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Kattoki · **12-14-2016, 11:12 PM**

We have all seen the "My parents died. I need to avenge my family. I came from Othard" tropes, and trying to think up some original ideas to make a more believable and unique but not a "special snowflake" character.

I rename and fantasia my characters a lot... more then what is nessicary sometimes. It isn't that I don't enjoy my characters its more, all this stuff happens in a short amount of time and my character devolves. Which then gives said character way too many traits. I would sorta like to rewrite but it doesnt work that way.

Warren Castille · **12-14-2016, 11:19 PM**

Belief doesn't come from the right combination of tropes or traits, it comes from writing the ones you have in a believable way. If the issue is stacking too many of them, just... Don't. Pick one or two you're particularly happy to work with and just work them into your character.

Virella · **12-14-2016, 11:21 PM**

It's not the background, tropes of traits what makes them interesting I'm afraid, it is the roleplay and the execution of said background. In fact, if said trait or trope is the only thing keeping the character from being interesting, I'd say have a good look at their personality. A baker on the corner of the streets can just be as interesting as the war hero who lost and won many things.

But yeah, personality and interactions is what makes or breaks an RP character, not so much the rest! I'd really suggest focusing on that, instead of trying to stand out with a backstory. Make your character enjoyable and memorable, and not just their background. Because well, that gets boring fast after you've told it a few times.

Koen · **12-14-2016, 11:41 PM**

Just make as realistic a character as you can. Don't be one of those people whose characters have 'flaws' like "He's too nice!", "He's just so powerful it's hard" blahblahblah, crap like that. My starting point when making a character is to get a general idea of what I want them to be. I wanted Koen to be an older soldier who'd been absent for a long time, since I'd come back from a break and didn't know the lore, and I didn't want him to be anything special, just reasonably skilled with what he does.

From there, you have to look at their starting point and do a lot of research. See how the environment they grew up in would have shaped their personality. Koen was raised in Ala Mhigo not too long after the Garleans had become a major threat, so naturally he would've had anti-Garlemald prejudices beaten into him from a young age. His parents were both military, so he'd aim to be the same and look up to them, and would also see discipline and respect as the highest virtues to have.

Things like that are how you start to form your character's values, and if you want to change them you can bring things in. I wanted Koen to be less strict with his values and not be a harsh military type, so I wrote into his backstory that he had two children, and lost one. The loss wasn't just to give him a tragic past, it was to make him appreciate his one child more, and it humanised him. So I managed to shift him from a super militaristic soldier to a skilled soldier who has a soft spot for kids and is kinder than he otherwise would've been.

Apologies if none of this makes sense, but that's how I try to make an interesting, or at least realistic, character.

tl;dr: Do a bunch of research into what it would've been like for them as they progressed through their life, and don't add anything for the sake of it being there. :^)

Kilieit · **12-14-2016, 11:49 PM**

Like if you're worried about making a backstory, want "believeable" and "unique" without "too complicated" or "too powerful" then my recommendation is to go for some variation on...

"I came from Othard, my parents died, I need to avenge my family... THROUGH THE POWER OF DANCE"

Stock tropes... with a single, minor, yet unique variation/subversion.

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Generally speaking though I don't think it's unusual or bad for a character to pick up a whole bunch of stuff as they roll through roleplay - they're like snowballs, not rolling stones.

Their personality will still be relatively simple. Most people's are. Maybe some aspects of it will alter, but it's a bit difficult to be, say, ruthless and forgiving. Development is likely to change personality, not add bits to it.

Most backstory stuff won't even come up in your average RP interaction! It can be fun working it into your character's inner thoughts without necessarily broadcasting it to others - letting them guess or put the pieces together as to what made your character who they are today. If you aren't infodumping, it probably won't cause an issue.

The time when it begins to become a problem is when you have to read half an hour of backstory to be able to even begin to approach the character for roleplay, because it's so special and so unique, and you can attend less and less events, and you get less and less people asking you for RP because they don't want to spend half an hour preparing for an RP like it's a damn exam, and it slowly begins to dry up for you... or, on the flipside, when you get shut of all the potential conversation you could have inside of a 5 minute window because the character is so generic and un-adventurous (both in-character and in the meta, usually).

