Building a Character: Development Through Roleplay

It’s been way too long, and there’s an army of distractions to thank for that. I guess it’s good this is a personal thing, then. Today I want to try and tackle the idea of building and developing a character through roleplay; just calling it “Character Building” should suffice, though. While most characters don’t see nearly as much development as their authors would like (or any for that matter) I would argue that this is certainly one of the highest achievements a roleplayer can make a claim to fame with. There may be times where you feel great triumph in orchestrating a long, devious plot, but character development is something that spans every tense you’re going to write and plan in, and I would argue is the hardest thing to master. This takes everything I’ve gone over into account all at once to produce one glorified, ever-changing product. It’s pretty crazy, and when done well it can be pretty awesome. You really are “building” something, so it makes sense that everything would depend on the other components to make a fully comprehensive structure.

In a nutshell, character building is the changing of everything you’ve built thus far. You have your appearance, personality, and histories altogether and you’ve hopefully established that you can be consistent within your own parameters, so now you can take it a step further. While keeping all those things we’ve gone over consistent, you must now, slowly, change them. This should, naturally, seem counter-intuitive; we’re trying to change but stay the same all at once? Well, from the perspective of your character, the idea of change will count consistency as a given – he or she will act a specific way, because that’s who they are, and diverting from that should be either of note (if it’s a dramatic shift) or should be so subtle that the character doesn’t notice it or suppresses any thoughts about it. I would argue that the act of being subtle is not only much more convincing, but it’s also much more challenging and consequently seen much less. It makes sense that a subtle change over a long period of time would be more common, as it fills in the time much more frequently, and it should likely always be occurring to a certain extent in your roleplay if a character is surrounded by things that would cause it. A great example of this is keeping company that would be otherwise unusual for them or being forced to complete tasks that would not necessarily fit neatly into their character.

This brings me to a very obvious fundamental, but it should be addressed all the same: character building will occur when the character’s person is challenged in some way. A stoic warrior may find the bubbly priest’s good-nature wearing off on him ever so slowly as he keeps company with them; similarly, the priest may find herself appreciating the warrior’s pragmatic reserve as it influences her as well. Now, there’s a difference between a character making a sacrifice and a genuine change in their person, and this should be noted too. If these characters despise each other at first, but they grow to “get along” or “live with one another” then that’s not really character building. In the case of the warrior, he may sacrifice a bit by putting his feelings aside and learn to deal with the priest. However! Should another extroverted character full of emotion come wandering in, the warrior will likely find himself disliking them just as much, because he’s only accustomed himself to deal with the first. Tolerance, while it can certainly lead to development, is not development in and of itself. If, after long enough, the priest has worn off on the warrior enough to encourage toleration toward all people of the type, then it can be said that he has grown personally, and finds himself more appreciative of things in general than he was before. With that out of the way, I’ll return to my original point: there must be an influence on a character in order to change them. Whether it’s long-suffering with a person they don’t agree with or one dramatic event that completely reshapes their perspectives on a number of different things, it’s important that it’s not completely spontaneous (even if you’re roleplaying a completely crazy character, though I would caution against that in general).

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll refocus on those two types of character building and attempt to cover them as best I can. Thanks to my disordered rambling, I’ve already started talking about long-term development, so I guess I’ll keep up with that and cover short-term toward the end. Firstly, it should be understood that long-term building will result in the vast majority of all building that your character sees within roleplay. If you feel the need to drop major traumatic events every other thread, then something with your own creativity is probably wrong or you’re not getting nearly enough roleplay and you therefore feel pressured to have SOMETHING happen. This is a dangerous place to be in, and I would say that even if you can’t get a lot of roleplay, better to do what you have well than to rush it and make waste.

However, I did mention that your character will likely always be in the process of building subtly. Character building isn’t strictly about destroying what your character already is, it’s about changing the character in general. If your stoic warrior is always hanging out with other people very similar to himself, then his character will be building as well. In this case, though, unlike the example with the priest, the warrior will find his character fortified instead of worn away. While the priest might push him to be softer over time, if he were to spend all his travels with a group of other stoic warriors just like himself, then he would find it increasingly difficult to depart from the mentality. Fortification is something every character needs in order to have a personality trait actually be a trait; a great example of this that is used frequently is emotional pain with a character. This can take the form of anxiety, suspicion, doubt, cruelty, or any other number of things, but if you take a moment to reasonably ask how it was formed, you can see that even this “negative trait” came to the strength you call upon through a long period of fortification. People usually just summarize this through the history, mostly because actually roleplaying this out is usually more time than people are willing to commit and it can be very depressing, but regardless it’s assumed to be fortified one way or another. I’ve used this example to death, but I’ll return to it once more – growing up in an abusive environment for years will result in a very intense culmination of emotional pain that the character will find very hard to overcome.

With this in mind, it’s important to keep in mind what exactly you’re going to be changing over the long haul with your roleplay. In the most recent example, with that much fortification how difficult do you think it’s going to be for that character to break free from that when you finally set them on that path to do so? The answer should be that it would prove very difficult, because they’ve spent so much time building that up inside themselves. Breaking free should be a very long, difficult process over the culmination of months if not years. How do you roleplay that? Well, no one said this would be easy. However, there is a crutch that people use (perhaps too frequently) that causes the process to go a lot faster. Instead of a long-term contributor, you can introduce, as the writer, a much more emphatic, short-term device. These should certainly be used with extreme caution, but they definitely have a place in the writing process. It makes a story interesting and provides a peaking point, provided there’s enough quality rising action leading up to it.

A quick example though as to what I’m talking about is probably worthy of adding; an event like this takes place only over a few moments but will change your character dramatically in the long run, such as a death, a realization of betrayal, a gift, the birth of a child, and so on. While all of these things may take place over varying lengths, I think it’s fair to say that we’re speaking of something in the short run. They can be positive or negative, and they can have varying levels of shock value, but it is a certain element of surprise that ambushes a character and overpowers your character in a moment. On this note, I would say that you can have varying levels of awareness for the parties involved, and I’ll go through them real “quick”.

