 players.) And because, believe it or not, not everyone owns or has used an iPod--moi, for example. Until a few weeks ago I had never even touched one, and thus until that time all of the details those vague references to "listening to her iPod" were implying had been utterly lost on me. People making references to iPods in their roleplays is not the end of the world, of course, and it's far from the worst thing they could be doing. But the thought was on my mind ^^
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Posted: Thu Apr 05, 2007 4:13 pm
Now, to conclude. Feel free to ask me questions or make comments, though I may not be on the ball with answering them. Hope you peoples find it mildly useful, overall. ^^
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Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 1:50 pm
Overall, it is great!
As for the age, you may want to include why people do go over 20 when they do. I find that it is mostly, because they want to be allowed to have their character drink alcohol in the ever-classic beginning tavern scene. The funniest part I find is that the world they're in is a fantasy one. Why would the fantasy world have the same retrictions as our own?
Just a thought.
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Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 2:14 pm
Nice, I like. I shall add it ^^
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Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 11:46 am
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Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:38 pm
Maybe a warning against "purple prose" in a romantic scene would be a good idea. I can't tell you how many throbbing manhoods and moist feminine caverns have thrown me right out of an otherwise perfectly good plot device. I don't know how involved love scenes in these RPs get, but it's a hassle nonetheless. It makes the scene comical rather that arresting. you end up wincing through the whole great romantic scene, rather than tapping the down arrow frantically as you read like you never read before.
Just one of my major peeves. mrgreen
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Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:16 am
Nice. I've definitely encountered that in fanfic, at the least. Hopefully there's not as much on 'PG-13' Gaia, but yeah. ^^
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Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 6:41 pm
Wow, at the very least i shall say that this was an interesting read (i actually wanted to read the whole thing) And at most i'd have to say it gave me a little insight or inspiration for role playing, thank you.
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Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 9:19 pm
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Reply
