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Kaeso
2012-09-06, 04:21 PM
'sup guys?

I'm currently playing a PbP game with some of my friends and my character is a horse archer style ranger. He's basically part of a band of thieves that go around mugging, pillaging and looting everything with coin on it. It's basically a light hearted evil campaign, bordering more on the "get rich or die trying" side than the "conquer the world and kick puppies in their soft puppy butts" side. This (http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=438090) is his sheet if you're interested.

Anyway, on to the main problem: my character still doesn't have a personality. He's supposed to be more or less based on the Monghol keshiks (which explains his name. Yes, I'm so original I might as well be the new Tolkien :smallsigh:), but he doesn't really have a personality yet. I'm looking for something that fits his stats (for example, I want to let the low cha be reflected in rudeness and a lack of table manners) and I want to make him a though, selfish and earthy person, but I have no idea how to do this and how to reflect it in his actions and words. Can any of you perhaps offer some suggestions?

Madfellow
2012-09-06, 10:03 PM
Just keep playing until something comes to you. Maybe there'll be some event that the character has a chance to respond to that will inspire something. Maybe over time the character will just emerge on his own. If all else fails, just play him as yourself. What would YOU do as a bandit in D&D World?

Here, maybe you can try this trick from Burning Wheel:
Try to come up with three instincts that your character has developed over the course of his adventuring career. For example, "If I hear a weapon being drawn, I immediately draw my own. No questions asked."
Then try to come up with three goals that your character might have, or three things that he really wants, beyond just "Get rich or die trying." Or try to figure out what may have driven him to the life of a bandit.

prufock
2012-09-07, 06:36 AM
I can't really give you a personality for your character, but I can offer ways to come up with your own. There are 3 ways I like to design character personalities.

1) Take some psychological/personality disorder, then scale it back a bit or put a twist on it. For instance, a recent character was based on phobias, but the twist was that he had trained himself over his lifetime to become immune to fear of any sort. He was a Sorc/Dread Witch/Nightmare Spinner.

2) Ask "why" and build a bit of backstory. Background MAKES personality traits come to light more easily. So: why is your character out for money? Why is he so rude? What has made him this way?

3) Take a modern-day archetype and sort of reverse-engineer it. For example, the last character I played in D&D was based on motivational speakers.

These can all be used in conjunction with each other.

Kelb_Panthera
2012-09-07, 06:50 AM
Unfortunately nobody can really give you a personality that'll absolutely fit your character 100% but you.

Character personality, one of the key portions of roleplaying, depends almost entirely on the creativity and acting chops of the character's player.

Look for inspiration in films and literature. Have you seen the movie Mongol: the Rise of Ghengis Kahn?

If you don't want to stick quite that close to your mechanical inspiration, you could pick any media with a magnificent bastarad warrior as a prominent character.

You could also play up the gruff quiet warrior archetype. You know, "I'm a badass, and I'm bigger than you. Give me your stuff," but have the character say it with body language instead of words.

For a character quirk, and characters live and die on quirks, you could have him be extremely attentive to and fond of his horse. If the horse gets cut down you get to have that moment of either unbridled rage (forgive the pun) or utter sorrow, or both.

I hope I've at least given you something to work with. Good luck. :smallsmile:

Craft (Cheese)
2012-09-07, 01:03 PM
- Name three things that make your character smile.

- Name three things that make your character really wanna punch somebody.

- What does your character imagine when they think of the "Good Old Days?"

- What parts of their life would your character prefer to forget?

- Name three non-obvious things your character thinks the world would be better off without. ("War" is okay but bland and obvious. Something like "Animal Breeding" or "Parking Tickets" is much more interesting, especially if you give them a logical philosophy explaining their reasons for it.)

- Everyone loves money and power, but what does your character consider even more important? What's more important than winning?

(Note: An answer of "nothing" is only appropriate for cartoon villains. "Family" is good but kinda boring, the most interesting answers are the ones that otherwise play against type or seemingly conflict with their other personality traits, like the otherwise rough and lawless bandit who refuses to sell priceless historical artifacts and donates them to the academia for study instead, no matter how much money he would make from doing otherwise.)

- What's even more important than that? What's the one thing that has to be protected, at any cost?

Exediron
2012-09-07, 02:39 PM
Eh, I can think of legitimate character concepts for whom nothing truly is more important than winning - it would be hard to pull off at level 3, however. The most obvious way would be someone who at one point held other things dear but lost them all. But then you still have to deal with the pesky underlying motivation for winning, in this case revenge or possibly to prove themselves.