Firstly, neither the reader nor the character might see the event coming. These are the most spontaneous events because they have very little rising action, or what rising action is present is aimed at deceiving both reader and character alike. These can be very strong for immersion for the reader and will help them to understand the shock the character at hand may be going through from it. However, because they’re so spontaneous, these ought not to be used excessively. Above all, though, they cannot be spontaneous for the writer himself. If the writer is introducing these things out of boredom, that’s a good cue that the roleplay or the roleplayer is not very good – usually both.

Secondly, the reader may be expecting the event but the character is not. I would say this one has the most common footing in roleplay, and is naturally the most challenging to convey successfully. Usually in this case there is enough foreshadowing that the reader may be clued in to the event, or the reader may have access to information the character does not. In either case, this one is difficult because both writer and reader must have the same level of empathy for the character as in the first case, even if they can no longer easily make the connection themselves. These are easily recognizable in most forms of fiction, and are very important for the story telling aspect.

Thirdly, the reader may be expecting the event, and the character may be as well. These are trickier and I can’t say too much on them mostly out of lack of experience. However, it is obvious that this changes the game slightly. The event may have less of an impact because it is less of a surprise, but the potency of the event should not be missed. A good example of this might be a father expecting a child and finally holding it for the first time; such things radically change a person’s vantage point, and while they can anticipate the event itself, they cannot anticipate the effects of it.

Keep in mind I’m talking about all these events as ones that shape characters with some level of drama. It’s totally possible for events using the same template to happen without necessarily dramatically changing a single character’s life in the process; they’re all basic elements of story-telling. Now that all of these are established, though, I’ll return to my summation of these events as a whole.

The surprise value implicated in each event is important, but more importantly is certainly the event itself. Just because it’s a surprise that you don’t have any milk even after you pour the bowl of dry cereal, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to change your worldview. I’ll come back to “trivial” actions when I finish, though. Anyway, all of these things need to be interpreted by the author as to their affects on the character based on the character’s personality (and consequently their experiences). Events like these may change the character just as quickly as they happen, but often times the change occurs still gradually, as the character becomes used to the reality of what has happened and tries to deal with it internally; a good example of this might be the commonly known stages of grief, where a person comes to terms with what has happened. What’s important, though, is that by the end they’re different!

These events don’t have to be positive, and they don’t have to be just negative; they don’t have to fortify, they might degrade a personality – what’s important is that your character does grow in one direction or another, and you as the author make note of that. As this is taking place, you can usually go into some detail about the process your character is going through internally as this takes place, and both you and the reader can gain some greater insight into the character at hand. Now, in some places this may not be appropriate (roleplay with “character limits” on posts or in other settings), but for the most part I would consider this a very valid level of “meat” to your roleplaying posts. You don’t need to be longwinded about it, but it’s a worthy endeavor to try and showcase some of the internal clockwork that’s going on, especially if you’re roleplaying with someone regularly.

Jeez, I think these get longer each time I write them; go figure. Well, I’ll try and wrap up then. I’m assuming that some level of character building is going on at all times mostly because roleplay (like any story) usually has some significance regardless of the scene. It could be that your character walks away happy or just thinking a little harder on something, or it could be that they walked away shocked; regardless, there is usually a certain level of action. Obviously, not everything that happens will build a character in a noteworthy way. You can use pretty much any action to complement or contrast current elements of a character, though; in the case of the bowl of dry cereal and no milk, if the character is a pessimist he may roll his eyes and conclude that this is clearly something that would only happen to him, or maybe he carries a slightly comedic streak and finds it funny that he would consistently forget to check something like this in advance. It’s pretty trivial and certainly not the most telling incident, but it helps if you think about each event in terms of what effects they’ll have, whether you introduce them as the writer or your reader who is roleplaying with you does. You need to be able to see through the eyes of your own character and gauge how much something would or would not affect them, in both the short and long term. And with that, I will conclude this short novel that hardly scratches the surface on the subject! Hopefully next time will be a (shorter) conclusion entry that goes over some final thoughts and ties up all these aspects of building a character.

Building a Character: Consistency in Roleplay

Now that I’ve finally done the personality section I feel very… relieved. Personalities are most certainly the greatest element of exhaustion in a character sheet when you really get down to it, and writing about them is much the same – and I could still talk for hours on it! But I won’t right now, because there’s still more ground to cover. I’ve come to the opinion that I’m not going to burn myself out on writing this type of thing, because every time I “finish” an entry it’s with the feeling that a day later I could double its length with more information. In short, I’m going to just try and write these whenever I can from now, instead of spacing them, because there’s so much I need to get out of my head! Now, though, I’m going to switch to the building process that involves that actual act of roleplaying, probably two or three sections, starting with consistency and then moving onto character building.

Consistency in roleplay is technically the opposite of character building, but it’s just as important. In a nutshell, the idea is that once you’ve written your lengthy (but concise) character sheet, you must actually make use of it in roleplay by doing what you said you would. Or rather, doing what you said your character would. This idea seems so obvious that you might even wonder why it needs to be brought up, but so often is it tempting to go away from it. There are even times when you should, but how you decide that is important too, so let’s just go over some basics.

Granting your character power they did not have can be very obvious, like using magic when you’ve never mentioned an affinity for it, or a child wielding a great-sword, but where things get nasty is when you start doing it more subtly. For example, say you have a character who has been a very strong mage from birth, and they have been able to defeat foe after foe with their prowess in the arcane. However, one breaks away from their character the moment they draw a melee weapon and fight with it. In terms of the fantasy/medieval genre, swords, axes, hammers, polearms, and the like are all fairly demanding weapons. They’re heavy and awkward to use at first, and unless a character has trained with them and has the strength to be effective, the very notion of picking up a weapon is completely out of the question.

On that note, even if you’ve already specified they carry a weapon and can use it, their skill is also of the highest importance. This is roleplay and we’re using our words to fight one another, should it come to that. You likely aren’t using stat points and move-sets (and if you are then refer to your local guide on the matter) and the only thing stopping you each from being the perfect duelists is your own self-control. If you’re fighting a master swordsman and you merely have training in the art, you’re going to lose. Hope your opponent is gracious, but that’s just the way it’s going to go. People try and come up with all sorts of flowery excuses, how they got lucky just this once (and the next and the next) and managed to pull something off that even they were surprised about, and that’s nice, but it’s also garbage. You’re breaking character and should stop. If you’ve worked your way into a corner and really want to survive the encounter, talk to the person you’re roleplaying with and explain it to them. I’ve never seen them not be gracious about it, even with the most competitive of people. (Similarly, in the future consider exactly what you’re claiming when you call your character a “blademaster” or something of the sort. You’re saying that there’s a tiny percent of everyone in existence who spars with melee weaponry that can even hope to match your talent. Make decisions because you should, not because there’s nothing that says you can’t, but more on that another time.)

So basically the same thing applies to personalities, but, since they’re obviously more difficult, the problems tend to be slighter and less conspicuous. I touched on the idea of staying true to a “loner” character before, and I’ll return to it once as it’s a favorite that is more complicated than most people care to think. Now that you’re a loner, it means you literally don’t like being with people, right? That’s the idea anyway. You’re either uncomfortable with them, or you think you’re better than them, and as a result you’ve locked yourself into the idea that any sort of character interaction is going to be a painful process for your character. At best, your character should only be tolerating the company of others, and if you do it properly then I guarantee you that the loner idea you romanticized is actually quite frustrating, both for the writers of the roleplay, and also for the characters themselves. However, if you start diverging from this, allowing more and more tolerance for your character and even showing a genuine affection for another character, you’re breaking your own character.

If we cannot remain consistent to our own character sheets that we’ve created, and we depart from them simply to make roleplay flow more smoothly, then we’ve missed the idea completely. Roleplay isn’t about you getting satisfaction because you know your character is, it’s about you staying true to your character (Not even just roleplay, but fiction in general). Without consistency in all fields, the very notion of a character falls apart completely and becomes simply what you as the writer feel like at the time. Bad! You must be objective with your character and be prepared to grant them both suffering and pleasure without necessarily giving yourself either. If you’ve written yourself a bitter, condescending character, you’re not going to throw that all under the rug the moment the lovely lady comes walking by, because you as the writer get a thrill from some in-character romance. Your character must stay true to himself, despite your temptations to pull him away, and any allowances you let through should be noted for their irregularity.

Now, I’ve been making some blanket comments about things you’re not allowed to do, and reading it you might start thinking that I’m basically telling you that your character must be a stone wall, incapable of acting more than one way, and that if you the writer is enjoying what they’re writing then something is wrong. As you start adhering more strictly to your character, you’ll begin to that the enjoyment from them comes from watching their life fluctuate, come to fruition, and finally grow before your eyes. I would argue that there’s a much deeper satisfaction in watching your character behave foolishly and slowly come to understand their errors than imposing your own knowledge of a situation into your character so they don’t stumble at all. Having your character do something stupid can be very difficult, and I’ll talk about that specifically another time, but it can quickly grow to be a very interesting thing.

Similarly, regarding the idea that your character can only act one set way, this isn’t true, or else there would be no character building. The important thing for you as the writer is to narrate this process appropriately, emphasizing the growing pains your character will experience as a result of it. Your character who is naturally very distrusting may slowly grow to trust certain individuals, but should it be with hesitance and something that takes a considerable amount of time, as it would for a real person. I would even go so far as to say that most character building takes longer that you usually devote to roleplaying a single character at all, so don’t write one thread, do one scene, and call it good. The more time you invest into the process, the more interesting, immersive, and potent the final change will be. On top of that, you’ll also have a much better understanding of your character because of it.

In closing, I will also say that sometimes you create a character that plays differently than you had intended to. You, of course, should first check to make sure that it’s not just your being preferential to good behavior over bad that causes the difference, but if you find that things you thought would be interesting characteristics to play turn out not to be, then you should act on that. Return to your character sheet and revise appropriately. The act of staying consistent is not so that you would never depart from one character concept, but so that you can use your character sheet as a reliable backbone for how your character actually acts. If you created a cold, ruthless barbarian who favors ale and the character ends up playing out that he’s more of a violent drunk, then re-emphasize that in your character sheet. Consistency leads to quality, and the better quality the roleplay is, the more fun it is.

Building a Character: The Personality

This is, without a doubt, the most difficult part of the character creation to do superbly. As a writer, your task is essentially to do the impossible and create sentient life onto a piece of paper. Not only that, but you have to do it in a concise format, hopefully not taking up too much of your reader’s time. The challenge is not so much producing the content, but rather coming up with content that has integrity with itself and coexists logically with the character’s history.

There are two core factors that must be considered in the act of building the personality content, categorizing personality traits into one of two categories. The first is used most frequently but acknowledged the least, and can be called genetic predisposition - that is to say, a personality trait that is brought into existence from the birth of your character, usually tracing back to their origins. As always, you don’t want to waste your reader’s time with an excessive and in-depth look into the entire history of the character’s family, but acknowledging that your character acts a certain way because that’s simply “who they are” is important. These personality traits are often over-arching and longer lasting than those of the other type, which I’ll get to in a second, and they’re often used by writers as a crutch for poor character creation and development.

For example, say you have a character with a very dark past – upbringing, childhood, school years, etc. – but you claim that the character is surprisingly more cheery and uplifting, despite all the trauma and emotional scarring they would have received during this time when they are very vulnerable. Now, it’s very important to understand that from a cause-and-effect standpoint this does NOT make sense. If you met someone who could tell you for hours all the atrocities that they had witnessed as a child, but they still had a positive and uplifting attitude about it and everything else, you would either question their sanity or consider that their ability to act like this is caused by something rooted deeply within them. Like a genetic predisposition? That’s kind of a mouthful, so let’s just stick with calling it a base trait. However, one should be wary of the temptation to use this as an excuse for an easy way out in creating your character, usually to provide some sort of interesting or redeeming quality to a character when it would otherwise be subject to being a lonesome prick. People often give these terribly tragic back stories to characters but then portray them as noble souls who wish to bring happiness into the lives of others. In other words, “Despite all of this, he persevered, becoming stronger and better because of it.” Why? How? Because of the concept of base traits, this isn’t theoretically wrong or illogical, but the question is: how interesting is it? This works in the reverse too.

Now, I haven’t exactly shed a very positive light on these base traits, and that’s mostly because they’re abused frequently, but base traits can also add quite a bit of strength to your character as a whole too. The thing to consider, that so few people do, is that prominent base traits are, more often than not, negative things. Things that a person struggles to overcome, and it’s not necessarily their own fault for having them. Overly aggressive natures, addictive tendencies, obsessions, and so much more can all be spawned very easily because they were born with it. Consider also that these “internal demons” will likely be the subject of great frustration for your character, and you can make them much deeper and more interesting because of it. Now, my intent in going over this isn’t to suggest that every base trait a character has must be antagonizing them constantly, but before giving your character any base trait (especially positive ones) question your motives for doing it. Is it because you want the character to be more likeable? Is this base trait actually one of YOUR traits (or a desired one) that you are imposing on the character? Not touched by history but always present in their actions – sounds like tampering and self insertion to me. Or are you doing it because you think it will build the character to the place you want them, to make them more interesting and definable. It’s really hard stuff and should be approached very cautiously.

I hope this makes some level of sense, but it’s certainly a challenging and somewhat strange subject. It’s hard to write about and, consequently, it’s even more difficult to produce properly. I may have to do a section later just using and analyzing examples of strong and weak personalities. At any rate, we’re not quite done yet, because causal behaviors are next. While your character will likely have a few base traits that you touch on, I’m currently of the opinion that causal traits are more potent for your character as a whole.

Beyond what they’re born with, your character is going to develop a number of traits over the course of their lives that will shape who they are when you finally birth them into whatever world of roleplay is in question. Unlike base traits, these traits are acquired by events in a character’s life and should therefore be explained in their history. This idea can be considered the bread and butter of your character’s existence, shaped by the course of their lives; it’s also the core idea in character building, perhaps what can be considered the goal of most roleplay.

Once again, creating a causal trait is not particularly difficult, but keeping all of them aligned and working with one another into your final result can be very tricky indeed. With every concept you add to your character you’re also adding another level of complexity to them as well. It’s something that builds off itself, so by the time you’ve added six or seven life scarring events to your poor character, they’re going to have a very interesting view on life. As a writer, it’s your task to keep these concepts under control while you build your character into whoever you want them to be in the end.

In terms of strategy, I’ve found that building from the floor up, like I mentioned before, is the easiest way to do this without creating something of significantly less quality. You have an archetype, then you build your history and appearance, and finally you combine all three factors into the creation of the personality. Private education as a child? That will add an effect. Drafted into the military at the age of sixteen? Also an added effect, but now you have to tweak that effect with the nod to your previous one. How does your character feel about dealing with all these barbarous men that he had otherwise avoided in his more secluded, educated life? How does this affect his views of his country? Maybe he had to leave his family to answer the call of war, though. Did private education make him a homebody or did it make him as eager as can be to escape his own household? If it’s the former, does he worry about the safety and prosperity of his family back at home now that he’s gone? If it’s the latter, perhaps now he’s missing the comforts of home? If not, perhaps he’s embracing it to his fullest and basically turning into a raucous, brutish man like the rest of them. What about when his best friend dies standing next to him? Does it cause him to start hating humanity, or does he push it under the rug like the rest of his long-lost morality he learned as a child. But don’t forget that education of his. If he’s developing disgust for people, it’s certainly not going to aid him as he’s likely carrying a better education that the people he meets. Men who cannot even read and write are responsible for the death of his closest friend and comrade. Will that affect him long-term when he finally escapes the war?

The concept of a soldier is so impossibly complex that, while it’s commonly used, proves to be one of the more difficult things to tackle. Every question I asked had several possible answers to it, each provoking new questions and so on, and the depth of your character is completely up to you deciding when you’re going to stop. What happens, though, both in roleplay and in real-life, is that there is a summation that takes place. When a character becomes so fed up with all this junk that’s filled their mind, they sum it all up (consciously or not) into an overarching personality trait. Your character sheet isn’t supposed to have the answer to every one of those questions in it, because that would be much too long, but it will essentially compile into a number of final traits. Perhaps our soldier friend basically became calloused and bitter because of everything that happened to him by the time he made it home. While that sounds pretty straight forward, consider all the nudges and slights in one direction or another that led up to that final summation trait. Perhaps his country won the war – why isn’t he marching home with pride? Or why isn’t he just flat out depressed, instead of stoically mute. You have these final possibilities, but what’s important for you as a writer is everything that led up to it, because those things are what truly make him operate.

I think of the process I described above in terms of a flow-chart diagram. Start with an event, and then have multiple branches that could extend from it. Each one of those branches will branch out further and further, and you’ll proceed through the tree to the very fiber of his being. Now, once you’ve created this incalculable level of detail for how your character got where he is, draw a big rectangle around it, attach a head, arms, and legs. Congratulations, you have a person with all his innards exposed. Now put a shirt over it all, and he’s presentable to the world. People who interact with him will only see “bitter” or “stoic.” They have no idea what’s underneath that shirt – what makes him work. They may begin to understand, because the character’s actions will draw from what’s inside them, but only you truly know everything.
In summation!

Step 1: Trace the steps of your character’s personality

Step 2: Frame your masterpiece and therefore establish its beginning and end

Step 3: Blanket it, as a person would

Step 4: Oh, that’s right. That was just ONE concept. Now consider all those other concepts you wanted to combine from all through his life.

Step 5: Look familiar? For everything you add to your character, there will only be more and more depth to them


In closing, I will say some final things. Ideally, what we’re trying to do is impossible. However, we can get close. We have both language and time on our side to make up for our lack of perfect understanding of this. Words can be relative and mean different things, and they can also encompass a large number of ideas very quickly with a certain turn of phrase or wording. Your ability to use the English language here will be tested to its maximum alongside everything else, but it’s still possible to come out alive. Furthermore, you also have time on your side. In turn-based roleplay (I post, you post, etc.) you will have a certain amount of time that’s considered standard to respond. Good posts do take some thought, even when you know your character through and through. However, keep in mind that the more you add to your character, the more you must consider. Even the “simplest” of characters can turn out to be these incredibly complicated beasts when really looked at, so don’t get ahead of yourself.

Good luck!

Building a Character: The History

Okay, so I've been kind of out of this habit for a couple of weeks now, so I'm trying to get back into it once more. Hopefully it will be beneficial to myself or perhaps someone else, but here goes: the history. This is usually written last, and often rightly so, but I would consider it the second most important of the three core items in the character sheet, bested finally by the personality section that I'll be doing next.

I will be mostly attempting to dispel some notions about the history section that I see often but don't consider to be the most valuable approach to it - primarily length and density. I am going to be a little repetitive here, but it certainly is worth repeating and reiterating: quality over quantity. Unless you've really got my attention with a killer character concept, you're a good friend of mine (not because only then could I consider your writing worthwhile, but simply because it is an immediate prompt of personal interest), or (hopefully not) I'm worried there will be errors hidden in it, my immediate reaction to seeing a very long history is to simply go do something else. Play a game, watch a movie, doesn't matter - I'm not really interested. A character's history section in their sheet should not be a biographical masterpiece covering everything from the romance of their parents down to the first crush they had in the first grade. Simply because it is a part of the character's history that you as the writer knows does not necessarily mean that it's information you need your reader to know.

Instead of including every minute detail you may call upon in the roleplay as you act out your character, simply explain it on a need-to-know basis, and use it to strengthen your roleplay and the reader's understanding of the character as it becomes important. How do you know if things are important? My suggestion would be to ask yourself what the information affects. First and absolute foremost, does it affect their personality? Returning to the example of a crush in the first grade, on its own it would be an irrelevant detail, but perhaps that same crush played a bigger role in the person's life beyond just that. Returned in their later life? Some childhood trauma that occurred alongside the original feelings in the first grade may be unearthed on the return of the character in question. If this person simply vanishes from their life and the character moves on, then bringing it up served no purpose. Make sense? Personality is the most important, but if it affects the character's appearance (which often ties with personality, right?) in a large enough way or it affects their current location or state of being, then it will also probably be worth mentioning in moderation with its importance.

Now, it's possible you've gone through all this and checked all the boxes, but there is another very crucial thing to be careful about as well, and that's making your history too dense . This is returning more to the creation of the actual character, not just your write-up of them for the reader, and can be just as frustrating to sift through by the reader as the aforementioned problem. Once again, this returns to a matter of length ultimately, but on a larger scale it reflects the author's inability to be concise in the conceptual stages of your character. Let me get a little more specific in a moment, but first let me emphasize one thing I consider very important: we are writing roleplay here, not fanfiction. In the latter, writing a core hero of the story is something is essential; in a roleplay, your job is not to dominate the spotlight, but to essentially craft real characters in whatever universe you're immersing yourself into, that would be likely to exist and could coexist to some degree with other characters. There is a place for the hero that saves the day or the arch-villain that threatens the world, but there is a reason that those roles are usually taken with some sort of planning and often by members of the staff or officer board in the community. If you think that fulfilling roleplay comes from only playing the true hero of the story (which is often just escapism, as mentioned before) then I would suggest that you are missing a very important note of healthy roleplay, and it is both a crutch for your writing and a degrading aspect of the roleplay for those around you.

Okay, so back on track. In its simplest concept, the notion is that you don't need your character to have life-changing events occur to him ever year. Unlike a main character often has, your creation can experience life in a much more, dare I suggest, normal fashion. Since you do want the character to have some sense of direction and depth, you will indeed have large events in his or her life that shape the way the character plays out. These events, though, should have some sense of balance to their life, rising and falling in actions, but most frequently residing in a trough period where little is happening except perhaps a slow molding of character; that's just how it works out, usually. In a person's thirty year life, it's highly likely that only a handful of things happened that truly shaped the course of their life in a lasting way. I'm not talking about things like going to a university and meeting a number of people or getting fired from a job and being unemployed for a couple of months - while those may be big things at the time, they are not really lifelong.

The thing I'm getting at is watching your village be burned to the ground in front of your eyes, meeting your spouse or lifelong friend that redirects your hearts and longings, or fighting with that important person in a conflict that was never resolved, leaving your character hurt and bitter inside in a way they were not before. Events that, in a moment, restructured and redirected your character in a profound way. If you are telling the story of a swordsman and you detail every fight he had from the bandits on the side of the road to with his best friend, then the reader will quickly be lost in all the facts of your character's history that they no longer will hold weight. The easiest way for your reader to lose their understanding or even interest in the events at hand is to bombard them with information about your character, whether that means being too detailed or being too dense, your reader very likely will not care. Even if your character perhaps move around a lot as a child (parents in the military?) you likely do not need to detail every new circumstance, only the most important ones, if that. Touch in the main point, which is how it affected them in the long run as they were subject to it over an extended period of time, but you don't need to detail each different incident.

