Posts belonging to Category Characters in the world
Posted by Ravyn on April 2, 2013
Yesterday I talked about ensuring that the audience is rooting for the character you want them to, with techniques focusing on the antagonist. But as came up in one of my points, the protagonist is often—if not predominantly—a good part of the problem. So what can we do with protagonists to keep them in the [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Writers |
Tags: Characterization, protagonists, writing | 
3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 1, 2013
One of the things I notice a lot, both in the chapter-by-chapter snarks I treat as a guilty pleasure, and in general reviews, are stories where the audience has a clear character to root for in mind, but for whatever reason, that character just isn’t the protagonist. For whatever reason, the antagonists are coming across [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Writers |
Tags: antagonists, Characterization, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 11, 2013
Most of the manipulative characters in both fiction and RPGs are absurdly good liars—you know, the type who could sell shoes to snakes or convince a person that the sky was red while standing outdoors at noon on a clear day. But that hides the fact that the people who are terrible at lying can [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Tactics |
Tags: Characterization, honest manipulators, manipulation, roleplaying, tactics, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on February 12, 2013
I talked yesterday about mutually dependent characterization, ending my riff with the idea that there are, in fact, risks as well as advantages to it. But what are they?
The first is utterly inseparable characterization. This most often happens when characters are designed as a set, rather than growing together naturally—they become so much of a [...]
Categories: Character dynamics, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: character dynamics, Characterization, mutually dependent characterization, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 11, 2013
Sometimes, you get characters who are, for lack of a better term, inseparable. Not in the physical sense, mind. They don’t always need to be in the same place at the same time—yes, they can be joined at the hip, but where’s the fun in that? No, this sort of inseparability is a result of [...]
Categories: Character dynamics, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: character dynamics, Characterization, mutually dependent characterization, roleplaying, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 20, 2012
Yesterday, I talked about building a world around characters, rather than building enough of a world to mold characters into and moving outward from there. I’ve been toying with this recently, and I’ve found a pretty good sequence for trying to grow outward from one or two characters to a plot and a world.
I start [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, plot, Technique, World-building, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 5, 2012
Ursula Vernon noted in a recent post that we have too few polite heroes in today’s stories. The post was only partly about that, so she didn’t really go into detail on why; since I agree, I’m going to take a stab at what’s so great about polite heroes—or, for that matter, polite primary characters [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers |
Tags: archetypes, Characterization, polite characters, roleplaying, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on August 6, 2012
It’s a natural thing for a creator to worry about the secondary characters stealing too much of the spotlight. It’s happened in fiction of all stripes, particularly when the main character is left fuzzy for audience insertion purposes; it’s a common risk in RPGs, and likely to end with a bunch of very annoyed players. [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Secondary characters |
Tags: competence, roleplaying, secondary characters, writing | No Comments »
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 July 23, 2012
While it may not necessarily feel true for a lot of people, most people have some specific role they fill which, if it were to be filled by someone else, would require a certain amount of instruction. Fictional characters, be they from a story or game, almost all have roles like this; after all, designing [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Exercises, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: character role, Characterization, Exercises, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »