The Cliche That You Can't Escape

[Desu Nee]

All my characters are smart. They can be ditzy sometimes, but I can't do a genuinely book-dumb character.

[Stormwind]

The power-hungry mage searching for answers. My favorite JRPG character of all time being Magus from Chrono Trigger, having alot to do with this I imagine.

[Jaran]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Jerkass

 

Ah, how I love them, hearts of gold or coal, any type will do. My nice guys never last.

Pretty much this. I have zero fun playing 'nice guys', or even 'good guys' for that matter.

 

Sure, they can be very adept at playing the part of 'good guy'... but I tend to play antagonists of any kind in a story, and even in the open world if I get an opportunity. Silver-tongued, stealthy and level-headed to bold-faced, fiery and diabolical. The former usually lives longer than the latter, though.

 

Also I cannot play females. I just can't do it. Tried it several times on several platforms and it just doesn't appeal to me.

 

As for physical looks, I have a thing for the monochomatic/greyscale and cooler colors like blue and purple. Like most people, I design my characters to, for the most part, be physically appealing, but not always in a conventional sense. I've had just as many 'sickly' looking males as I have bulky ones and just as many with gruesome, disfiguring scars (think teeth-constantly-exposed, perpetual snarl sorta scars) as I have ones with flawless skin. I tend to just 'design around' their physical flaws in ways I think make the bigger picture seem appealing.

 

I constantly abuse my characters, adore in-character drama and tend to draw more blanks when it comes to giving my characters strengths as opposed to weaknesses. I'm starting to see a pattern here, actually...

[Clover]

Um, I like playing young characters (teens or early twenties) that still have many things to discover, because I find adults boring, plain and simple. I don't know much about cliches, but I guess that if you play tons of characters, some of them are bound to share some traits sooner or later.

[Zyrusticae]

All of them.

 

 

In all seriousness, I think 'cliche' is a fairly loaded and often useless phrase, given that simply subverting cliches is not in and of itself a valuable thing that improves stories. Sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. I still subscribe to the notion that execution is far more important than originality in any case (not that you can actually be original in storytelling - everything's been done before, after all).

[Wymsical]

I definitely play sometimes-pale, petite females with a penchant for magic and eerie. They've all had very different styles, executions and personalities but I still feel a little guilty that my designs all have such a common thread in a distinct fashion that my friends all immediately know what general aesthetic I'll do. Oh well, guilty pleasure!

[FreelanceWizard]

I'll admit it.

 

I'm a sucker for waif-fu -- the petite female character who can wipe the floor with someone twice her size. I know it's thoroughly implausible in most settings (aikido and judo notwithstanding), but I end up coming back to it and "pint-sized powerhouse" on the male side. Maybe it's the whole "David versus Goliath" thing, or maybe I've spent too much time watching Whedon's work.

 

Other than that, like Clover, I tend to make my characters relatively young (late teens to early-mid twenties), as I can personally get more character growth out of them and I feel that age range works better in the "monomyth" structure. My monomyth "mentor" characters are all usually NPCs -- I've never been able to play one for an extended period.

[Steel Wolf]

I didn't get to file through the website (my work comp hates TV Tropes), but my favorite characters to RP tend to be either the "wandering warrior" or the "hidden power" trope.

 

The Wandering Warrior I fell in love with from the moment I heard Ryu's story from Street Fighter. It's so trite and stupid, but I love writing it, and it tends to work well in MMO RP for me.

 

The Hidden Power type is an enjoyable hook that I like to try to get others to work out. I like to think its engaging if done well, but sometimes that doesn't always work out, or the other people involved are just exhausted of the idea. :<

[Hammersmith]

"Huge" and "World worn bastard" are Hammer's two major thematics and they're pretty central to how he operates.

 

They're usually all anyone sees and they get worried when he demonstrates other traits, and I can't blame them.

[Warren Castille]

If we're talking Tropes (which I guess cliches are, but my brain isn't booted until about 11am anyway) then I've got to add Gray and Gray Morality. I'm a big fan of there being no clear-cut good or bad guy. Sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons. Sometimes bad people do bad things for good reasons. People are complex, and I AM TEH EVILUST and I AM TEH LITE are boring.

[Hammersmith]

If we're talking Tropes (which I guess cliches are, but my brain isn't booted until about 11am anyway) then I've got to add Gray and Gray Morality. I'm a big fan of there being no clear-cut good or bad guy. Sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons. Sometimes bad people do bad things for good reasons. People are complex, and I AM TEH EVILUST and I AM TEH LITE are boring.

Fucking this.

 

Complexity drives from knowing the whys, and the hows, and they're rarely that easily  polarized in an RP that's going to be fun to play and involve with.  People have reasons, not alignments.

[Desu Nee]

If we're talking Tropes (which I guess cliches are, but my brain isn't booted until about 11am anyway) then I've got to add Gray and Gray Morality. I'm a big fan of there being no clear-cut good or bad guy. Sometimes good people do bad things for good reasons. Sometimes bad people do bad things for good reasons. People are complex, and I AM TEH EVILUST and I AM TEH LITE are boring.

I would say that's less of a common standard nowadays, unless you just do it very well, like Jojo normally does. And even then, it can be very complex.

[Flickering Ember]

Themes I like and definitely make liberal use of

 

-Big-boned, muscular women

- Amnesia with a twist. I never use amnesia for blank slate characters nor do I use it when I don't know the lore. Straight up classic amnesia is boring.