One last thing, though, before I finish up. There is a temptation when attempting to get a certain amount of length to a history to put roleplay inside the history itself - those little snippets when all of a sudden you were reading how your character reacted in a specific conversation, including dialogue and descriptions. It adds very little! Given everything I've ranted about so far, acknowledging and disapproving seems hardly necessary, but I will say that there is a place for that, actually. If you are truly in love with the character you are writing, create a condensed version for your typical reader who is hoping to get a basic summary and understanding of your character. When that's finished then you can set out making a longer version for your own pleasure. If you want to share, it post it in your community's writing section - they almost always have one. If your reader really does enjoy your writing or your character and wishes to know more, then they can opt-in to the challenge of seeing a very in-depth writing of the whole thing from start to finish.

It seems ironic that many sites would have a minimum number of words/lines/paragraphs/characters for a history section when most often it seems that people should be capped in how much they're allowed to put down. Ever written a précis? It's "a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts." Take your 1,000 word history and write it in 250 words. 100 words. 25 words. It's challenging, to say the least, but doable, and it's the model of the character sheet. Make it look nice - make it enjoyable to read, but don't waste your reader's time.

"Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad"

Building a Character: Physical Descriptors

My hope with these next three parts is to go over the specifics of a character sheet. There are three areas or so that are expected to be more intensive, from what I've encountered. First I'll work through physical descriptors, often simply referred to as the appearance section, then I'll tackle personalities and finally backgrounds. Unlike the other two, physical descriptors are much more straight-forward and more difficult to really mess up on, but that doesn't mean there's no line between a good and a bad one. Most of what I'll be going over ought to, like pretty much everything I've said, not be too groundbreaking or perhaps just a nice reminder. It's very important, though, that the work never be finished. There are always improvements that can be made to your work, and it's a scary place when you think, or act like you think, that you're doing the best work you can be.

The main underlying point of this process must be quality over quantity. Simply because you can write an entire page describing their armor down to the color of rust on the hinges doesn't mean you should. There are a lot of roleplayers and communities of roleplayers that will think you've not put enough effort into something because you don't get super descriptive, but usually there are some excellent ways to get a lot of good content without diving into superfluous detail. Your character description really should give the reader a deeper understanding of the character, and if you hide that amidst a lot of fluff then they may have missed an important point you intended them to see.

Like I mentioned in the previous section, your character sheet should be an attempt to build up your archetypal image. I had an English professor once who challenged his students to describe their soul in a single word. It's pretty hard, so maybe we'll expand this to a sentence. A great example of this is the first sentence of nearly any Wikipedia article. Here's an example, "Role-playing refers to the changing of one's behavior to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role." Or how about this one, "Arnold Daniel Palmer (born September 10, 1929) is an American professional golfer, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of men's professional golf." The rest of both of those articles go on to support these first sentences and describe them in more detail. We need to cover the general basics of the topic without the need to get horribly specific, just like an article. The difference, though, is that we are trying to both portray information and provide an opinion on it at the same time.

I'm going to go into some more examples, just to be clear. Let's say we've chosen the archetype of a male hunter; let's call him James Strong. James Strong is a laconic hunter who feels more comfortable speaking through his body than his words. We know his name, profession, attitude, and a key piece to his personality now. This is not the ending depth or the detail we'll invest into the character, but it's our base we can always refer to. Everything we do should support this image we've crafted in that one sentence, because that is the soul of the character. If things go further and you decide that isn't the character you want to create, you don't need to scrap your progress, but make sure you understand that your goals have shifted before you accidently create a very disjointed person! The ultimate goal is to craft a believable person, yeah?

Okay, so general examples aside let's get back on track. Build up your character to the point where you have your own image and now convey it to your reader in the form of an appearance section. As I said before, give detail when necessary, don't give it when it's not. While having a long scar across your eye, or facial scars in general, is a favorite among many, you may be better off not having it at all unless it's tied in closely with your character's background and consequently their personality as a result. The eye is a sensitive region that is linked very closely with a person's identifying features as a whole, so a lasting mark to the area should be a pretty big deal, right? If you just shrug it off (like your character might) and say that it doesn't affect them in the long run, then I'm tempted to think you're just trying to make them more badass, or worse, increase their sex appeal. It's both cliché and a crutch, and there are a lot of things that can support a character's image more firmly and drastically than offhand referencing of specific scar locations.

If you must be scarred, refer to his or her body being scarred as a whole; it doesn't showcase your talent, creativity, or knack for building characters to understand which places can be caught in the crossfire of combat. Better yet, simply say their body is rugged, coarse, or beaten up. These things broadcast a much better insight into your character and fortify what you're trying to build as a whole, whereas scarring causes some difficulties. It seems like a lot of characters are scarred, but despite the use of the word they're only scarred on the outside. How much more effective, then, to say beaten up? Even your strongman character can be beaten up on the inside. Scarred might not be the best word, because it would imply he's haunted from a specific, lasting wound. Being beaten up suggest the reality of it just looms over him like a lifetime of injuries. I'm getting a little too specific for my liking, and that's just because I'm bad at explaining things, but I hope this is intelligible at least.

