(06-01-2015, 04:50 PM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote: It is, however, not a replacement for actual development, especially when there's additional people involved. If you end up writing a novel's worth of history for your character, then you might as well be flying solo; you've decided all of the growth on your own, railroading the journey long before it even begins.
I agree with this to an extent, but there's a difference between flat characters and round characters. Not everybody is RPing a character arc, and I think the fact that some of us choose to place our characters at the end of their development rather than the midst of it, can help them work more in the service of other people's stories.
As an example, Ms. Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations is a flat character. Nobody expects her to change over the course of the story. But that doesn't mean she isn't interesting, and it doesn't mean a lot hasn't happened to her that resulted in the person she is.
Characters like this can be good in RP, I think, when they are a catalyst to other characters' development.
![[Image: hlEovB0.png]](http://i.imgur.com/hlEovB0.png)
