I play Sastra - Deliberately excluding her surname as that is OOC. I didn't read the naming conventions before rolling a character, and managed to start as a cat before finally deciding to go with Highlander because of their awesome hairstyles. turns out I like their lore too! - and due to how I create my characters, there hasn't really been any outside influences on her. I create my characters by deciding a few things upfront, such as their core traits along with a fault or two - and then I get them into RP and roll on from there. So I didn't actually fully write out a background story for her until I had been rp'ing her for about a month (keeping track of my answers to the common questions) - Meanwhile I also looked up the lore surrounding highlanders and their history.Â
The only thing that'll probably always shine through her from me is my autism, which can make me completely misunderstand things which then is shown through her - It's both annoying and fun.Â
Other than that her opinions on things like other races, politics and so on were all created by improvisation - As an example she's had bad experiences with lalafell and elezens, and thus she adopted the tendency to not fancy them overly much.
I prefer doing things this way as it feels easier for me to find their personality and get used to it, and the fact that the RP my characters get exposed to shapes them means that I'll very rarely have two characters that are very similar. When I started RP'ing many years ago, it also helped me a lot to learn the difference between IC/OOC because by creating a character that was not like me, there'd be less risk of me oocly getting offended :p Though it's hardly needed now, I've grown used to my characters also differing from myself to a large extend.Â
The downside of making characters this way is that it can take months before they feel "done" with their general creation, but it's worth it because when they are done it starts to quickly feel like it's not you who's playing them, but them playing you. In a completely sane way, which I consider a good thing.