Anyway, you're trying to convey a character to your reader, not impress them with how cool the character is, or how well thought-out of a writer you are; if you are, then reconsider who you're roleplaying with. Use language that will be memorable and give your reader a good image to start off of. Like cartooning, shape is a big deal; this is why Neville Longbottom was such an easy character to understand and cooperate with while reading, and it made his eventual actions all the more impactful. Between being described as the round-faced boy and having a last name like "Longbottom", the reader could very, very easily understand the type of character they were dealing with. He wasn't an evil character, but perhaps his mind wasn't that sharp, just like his face? Take a cartooning class or watch a Disney move, it's really awesome to see what they do! Thick necks, sharp eyes, sinewy frames, slender fingers, cramped toes, hunched postures - it goes on and on. Once again, return to your other aspects of the character. Maybe they were beaten as a child, and they actually did earn a nasty scar across an eye that way? Now that is a scar, both on the outside and on the inside. The amount of depth that type of thing adds to a character is just incredible, especially if our comparison is just: "Got a scar in a sword fight before I was a master."

Try and write something that captivates your reader, I guess. I've done my share of critiquing character sheets for approval, and I cannot tell you how many I've simply skimmed over as they started telling me specifically how their brown, leather belt is frayed in sixteen different areas with all sorts of pouches that don't add anything to the character. Be relevant to your character and take quality over quantity. Regardless of what archetype you're using or which style you're taking, it should all be part of the same thing in the end.

Building a Character: The Process

Building a character is probably one of the most universal aspects of roleplaying, regardless of where or how you're doing it. This process is very important for participating roleplayers, whether it's your character or someone else's, and being able to have a strong character is essential. Now, while in my last entry I talked a bit about different types of roleplay and different standards accordingly, for this I am going to focus on a more serious expression of roleplay. That is to say, my attempt will be to create a real person. Cut out your science fiction and fantasy for a moment while you create your character - those factors may prompt you toward a certain type of character or specific attributes of him or her, but in the end things should really make sense on a very base level. They should have causes and effects amidst your character; your reader should be able to look at your character and say, "I could believe a person like this would actually exist for these reasons." It's something that people should always be getting better at, of course, and I'm far from the best at it, but there are definitely some things that you grasp at least a little better over time. In general, I would say that the act of building up a character has three parts.

Firstly, you must conceptualize the character. Create him or her in your own mind first, starting usually with a basic idea or inspiration for them. It's always subject to change, but choosing a larger archetype for your absolute base often makes the process much easier and, well, real. Is your character built around vengeance? Childhood trauma? A career? Religion? War? You are, in a sense, choosing their very identity. Now, some of these work better than others, and some are simply harder, but it is still where everything has to start. Grow this base idea into something specific, then, and eventually work your way to something that's unique. They don't need to be a special snowflake to be unique, but they should be their very own person.

Second is the conveying of the idea. This aspect takes on many, many different forms in different styles of roleplay, and can be anywhere from a sentence or two in description to a full character sheet or profile page. Since this is really, primarily for me, I will be focusing mostly on a Character Sheet style, as that's what I've spent the most time dealing with and am actively working on improving. I'll go more into detail on this in further parts as I focus on individual aspects of the character and its creation, but, in short, a Character Sheet needs to be primarily both a general image and a reference. It is not the most important aspect of your character, and you may find that as you get to roleplaying them more and more, the character actually plays out a little different than you would have thought or hoped. A Character Sheet is a good way to firstly define the character, but secondly to restrict yourself while roleplaying them; a little more on this in a minute.

Anyway, remember that your character sheet is not the book of their life. You can't write how they would act in every circumstance of life, but you can give your reader a good impression of the character. It's not super important to tell everyone the intricacies of the tassels on your belt; emphasizing that it's expensive or well crafted does the reader more good than a three page long description about it. You are trying to convey a large amount of information in a short amount of space (I've done the monster character sheets before. 20 pages really doesn't do anyone any good). Don't add things that don't define the character! Maybe they have a gold pendant, but if it has no personal value and no practical use for them, then don't make a big deal about it. Maybe don't even include it. Maybe they got pretty sick when they were a kid and were stuck in bed for two months. That might seem like a big deal to your character, but if he got over it eventually, is healthy now, and suffers no long term scars from it, then you probably don't need to write for hours about how dramatic it was. If it's not going to add to that final image of your character you are trying to make, then just do without it. I'll go into more specifics about certain aspects in later parts.

Thirdly, though, and lastly I think, is the actual roleplay of the character. This is still part of the building process, since they will almost always act slightly different than you had originally intended. Character building is part of this, and I'll cover that in a later part. As I said before, the Character Sheet provides an excellent boundary for yourself in deciding what the character is or is not capable of doing. If you've emphasized a character as being cold or uncaring, then not only should you roleplay as not saving that child who is being attacked, but you should also roleplay their thought process as they criticize the child for perhaps being too weak or idly wondering if they'll even survive. Since you've already dictated the personality of your character in the sheet, then you should adhere to it in your roleplay; not doing so should be a very big deal for your character. It is your job to keep yourself as honest to your Character Sheet as possible; it's simply not fair for those around you to expect one thing based off your Character Sheet and to receive something totally different in roleplay simply because of your own personal whims. Your character should act as your character WOULD act, not even how you would like them to act.

If you're writing fictional characters then there must always be this core idea supporting the process, because when the writer intervenes with his own ideas, morals, and so on, the character falls apart. If you've created a loner character, then interacting with other people is probably flat out difficult for them. It should be uncomfortable and unwanted by the character and only done very grudgingly. While the loner is an archetype that is actively used in roleplay, I'm of the opinion that it's one of the absolute hardest to pull off effectively. Roleplaying is about interacting with other people and their characters, and if your character hates doing that then you have a very complicated situation. It's very tempting to concede more active relationships with other characters to make the roleplay go more smoothly. You need to be prepared to follow through with what your character would do, even if that means pissing people off or even putting yourself in danger. A really awesome example of this is the web comic titled 1/0. It actively breaks the fourth wall and shows the characters trying to antagonize the writer or cause trouble for him. (Link) Another great example is ventriloquism where the puppet argues with the puppeteer. The writer is always in charge, but they're being true to the character.

This went a little longer than I had wanted it to, and hopefully I didn't accidentally use up all my material for the next few parts, but this seems like a pretty good place to leave it. Character building is a pretty daunting task that we're never going to get perfect, so be careful and work your way through it slowly.

