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.