Nero

Stupid Japan and their stupid awesome themed cafes *grabby hands*

Your shading is drop dead gorgeous.

For every main character I've written, I've always tried to project the most identifiable aspects of my own personality on to them. "Write what you know", and all that. Common elements across all my main characters are sardonicism, flippancy, and a fascination for technology. Obviously, writing the same character all the time across multiple settings would be boring, so sometimes I mix it up. My main character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, was the exact opposite of my typical main character: bent on revenge, humourless, and serious. If I had to identify one common element shared across all my characters, and probably the most distinct part of my own personality, is that they are all slow to trust. This is reflected in different ways; sometimes, obfuscating stupidity and bad jokes. Other times, a sense of conviction and duty, bordering on obsessive. How does this reflect a lack of trust? It's fairly simple: as far as I can recall, none of my characters have ever shown their genuine selves, except in those rare cases of very intimate relationships. They always wear some sort of mask, something to deflect attention to their real personality; this can also make them hard to trust, or at least seem mildly disingenuous to their peers.

Very carefully. Jokes aside, there's two ways I typically approach it. One is just to go with the flow. I'm not an egotist about my character by any means; s/he has their limits, and if my opponent seems to surpass them on those limits (without godmoding--if, for example, my character were attack a steel golem with a sharpened pencil, obviously I'd roleplay that character to lose the fight) then, well, my character loses, and whatever happens from that result happens. The second way is to talk to the other person OOC and discuss the actual fight, if it's a fight that can affect the overall story of the RP. I typically prefer not to do this, as I think RPs are at their finest when developed organically, but doing this can offset any damage from bruised egos about characters losing fights, and can help organise the actual sequence of events in the fight a bit more.