Posts belonging to Category Characterization
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 »
Posted by Ravyn on November 7, 2011
I’ve always had a strong competitive streak: a constant drive to excel, to show the world how I measure up, particularly when I’m operating at what they consider to be a disadvantage or supposedly “can’t” do it. So something like NaNoWriMo, with its inherent scoring mechanic, is practically begging for me to turn my full [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: concepts, Generic Villain project, NaNoWriMo, Raven moments, Round 2, writing | 5 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on October 13, 2011
This week, I’ve focused mostly on ways that a player can learn enough about a GM’s created culture to be able to at least somewhat fit in (or at the very least, mostly stay out of trouble). But in the case of characters in cultures they aren’t actually a part of, there’s one fact about [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Tactics, The Real World |
Tags: culture acclimation, GM tips, social interaction, uncanny valley | No Comments »