Posts belonging to Category Characterization
Posted by Ravyn on January 31, 2012
Yesterday, I wrote about the game shepherd NPC. What got me thinking about that character type (or at least, what got me thinking this time) was that one feature that all of the 3D Zelda titles share—their local equivalent of the game shepherd, someone to look over Link’s shoulder and tell him about things that [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Reviews and technique, Secondary characters, Technique |
Tags: game shepherd NPCs, GM Advice, Reviews and technique, roleplaying, Zelda | 
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Posted by Ravyn on January 30, 2012
One of the things we’ve learned pretty quickly about introducing a player or group to a world they’ve never played in before is that they might not really know what the place is like. Not everyone reads the setting info cover to cover, after all. This is usually where we bring in the Game Shepherd [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Secondary characters |
Tags: game shepherd NPCs, GM Advice, roleplaying | 7 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 11, 2012
Sometimes you have characters of few words; you know the type, the ones who will nod or shake their heads or occasionally toss out a few word insults. And then there are the ones who don’t talk. At all. No, not even then. They’re mysterious, and they’re definitely a challenge to write or play; there’s [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: Characterization, roleplaying, silent characters, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on January 10, 2012
One of the things people learn when gaming with me is that I have a thing for characters in disguise. Secret identities, alter egos, pretending to be something they’re not: particularly if I’m on a slow session, there’s nothing quite like watching the peculiar dynamics of a character’s interaction with the person she’s pretending to [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers |
Tags: Characterization, disguise, personal notes, roleplaying | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 2, 2012
“While Kueng is lecturing Black Rooster on how renouncing his greed will end the curse, the Enlightened Master steals a few of Black Rooster’s buttons.”
On the night of New Year’s Eve, we discovered (in the Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin sense, mind you, the fact was there all along but we never really [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, Nonhuman characters, The Real World |
Tags: group observations, real world, roleplaying, small animals | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on December 28, 2011
Originally posted on October 8, 2008, because worlds that obviously revolve around their protagonists are dead boring.
The secondary character exists when you’re not looking at her.
That should be pretty self-explanatory, but it’s easy for people to forget that. In stories, you have characters that for some reason are always there, always available, always [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Secondary characters |
Tags: roleplaying, side character autonomy, techniques, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 27, 2011
Originally posted on September 9, 2008. Have you ever gotten tired of a character, PC, NPC or just plain fictional, who invited himself to a pity party and never left? So have I.
No beloved peasant villages were harmed in the making of this post.
If you’ve been running games for a while, you’ve probably seen one [...]
Categories: Backstory, Character creation, Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: angst, Characterization, reprise, roleplaying, techniques, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 22, 2011
In the comments to yesterday’s riff on why I don’t tend to start with my characters pre-heroed, UZ pointed out that there are two things that can both mean character development. It’s a topic I couldn’t resist poking a bit.
I’m going to start by assigning names to them so that we can keep the silly [...]
Categories: Character development, Characterization, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, concepts, meta, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 19, 2011
This month’s RPG Blog Carnival, on the subject of Heroes, Living and Dead, got me thinking about the term. “Hero” is a pretty subjective term, as these things go; some people consider heroism to be anything that involves improving other people’s lives, others see it as risking one’s life, there are still more whose main [...]
Categories: Characterization, Exercises, For Roleplayers, For Writers |
Tags: Characterization, Exercises, heroes, roleplaying, RPG Blog Carnival, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on December 15, 2011
Creepy characters are something of a hobby of mine. It started by accident; one of my early characters somehow managed to creep the socks off of her entire party, and at the time I couldn’t seem to figure out how to make her stop. So I designed a character to see if I could do [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers |
Tags: Characterization, creepy, freewriting, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »