Posts belonging to Category Character image
Posted by Ravyn on February 19, 2013
A long time ago, I suggested an exercise in which the object of the game was to come up with a character’s retelling of an event, in voice. But no story is told in a vacuum, and few are told without someone to hear them.
For this exercise, then, choose two characters and one event. It [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Mood, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: characterization exercise, Exercises, retelling | 
1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on July 30, 2012
Originally posted on June 30, 2009
One complaint people often have about bad writers is that they claim their characters are good at doing a certain thing or have a certain interest, but there’s next to no evidence in the text that it’s actually true. Characters who love books [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Exposition, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, reprise, show don't tell, skills | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on June 13, 2012
Let’s face it, intrigue is fun: it creates cerebral rather than physical conflicts, gives the audience a chance to match wits with the characters, and leads to some of the best sneaky maneuvering and one-liners a fictional setting can allow. Then it gets tangled up with politics, and things get really interesting; a politically skilled [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, politically skilled characters, roleplaying, show don't tell, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on June 7, 2012
Originally posted on March 24, 2010.
I find there’s a continuum over which powerful characters (either compared to the PCs in a game, or compared to the world in which they’re in) tend to fall. On one end, you have the characters who are truly Awesome; one can envy them, but they’re much [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: awesome vs. better than you, Characterization, reprise, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 2, 2011
Yesterday I talked about distinctive silhouettes and why they’re important in comics and other visual media. My question, thinking about this, then became “What’s the prose equivalent? How do we manage distinctive silhouettes when we’re limited to words?
The first thing we need to remember is that for the prose silhouette, most aspects of appearance aren’t [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on August 1, 2011
One of the panels I attended at Comic-Con was Bryan Tillman talking about character design—or more specifically, visual character design. I came, I saw, and needless to say, I started thinking about how to apply what I’d learned to prose, to the point where I ended up following up on the jokingly oft-repeated exhortation to [...]
Categories: Art in writing, Character image, Characterization, Concepts, Cross-discipline, Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Art in writing, concepts, Cross-discipline, roleplaying, silhouettes, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on June 8, 2011
One of the toughest things about a relatively new character can be figuring out where their boundaries and obligations lie—which is a pity, because those can be the fastest way of making a character interesting. Shinali recently poked me with a solution, based on her regular quoting of Gibbs’s Rules: write the character up a [...]
Categories: Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Exercises, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: characterization exercise, code of conduct, roleplaying, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 29, 2011
Corruption. It’s one of those dark things that we like to use to make antagonists out of characters who really don’t seem like the type to go into full-out villainy, pretty much as soon as we step into a setting that screams out “bureaucracy”. They’re evil HR managers, embezzling accountants, stock traders with inside information—they’re [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Character image, Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice |
Tags: antagonists, bureaucrats, Characterization, corruption, roleplaying, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 9, 2011
This was inspired by (and, in fact, supposed to be a comment to, before it turned post-length on me) the recent Hathor Legacy article “Pride and Possession”. In it, Gena responds to seeing a debate on whether or not Mother Gothel might not have been so bad after all (I’ll admit, this concept rather scares [...]
Categories: Character dynamics, Character image, Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Motivation, Reviews and technique, Secondary characters, Symbolism, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: antagonists, Beauty and the Beast, Characterization, redeemable, responses, roleplaying, Tangled, writing | 3 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 | 3 Comments »