- Violence

- Tribal or close to nature in some way

- Neutral and chaotic alignments. Can't play a Lawful character to save my life.

- Former villains, reformed villains, or anti-villains

- Character used to be a completely different person in the past. 

- They like food a lot. Each character has a different reason. Likely to practice cannibalism

- They are never antisocial. That is too hard to RP. From my most stoic characters to my most affectionate, all of them enjoy being around others

 

Probably a lot more than that.

[Harmonixer]

For the life of me, I cannot play good guys. I've tried on multiple occasions to make a purely well functioning, well meaning characters that have a final goal of being protagonists.

 

But I always end up making them into something of the opposite. It's really typical, nice guy on the outside- complete nutjob on the inside.

 

Edit: I often end up talking to people about some of my characters years later, when I tell them what they 'really' were they are generally quite surprised. It's somewhat in line with morally gray characters, because it's relatively self serving and I don't believe in being bad, just to be bad. It needs to be functional, and purposeful.

 

Also tall characters, I tried to make a short character in recent years! I really did! To make up for his size, I ended up making him one of my most vile characters in my own RP history.

 

Maybe I can break that trend here.

 

Maybe.

[Warren Castille]

Ooh, I'm also super guilty of using In Media Res for my posts. Openings are boring and I don't write them well. Let's start with the chase scene, then flashback to where the stab wounds came from, then hit a cliffhanger, and then timeskip past it in the next post.

 

/em holds up hand for a high five.

[Harmonixer]

Ooh, I'm also super guilty of using In Media Res for my posts. Openings are boring and I don't write them well. Let's start with the chase scene, then flashback to where the stab wounds came from, then hit a cliffhanger, and then timeskip past it in the next post.

 

/em holds up hand for a high five.

 

One of my favorite authors does that, which I've somewhat adopted myself. I enjoy dialogue quite a bit and pride myself on it.

 

Action is sometimes boring to read for myself unless it's done a certain way, I do love the smash cut to after when both characters are on the ground bleeding, unable to fight but having a deep introspective on just how much they hate each other while complimenting on how good the wounds they got were.

 

It tends to be far more engaging for RP as well! It's not fun to listen to one person do fight things while everyone stands arounds and waits for them to stop being cool. I guess it's a matter of presentation though.

[Martiallais]

Pretty sure my standard ones have been listed:

-Blood Knights

-Hidden Power

-Jerkass (usually w/heart of gold)

-Gray & Gray Morality

[TheLastCandle]

I had a long, drawn out post in the beginning stages, but then I found that TVtropes (of course) already had this covered:

 

Knight in Sour Armor

 

I almost always have one character that fits this description in any given RPG. It's the cynical realist in me.

[Caspar]

I am pretty addicted to Death Seekers and Parental Substitute

[Dat Oni]

The Man Behind the Man/The Man in Front of the Man and/or the Hidden Villain.

 

I fucking love the idea of messing with the heroes' concept of who/what they are actually fighting against, as long as it is done properly (FFIX' Necron was not a good example...) Nothing is more disheartening to a group of adventurers than never being able to put a peg on the actual bad guy in the face of overwhelming evil's descent upon the world, or putting all their efforts into defeating the supposed bad guy just to find out he was a mook. For me, that ups the tension considerably, even when other people roll their eyes and shout "PADDING!"

 

Bonus points if we saw hints of the real Big Bad beforehand.

 

I'll admit it.

 

I'm a sucker for waif-fu -- the petite female character who can wipe the floor with someone twice her size. I know it's thoroughly implausible in most settings (aikido and judo notwithstanding), but I end up coming back to it and "pint-sized powerhouse" on the male side. Maybe it's the whole "David versus Goliath" thing, or maybe I've spent too much time watching Whedon's work.

 

Other than that, like Clover, I tend to make my characters relatively young (late teens to early-mid twenties), as I can personally get more character growth out of them and I feel that age range works better in the "monomyth" structure. My monomyth "mentor" characters are all usually NPCs -- I've never been able to play one for an extended period.

 

Also something I enjoy. Hell, Kopo is a good example of the tiny character who bloody destroys people bigger than him (I'd call it Husban-do, in this case).

[Kellach Woods]

The "fish out of water" cliché I guess - I always use it if I've no prior contact with the lore as to explain my OOC shortcomings.

 

Alternately, edging the lore as well.

[Gegenji]

I don't know if it's a cliche, but I seem to really like generally silly/goofy characters who actually have a rather serious/dark backstory behind them and can be straight just as much as they can in a more lighthearted manner.

[ShoggMommy]

Other than that, like Clover, I tend to make my characters relatively young (late teens to early-mid twenties), as I can personally get more character growth out of them and I feel that age range works better in the "monomyth" structure. My monomyth "mentor" characters are all usually NPCs -- I've never been able to play one for an extended period.

 

I like playing younger characters as well like you said late teens-twenties because I can rp through their storyline and make them more rounded by the time they're older. So I guess toss that trope/cliche onto my stoic woobie as well.

[allgivenover]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WiseBeyondTheirYears

 

Usually with a huge crack in the personality that pushes them to make poor decisions,

[Caspar]

Not a cliche I encouraged, but a lot of people on my old forums pigeonholed me into The Smart One role. I guess I did the whole "overly wordy, pretentious know-it-all" too well, to the point at which people expected it of me and were disappointed when I didn't feel like playing it.