Getting inspiration from characters of novels, movies, games, often goes a long way to find the right things and chemistries... Because basically, it always boils down to the tried and tested tropes that continue to do the job again and again, and believing that re-inventing the wheel is the correct approach, is actually a flawed approach.Â
You won't invent anything. Inconciously, you will always fall back to the tropes you grew up with, no matter what. And conciously, you can't just create something unique that has never been done before.Â
No, the idea is to find the tropes you want, don't copycat them, but make them yours and bend them to the character concept you want. Find one or two main tropes that you can maybe complement with a few minor ones. But playing the "Fallen, brooding knight" (which is translated in the ffxiv setting as a fallen/wounded/crippled dragoon for exemple) is already enough in itself. The minor trope ou can add is that the character is an alcoholic and isn't able to live up to their expectations so they drink even more. An example among many.
Then I find that finding 3-4 strong keywords to define your character is a step often missed by many people. If you roleplay a little with someone, but enough for them to get an idea, and ask them after to describe your character in 3 or 4 keywords... well, if they can't do that, then I think your character concept is not quite there up yet. A successful character is a character that sticks in people's minds for a few of its key defining traits, making them unique.
And yes, you don't need much. Less is more is actually the way to go, unlike so many believe. If you always come down to reprocessing your characters because they tend to gather so many traits and things that it just looks like a huge mess and loses all its meaning, it's because you lack focus, and the character too. Believe me I know what you feel. I constantly have to deal with that myself, and while now I know how to deal with it, I didn't back then before.
This tends to happen quite a lot because of several things:
1) RPers are also fans of the lore, and will probably find many traits of the lore they love. They will want to play with them and add them all into their RP (or they will just make up their own thing because they always wanted to play this and that, or because it's cool). On my own character I had to weed out the magical/hearer side that wasn't meshing that well with the tinkering side, even if it was by design at first. If it doesn't work, get rid of it, especially when it hasn't come into roleplay yet. Even if it makes you a bit sad. Look after quality and not quantity.Â
2) Characters, depending how often you roleplay, will often come to face many challenges, learning opportunities, etc. This will stack up pretty fast in the story and you might get tempted to make your character constantly get new traits out of it. My advice: don't, unless it makes an absolute sense for the story. If they get a new trait due to an important or traumatizing experience, then sure go for it, it's actually very important for roleplay, but at the same time it might mean that they may lose another one in the process. I left my old FC partly for those reasons actually: too many epic and gritty fights that would have tended to turn my green/young character into a grizzled awesome adventurer taking on evil for breakfast otherwise. As for new skills? Be reasonable and don't break suspension of disbelief, or it will kill the character believability pretty fast. You don't learn kung-fu in one month. Goals? Keep short term goals as well as goals on the long run. My character has been after a manacutter for eons. She still hasn't really made any progress towards it. If you reach all your goals in a few months, then you will be left with no motivation to continue, like your character will have none. Or at least you will have to find new ones. Goals are what makes you and your character strive, and that's what create story hooks. When your character have reached all the biggest goals they had, have changed an matured enough for a lifetime, then maybe it's time to retire them because there is nothing left to strive for... Or you can drop a meteor on their story and wreck their lives in their entirety so they have to start over, physically and mentally.
In short, don't hesitate to weed out shit even before it becomes part of your character story if you don't think it meshes well with the idea. Or if you do because of "important things in story", then it might weed out other traits because of CHANGE. Older traits aren't static either.
You won't invent anything. Inconciously, you will always fall back to the tropes you grew up with, no matter what. And conciously, you can't just create something unique that has never been done before.Â
No, the idea is to find the tropes you want, don't copycat them, but make them yours and bend them to the character concept you want. Find one or two main tropes that you can maybe complement with a few minor ones. But playing the "Fallen, brooding knight" (which is translated in the ffxiv setting as a fallen/wounded/crippled dragoon for exemple) is already enough in itself. The minor trope ou can add is that the character is an alcoholic and isn't able to live up to their expectations so they drink even more. An example among many.
Then I find that finding 3-4 strong keywords to define your character is a step often missed by many people. If you roleplay a little with someone, but enough for them to get an idea, and ask them after to describe your character in 3 or 4 keywords... well, if they can't do that, then I think your character concept is not quite there up yet. A successful character is a character that sticks in people's minds for a few of its key defining traits, making them unique.
And yes, you don't need much. Less is more is actually the way to go, unlike so many believe. If you always come down to reprocessing your characters because they tend to gather so many traits and things that it just looks like a huge mess and loses all its meaning, it's because you lack focus, and the character too. Believe me I know what you feel. I constantly have to deal with that myself, and while now I know how to deal with it, I didn't back then before.
This tends to happen quite a lot because of several things:
1) RPers are also fans of the lore, and will probably find many traits of the lore they love. They will want to play with them and add them all into their RP (or they will just make up their own thing because they always wanted to play this and that, or because it's cool). On my own character I had to weed out the magical/hearer side that wasn't meshing that well with the tinkering side, even if it was by design at first. If it doesn't work, get rid of it, especially when it hasn't come into roleplay yet. Even if it makes you a bit sad. Look after quality and not quantity.Â
2) Characters, depending how often you roleplay, will often come to face many challenges, learning opportunities, etc. This will stack up pretty fast in the story and you might get tempted to make your character constantly get new traits out of it. My advice: don't, unless it makes an absolute sense for the story. If they get a new trait due to an important or traumatizing experience, then sure go for it, it's actually very important for roleplay, but at the same time it might mean that they may lose another one in the process. I left my old FC partly for those reasons actually: too many epic and gritty fights that would have tended to turn my green/young character into a grizzled awesome adventurer taking on evil for breakfast otherwise. As for new skills? Be reasonable and don't break suspension of disbelief, or it will kill the character believability pretty fast. You don't learn kung-fu in one month. Goals? Keep short term goals as well as goals on the long run. My character has been after a manacutter for eons. She still hasn't really made any progress towards it. If you reach all your goals in a few months, then you will be left with no motivation to continue, like your character will have none. Or at least you will have to find new ones. Goals are what makes you and your character strive, and that's what create story hooks. When your character have reached all the biggest goals they had, have changed an matured enough for a lifetime, then maybe it's time to retire them because there is nothing left to strive for... Or you can drop a meteor on their story and wreck their lives in their entirety so they have to start over, physically and mentally.
In short, don't hesitate to weed out shit even before it becomes part of your character story if you don't think it meshes well with the idea. Or if you do because of "important things in story", then it might weed out other traits because of CHANGE. Older traits aren't static either.
Balmung:Â Suen Shyu