Roleplaying is Fun

What is the purpose of roleplay, anyway? This seems like the most obvious thing to address first, I guess. It seems like a pretty basic question, but I've never really thought about it, much less tried to answer it, until now, so I'm going to give it a shot.

The purpose of roleplay is, primarily, to have fun. I've seen it become a chore for people, something they do because they've been doing it for so long, and if that is the stage you've reached then it's time to stop. This is a really, really simple question that isn't asked often enough. When you're playing a game, reading a book (for pleasure), playing a sport, or roleplaying, and you find yourself frustrated with it, you have to ask yourself: am I having fun, still? If the answer is No, then it may very well be time to stop. Stopping isn't always what you need, but considering it is a good place to start.

Well, if the purpose is to have fun, then I guess it would be prudent to understand why or why not it's fun. Roleplaying is a free domain for you and those who you bring along with you. Unlike standard fiction, roleplaying allows you to enter a universe alongside another human being. A friend of mine used to say that people who were under the age of 12 or so weren't actually roleplaying; at that age it was just called pretend. While that's true, isn't it really, still, roleplay? From the little girl playing dress-up or house to the boy who's outside waving sticks around and fighting the invisible bad guys, this is the first encounter most everyone has with roleplay. When they hit that age of 8-12, then they tend to either go further from it, or further toward it. People have their own interests, but for almost everything, at one point in time, there was that spark of creativity that was truly enjoyable. To be able to create a world and immerse yourself into it, be a different person for a few hours in a world of your own making, where there were no consequences or reward.

As much as I disliked the film Inception for the fact that it was intellectual candy for so many people, it did provide one of the rawest examples of this idea. The ability to create worlds with your mind, to raise castles from the dust, and to fully surpass the limits of one reality with your own new one has always been a source of great excitement for those with even a trickle of creative tendencies (more or less everyone, in my opinion). Whether it's movies like Tron or the Matrix, or anime like .hack, or even games from Minecraft to Battlefield, where one can change the world at a touch, this idea that we can create another reality sub-rooted in our current one is dazzling to say the least.

Roleplaying is our attempt to go further. How many times, when playing a game, did you wonder what was behind that door that was only an image in game? Why that building was on fire in the background? With television shows or anime, how many times did you wonder what a character's history was like when no one told you? What would have happened if Y had taken place instead of X? We have summoned roleplay as our medium to descend further. Much of roleplay is done through characters we use to interface with these artificial worlds, and truly immersive roleplay creates a genuine excitement that writing fiction cannot, because we long to know the next step of the journey.

This is why roleplay works as entertainment for many - there is another link besides just yourself. There's a variable we're not in control of, directly, and that's another person. Whether it's a chatroom roleplay, in a game, or on a forum, there is another person present providing a true randomness that even games cannot compete with. We can expect and anticipate, but when push comes to shove, if the roleplay is done properly then we are not completely in control. In a game you interface with an engine and sometimes other players bound to that engine. In a visual novel you interface with options you are given, and you see the effects of your choices on the world you've touched. In roleplay, you are purely synergizing with another person, creating either the most dull or most unique sense of enjoyment in the fields of creativity. You can plan, you can direct, but when it comes down to it you are still only one part of two or more.

Here you hit a problem, though. Why is it fun, sometimes, and why is it painful other times? People talk a lot about "Bad RP" and "Good RP" as they go about doing it, but what they seem to be getting at is what is enjoyable and what isn't. For many, if a roleplay cannot have proper grammar and a certain set of rules, then it won't be fun. I've had fun roleplaying with single lines of text in first person shooters, butchering words and creating poor, convoluted, thoughtless stories with other people. Silly, god-moding roleplay in a chat room is still roleplay, even if its nonsensical and it doesn't agree with a set of rules most people are used to. Remember, the purpose of roleplay is to have fun, so do it! Some people like the challenge of creating deep characters and intriguing plotlines - other people would rather pretend to blow things up by writing it out or recreate Pokémon battles they saw in a show in the same way. People seem to get really caught up in rating roleplay that they miss the point - it's still about having fun. It's not about everyone adhering to the same style or rules, and it's not about everyone progressing in tastes the way you have. It's about writing something and enjoying it while you do it.

Now, I've just made a pretty big blanket statement, and I'm going to go back and make some clarifications. Rules can be very important. When the difference in taste is small or simple, then a set of guidelines to say what is permissible and what is not in a certain place (server, forum, chat room, etc.) can help keep the flow much stronger. After all, you're relying on other people to make your roleplay work in the end. Clarify you would not like god-moding. Clarify you would like to adhere (or not adhere) to the canon/lore of the topic at hand. If someone disagrees with these things, especially the larger ones, both parties are obligated towards an action. The person rejecting the rules should understand that it's not the place for them to roleplay, and should search for a more suitable location, and the person in charge of the rules should understand that people have different tastes. It can, of course, get nasty and complicated, but this is still a really strong base to grow off of. Find places that suit you and work with them. If they stop working for you, move on.

There is, I think, one other thing that should also be disclaimed. Roleplay CAN be unhealthy. This is crossing into the realm of personal lives and such, which is weird territory, so I'll hopefully talk about this in its own post. However, it should be of note, at least, that roleplay can be un-enjoyable for either you or the person you're roleplaying with because it's unhealthy. The best roleplay will come when it's healthy, and that means sacrificing things to get it. I'll go into this another time, but roleplay should not be a substitute for your own, crappy life. Escapism is a nasty hole to get into, and it will detract from the RP for you and everyone else.

Anyway, roleplay is fun. It can be used as a method to get better at writing or other things, but primarily it comes back to being a means of enjoyment. Be elitist in your communities if you want, because you have things to uphold. In terms of roleplay in general, though? Have fun.