Posts belonging to Category Character creation
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 | 
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Posted by Ravyn on May 4, 2011
Yesterday, I started riffing on the difficulty I have with character generation and the problems it poses. Today, I’m going to think about how I can fix it for myself.
First off, the difficulty of finding a concept—I’m going to talk to people. Earlier. And make sure I’m talking to them throughout the process. Granted, in [...]
Categories: Character creation, For Roleplayers, Player Advice, The Real World |
Tags: character generation, disliking chargen, freewriting, roleplaying | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on May 3, 2011
It’s one of those bizarre contradictions that I’ve never entirely made sense of: why do I hate character generation so much, when I run a game with such a ridiculously large NPC cast that I could probably do two or three alphabets and only repeat myself on a letter or two where desperate? Given how [...]
Categories: Character creation, For Roleplayers, Player Advice, The Real World |
Tags: character generation, disliking chargen, freewriting, roleplaying | 6 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 6, 2011
In Monday’s post, I talked about the idea of a small group of characters so closely associated that they might as well be a single character. So how does a small group as a character work?
Before we can discuss why they work that way, we need to understand what kind of group can serve as [...]
Categories: Character creation, Character dynamics, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: roleplaying, small groups, unit, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 5, 2011
Yesterday, I talked about some of the elements for creating groups of characters that could also function as one somewhat complicated character role-wise. One of the points I touched on was the idea of each character’s role in the group, and how these roles can be used to ensure that the characters aren’t misplaced (unless [...]
Categories: Character creation, Character dynamics, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Secondary characters, Technique |
Tags: role, roleplaying, small groups, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 24, 2011
Some of the characters I’ve run into could fit in anywhere, really. Maybe it’s just being archetypical, maybe it’s being in worlds that have a lot in common with the other worlds I’ve read, but I could swap them with other characters of their ilk all day and all it would get me is amusing [...]
Categories: Character creation, Characterization, Characters in the world, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, World-building |
Tags: Characterization, culture, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 6 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 11, 2011
We know all characters need to be differentiated one way or another, but it’s particularly important for antagonists. After all, even in standard fiction, villains drive the story enough that it takes a really spectacular main character to make up for a bad one, and—well, since the protagonist in a game’s been outsourced to the [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Character creation, Character development, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Secondary characters |
Tags: antagonists, Characterization, differentiation, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 30, 2010
We’ve all heard about people who describe their characters too much, too florid, often when it really doesn’t make sense to do so; I think most of us can agree that that’s generally a bad idea. But some people have the opposite difficulty; they can settle down in a character’s head, dredge up personality, skills, [...]
Categories: Character creation, Character image, Characterization, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: character descriptions, Characterization, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 16, 2010
I’ve seen two general patterns of character generation in my time gaming. There’s the one where everyone comes up with their own characters individually, coordinating with the GM but not really comparing notes unless they feel like it or they want to make sure someone else hasn’t already chosen the role they want; I get [...]
Categories: Character creation, For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics, The Real World |
Tags: character generation, coordinated chargen, roleplaying | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on May 19, 2010
We all know it’s a good idea to know, in general, what a character’s good and bad at, what she looks like, and what her personality’s like. Most games will let you get away with just that (all right, plus or minus a little backstory); most writing gives you a chance to fill in details [...]
Categories: Character creation, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique, World-building |
Tags: Characterization, research, role-playing, writing | 5 Comments »