As for personality generation, I find that something which works well for me when I'm trying to refine a new personality is to write some small amount of text (perhaps 3-4 pages) in character. Maybe you could come up with a set of questions which would make you think about how their think and answer those. Sometimes, I also seek out online personality tests and take those in character. Ignore the verdict, it's the process of thinking of the answers which is helpful.

Advice for playing the traits you describe: Well, I'm not really sure what 'though' means in this context, so I'm going to answer for thorough. NOTE: These will all be relatively narrow views, as I don't have the time to go into depth.

Thorough: This one is mostly visible as a method of action, but it likely has its basis in the thinking of the character. A thorough personality is probably the sort who believes in following things through and not acting without all the facts. In conversation, he might take a more deliberate approach to planning or questioning, seeking to learn all possible information rather its strictly relevant or not. A character like this probably pays more attention to the little details than many others would. If the characters are looking at a map of a fort they intend to break into, he would likely not be content until he understood the whole of it, on the possibility that this knowledge would be of importance later.

If taken to the level of a compulsion or disorder, this trait may manifest as something similar to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Maybe he doesn't feel comfortable leaving a room without having carefully examined every corner, or he feels the need to explain the sum total of his knowledge on a subject whenever it comes up.

Selfish: This one is theoretically quite obvious, but often difficult to play for those who are not. The core of being selfish is that you place value only on yourself, or at least an inordinately high degree on yourself. The notion of doing an unrewarded deed for another is alien to a very selfish person, and they would likely disapprove or even consider it a sign of weakness. This is not to say that a selfish person cannot have friends; these are people who they enjoy being around, and possibly even truly care for. When it comes down to it, however, they will still put themselves above anyone else. As they are the clear center of their own world, the selfish individual will likely be interested only in topics or conversations which concern themselves. They aren't required to be the focus of the topic, but if it doesn't involve them at all they are very unlikely to care.

Taken to extremes, this person becomes a sociopath, unable to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of others and perhaps even unable to acknowledge other people as having value at all. A complete lack of empathy is the hallmark of this character type; they may not even be aware that the ability to appreciate the feelings of others is real, and explain their actions by saying that everyone just looks out for themselves. The sociopath is quite capable of being pleasant so long as people play by their rules, but they are unable to really care about anyone besides themselves.

Earthy: This one I typically take to mean a more down-to-earth, unpolished type; the sort who says what he means, and has no use for the frills of society. A character of this type would probably believe in speaking simply and directly, and might look down upon those who use careful and diplomatic language, considering them equivalent to tricksters. He would probably place emphasis on and respect physical pursuits more than those intellectual, but its equally possible that he would acknowledge the value of intellectuals while possessing no personal desire towards intellectual endeavors.

At its extreme, this trait might represent a person who hates organized society and any form of technological advancement beyond that with which he is familiar, believing that people are better when living simply and off the land.

...

Of course, there's a million ways to represent all of those. The examples I gave are just the ones that seem most typical to me.

The single most important thing for playing any character is to understand them. If you know how a character thinks - what they want, what experiences they've had which they draw upon and which shaped them - then you're going to be able to figure out what they would do in any given circumstance.

Typically, the way people act and talk is also drawn from these influences, although they might have made a conscious effort not to do so. You might have a nomadic barbarian who went out of his way to learn eloquent language simply because it interested him, for example, with no back-story justification; then again, he might have learned it because he befriended a very cultured person and wanted to be able to talk on their level.

Once you understand your character, playing them comes easily (well, if you're an actor, at least). If you don't understand them, you're doomed to just have a character who operates as an artificial intelligence - possessed of a set of floating traits which behaviour is calculated by, but with no real substance. A true character can still evolve out of this state, however; most characters start out like that.

Craft (Cheese)
2012-09-07, 03:32 PM
Eh, I can think of legitimate character concepts for whom nothing truly is more important than winning - it would be hard to pull off at level 3, however. The most obvious way would be someone who at one point held other things dear but lost them all. But then you still have to deal with the pesky underlying motivation for winning, in this case revenge or possibly to prove themselves.

Yeah but such characters aren't interesting because they aren't forced to make hard choices about what their goals are, they only have to make choices about how best to execute them. Walter White's an interesting character because he has to pursue his meth empire while also trying to be a good father and husband, and it becomes increasingly clear throughout the series that he can't do both. If he didn't have his concern for his family to hold back his ambitions as a drug lord he would cease to be a compelling character.