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Like, this is pushing the boat out a bit and making assumptions, but maybe it'll be useful advice for someone if not for OP... if you're enjoying doing it, but you feel like it's "bad" because you've compared it to some standard (mental or literal) and it's "too this" or "too that", and yet you're not actually having problems finding or maintaining RP... maybe treat it like an anxiety issue instead of a character issue?

I have this problem myself sometimes. There are days when I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to "fix" or "simplify" my character because it's "too complicated" or "too inconsistent" but at the end of the day, um... people call me back for RP? New people ask me for it? My friends enjoy it with me? I have fun letting his personality come out during interactions? So the issue isn't with my character, because no one else sees the issue. It's with my own perception of my character.

Reylin · **12-14-2016, 11:50 PM**

To be fair, every character a person place is likely a "special snowflake" to them.Â ( could be misunderstanding its use here, I always see "snowflake" in a negative way these days) Else we'd all be playing the same character and no one would be special or interesting.

The problem isn't coming up with something that has to be unique for the sake of it being unique but just finding interesting ways to develop or us them.Â Just like RL people, they should evolve over time and with RP.Â Their opinions, values, morals, ect ect, might not be the same after all is said and done.

All that said, if you are looking for something that isn't what you said, try something more mundane and simplistic in a day to day life sense.Â As Koen said, even loss can be a driving force of motivation but not for the "feel sorry for me!" value, but as a life changing event for the better as much as the worse.

Kattoki · **12-15-2016, 01:29 AM**

(12-14-2016, 11:50 PM)Reylin Wrote: To be fair, every character a person place is likely a "special snowflake" to them.Â ( could be misunderstanding its use here, I always see "snowflake" in a negative way these days) Else we'd all be playing the same character and no one would be special or interesting.

I think it's mostly used for people that have meta knowledge but try to explain it as a rp trait their character has. To me yes my characters are "Special Snowflakes." but to another person, the same character let say, a Merchants from Ul'dah that often ships his wears from city to city. Is just an ordinary person.

Valence · **12-15-2016, 06:18 AM**

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.Â 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.

Val · **12-15-2016, 10:36 AM**

Pretty much everyone here has already stated what I wanted to, but I'll just add to it. Any tired trope can be given new life if you can roleplay it well or throw a unique spin on it. In fact, as many people have mentioned before, the character is in the roleplay, not the backstory. Their history can certainly shape how they feel and act, but as a writer/roleplayer, you have the ability to really breathe a unique, fresh sense of life and perspective into that "tired trope." As Warren mentioned, find a few things that you're really interested in and works for you and just go with it!

Valence · **12-15-2016, 12:25 PM**

I would rather disagree with the assertion that a bad or cheesy trope can be salvaged through excellent roleplay though. Both go hand in hand.

If the former fails, you are gonna cringe and die a little inside everytime the cheesy and rubbish stuff gets mentionned, however good the RP is. If the latter fails, then you are just gonna get bored.

Zhavi · **12-15-2016, 01:44 PM**

Back when I modded on a rp forum, we'd see a lot of people come through with, inevitably, one thing in common:

making their character about the traits.

They'd all end up the same: the traits, alone, inevitably became boring to play, and they lost interest in the character. Why? Because the character was never about being a person, it was about the trait. You can tell this is happening because when you ask questions about the character specific to who they are as a person, it will circle back to the traits. "Why does he carry two katanas around?" "He inherited them because I wanted him to have two katanas because they're cool." And thus, the history was all about allowing the character to have a certain weaponry, and really became about a human-shaped object that had really, really cool swords, yo, and could use them really freakin' well. Which then proceeded to fall apart because it had no depth.

I like to think of it this way: the personality, quirks, and interests of a person often go back to something (or somethings) that happened while they were growing up or, if they are older, something (or somethings) that happened to them during their adulthood. People change, grow (for better or worse), and typically do things due to a learned set of behaviors.

To give you an example, I'll present you with one of my characters: Saruna. She is an ostensibly simple character: a fifty-something housewife who was widowed a decade earlier and whose passel of children left one by one to take up their family heritage in the far west in bigger cities. She lives a lonely life, weaving to get by, growing food in a small garden.

Her parents left the west to be with each other, and she was raised in a small town, met her husband, and lived a quiet life. Her focus was always on family: giving of herself to those she cared about was, to her, the highest achievement one could have.

Her traits, therefore, followed from her history.

Nature: she was a quiet child, therefore was never rebellious.

Nature: she was a caring person, therefore it came naturally to her to want to be a mother.

Nurture: following in her parents' footsteps, family was extraordinarily important to her.

History: as she lost her immediate family one by one, the need to care about others expanded to those in her community.

History: Her tendency to put others before herself and her loneliness made her more likely to be trusting and forgiving of strangers.

Therefore: her strength of will comes from her desire to nurture and protect.

Therefore: she is easy to involve in the stories of others, either as a mark for a scoundrel, a motherly figure to someone young, or as someone who steps out of her comfort zone to aid others in need.

Her traits supported her as a person, never overwhelming the character or becoming the sole reason I played her. She was rewarding to me to play because, due to her simple life, she had an untapped potential that she didn't know about to become strong and stand up for what she believed in, even if that belief was rooted in a desire to protect an adopted family (she eventually went on to become a leading figure in a rebellion, standing up for what she believed was right). She was rewarding for other players because of the depth of her interest and focus in their characters.

Ultimately, her character was about growth and second chances. She was easy to attach goals to and was a believable person.

And that, to me, is what makes for a successful, long-lived character: they are a believable person. No matter how ridiculous their premise, no matter how odd their backstory, no matter how humorously you write them: you can look at them and say - "I know that type of person." It's not just 'oh, he's easygoing' but 'he's easygoing because ____.' If you just slap things on willy-nilly, you're going to end up with a mish-mash collection of glued-on traits that will not be rewarding to play.

Take Verad, for example (FORGIVE ME FOR USING YOUR CHARACTER AS AN EXAMPLE). The character is humorous, but believable. We've all met the silly guy who takes himself too seriously, as well as the shady one who sells shit that he presents as legit. And yet, despite these traits, the character is not all about them. They form the focus for certain rps, but he has a backstory and is never presented as just a gag. There is more to him than meets the eye, and even when he's presented as 2-D, you can always see glimpses of something more just around the edges; an illusion that may or may not be more than it appears. That was what made him rewarding to play with (I haven't played with him in awhile, so I can't speak to his current incarnation). He was the sum of his traits, both more and less than their presentation. They melded together seamlessly and weren't just stapled on because they were unique or cool.

Bottom line: yes, this is a fictional character for rp, but, within the rp this is a person who exists in a world and has a life. If you don't know who that person is, why they are the way they are, and what they want out of life, the rest is just glitter and noise: unsubstantial, and it'll get annoying after awhile.

Don't focus on unique.

Focus on enjoyable.

Aya · **12-15-2016, 01:55 PM**

I love your post Zhavi!!

A couple of things that I always try to keep in mind, is that this is an MMO RPG, not a table-top one.Â Sometimes in a table-top it can be fun and rewarding to take on the character of the unique, the prophesied.Â Your group can be the Fellowship.Â As you start to add more and more people it starts to become clear that you can't be set apart by some obvious trait.Â You're no longer the only bard, the only wizard, the only elf, the only princess, the only dancer, or so on.

In a community the size of Balmung no character is unique based upon any collection of identifiers and traits, and if that is what you are aiming for in order to be satisfied you're bound for disappointment.Â There are so many characters that we instead mirror the real world: they are unique because they are themselves.Â Just as every person is different, despite there being thousands who share our collection of traits and identifiers (ever our names!) we're still our own individual, so too are our characters.

I always feel better when I dismiss that weight to be different and unique, and instead focus on just being the character.Â

My last comment is a more personal one.Â From my vantage point I appreciate all sorts of characters, but what always tugs and pulls at me are those little hooks I can grab on to that make someone relateable to my own experiences.Â Challenges, family, frustrations, hopes and dreams, these are what make me sit up, pay attention, and care.Â I don't really care about your "powers", your traumatic history, or your gadgets (though these all do have their place in things), but when you explain that you're just trying to make gil to support your unfortunate older brother while struggling to live up to your father's expectations that you follow in his footsteps as an engineer, well, suddenly those gadgets you've made in your spare time seem a lot more interesting.

Through such things a character becomes a human, someone that you can come to know just like you do a friend. That's when things really seem to work for me.

Actually, one very very last comment: Tropes are not bad. Tropes are the collected wisdom of thousands of years of story-telling by millions of people. There is nothing new under the sun, we are all drawing upon the concepts and ideas that we have been steeped in since birth. Do not fear them: embrace them. Both as aspects to conform to (it does help people very rapidly come to grip with your character), and expectations to subvert ("OH NO SHE DIDN'T!").

Seriphyn · **12-15-2016, 03:08 PM**

(12-15-2016, 06:18 AM)Valence Wrote: Getting inspiration from characters of novels, movies, games, often goes a long way to find the right things and chemistries...

I have an issue even with this. Of course, you said inspiration from rather than being based on, but in any case, characters in existing media have a fixed range of responses and emotions based on the scripts they're pulled from. What happens in roleplay when a situation arises that doesn't exist in that script? For example, there may be a whimsical scenario that would emerge organically in RP that just never came up in another production's script. As a result, you will have no idea how the character would have responded because he/she is not an organic creation but a subject with a fixed fate determined by a script.

I see this happen all the time in RP. Some Highlander dude who apparently is a hardened soldier stands in that crossed arm /cpose chuckling mildly with a shake of his head as some tavern antics takes place in front of him, far too mature and whatnot, so plagued by the woes of war to let his hair down. Absolutely not. I've engaged professionally with USAF Pararescue Jumpers as a chaplain assistant, and those folks are absolute party animals despite being trained killers and lifesavers (who aren't always successful in the latter). They are the coolest people you will ever meet. Now, that's not to say privately these people might suffer from issues coming from the job, but as far as outward demeanour, you wouldn't tell.

Some player-characters' also have some seriously laughable dialogue. My first thought is "M8 NOBODY TALKS LIKE THAT IN REAL LIFE". Yes, it's a fantasy world, but the level of theatricality in their dialogue instantly signals to me that this is not a dynamic character. They are more interested in presenting a certain stage act than actually responding or behaving like an actual person of the world.

Base your characters off of real people, or at least flex them to be a real person with an actual range of character, capable of holding multiple emotions at once. Characters from other fictional mediums are what they need to be for the preexisting story. In RP, there is no preexisting story. A good number of our characters would put an audience at an improv show to sleep because of their incapability to respond to dynamic situations believably and plausibly.

If you want to play a certain occupation, think of real people you know in similar occupations, and use those for inspiration instead. Then, tweak as necessary to fit the lore of the universe (e.g. using period speech to match FFXIV's 17th thru early 20th century British English dialogue), and otherwise make the character seem like a product of the world.

Play real people, not characters, and I guarantee an amazing RP experience.

Seriphyn · **12-15-2016, 03:11 PM**

(12-15-2016, 01:44 PM)Zhavi Wrote: StuffÂ

Also, this is awesome. Same argument as mine I feel, just different content to convey.

Faye · **12-15-2016, 03:32 PM**

(12-15-2016, 12:25 PM)Valence Wrote: I would rather disagree with the assertion that a bad or cheesy trope can be salvaged through excellent roleplay though. Both go hand in hand.

If the former fails, you are gonna cringe and die a little inside everytime the cheesy and rubbish stuff gets mentionned, however good the RP is. If the latter fails, then you are just gonna get bored.

Just a matter of personal preference and opinion, because I definitely do not feel the same.

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Unusual Character Traits

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