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View Full Version : Suggestions on how to make a meanigful personality and not just something attached to



Sergio
2018-01-31, 04:40 AM
the character?

Because I'm starting to be scared that by making many characters, due to their deaths, I will lose inspiration. And I would like to find a way to get a decent goal suggested by the personality of my character while being credible in front of my dm.

Thanks for help.

Koo Rehtorb
2018-01-31, 07:30 AM
People aren't that complicated. You can basically sum up a person with a couple of statements/personality traits and have a very solid foundation that you can build on through play.

I've done a great deal with the starting point of "Former slave, hates slavery. Secretive. Willing to go to extreme lengths, but fundamentally a good person."

or

"Former villain, wants to make amends. Resigned to death. Desperately wants to make real human connections but is bad at it."

Statements like those are enough to start playing a character. They'll naturally develop more personality through time as you play them.

redwizard007
2018-01-31, 10:06 AM
Build the person before you build the PC. It rarely leads to OP, but if you are role-playing instead of roll-playing it works just fine. You can have a basic idea of what you want, but let the character build himself. At my table, we like to write out, or talk through our character's backstory if we are having trouble developing them as a character.

Example: my kid wanted to play a Mowgli character as a caster, so... Mowgli was orphaned in a manticore attack while picking berries with his mother in the rough hills outside the village. A displacerbeast that had lost her kitten's adopted him and raised him in the wild. Growing up malnourished and with little protection from the elements, Mowgli did not grow reckless and fast. He grew observant and cautious. He learned that there is always something that will make a meal of him, and that when attacked, he must flee and hide, or lash out brutally and hope to drive off his attacker.

Now at this point we had a cautious wild man, and debated ret-conning a Con/Cha switch and making him a barbarian, but decided that sorcerer would work even better.

Mowgli did not mourn the loss of his "mother" when she was killed by the hobgoblins, for he did not know what sadness was. But he knew rage. As his blood boiled and his body shook, a change came over the boy. For the first time in his life, he understood what the song in his blood was singing. He understood how to call fire to his hands. He understood how to destroy the hobgoblins that had killed his only protector. He knew power.

So from this, it was decided that Mowgli was not a nice guy, and was a big fan of retribution, but that he wasn't some crazy out to take over the world either. He had just wanted to be left alone, but now he had nothing holding him to this place, and it was too dangerous for a boy on his own. He left in search of a safer lair.

Shortly after leaving the hills, Mowgli came upon a farm worked by a family of gnomes. He tried to simply avoid them, but the children... The children caught his attention. They were... Like him... And not, but more so than the displacerbeast. He watched from a stand of pine as the children played, and then as the adults called them in for a meal. Then he came into sight and everyone froze...
The gnomes sensed his otherness, his magic, but it was similar to their own. A power from within. A natural power. They took him in, showed him kindness and family. Taught him to speak. Taught him to ride the magic in his blood rather than to be consumed by it. He spent several years with this family before he saw another of his own kind...

Here we stopped. We already know Mowgli has a touch of evil and maybe chaos, but he also craves community and does not harm others for spite. It was decided that Mowgli will be NG/NN despite his early years. He has no tolerance for those who attack without provocation, and is prone to use more force than is necessary. He respects strength, but values compassion more, and friendship even above that. Mowgli will be the first to stand shoulder to shoulder with a paladin and spit in the face of evil, but when the paladin tries to arrest an evil-doer Mowgli seeks a more permanent solution, particularly if the offenses were violent. He has little use for man's laws, but lives under the law-of-the-jungle, meaning most laws are just common sense to him.
Other quirks Mowgli picked up that stem from his upbringing: raised by a displacerbeast, Mowgli never looks directly at someone. He tends to scan the area and only glance at those closer to him from the corner of his eyes. From wild, to gnome farm, Mowgli has always been around animals. It has breed familiarity with beasts both wild and domestic. Mowgli sees little distinction between humanoid races. Even his fellow humans are sort of strange to him, why would elves or orcs be any more odd?

For the record, Mowgli retired to a border town as a 12th level sorcerer. He had an interesting, and far from optimized list of feats, some wacky spell choices, and host of friends who loved him. Occasionally, he makes an appearance in a one shot, or as an NPC cameo in an ongoing campaign.

Tanarii
2018-01-31, 10:45 AM
That's a problem if you're just playing an avatar of yourself, with maybe one or two twists. Which is extremely common for even experienced role players, even when they've written out a complicated character origin on paper. Characters tend to be a little same-y in actual play, personality & decision-making wise.

Step a page from 5e, or the posters above, and make a list of motivations for your character. Things that will affect what he does, or wants to do, in certain situations. Try to make them something that will actually affect decisions during play if you can. Then refer back to them before you start each and every session, to get in character.

Motivation categories I really like are ones that tell me things like:
What am I trying to get out of adventuring?
How do I feel about other people?
How do I feel about other adventurers?
How do I react under extreme stress?
How do I react to extreme temptation?
What tempts me?
What makes me want to work with the party?
How do I feel about killing the bad guys?

Questions like "how did I learn to do what I do" aren't very interesting to me. That's just pre-play history. Which is boring & in terms of importance, mostly irrelevant outside of any motivation it generates, or possibly as a GM plot hook. What really matters is what I do during a game session, not what happens before or between them.

Edit: I'm not suggesting 10 motivations. 3-5 single sentence motivations is usually more than enough for most people.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-31, 11:03 AM
Having answers to a set of broad questions like those suggested above can do a long way to forming the framework of a character you're going to play.

Where is your character from?
What was their family like?
Why did they leave?
What/who do they care about?
What do they love?
What do they hate?
What do they want / what are their goals?
How did they learn the skills they enter "the campaign" with?
Is anyone looking for them? Why?
Is their anyone in their past that they've lost? How/why?


The answers don't have to be long / complicated / detailed, the point is more to think about those things and let the answers give you an idea of who this person is.

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-31, 11:21 AM
The best characters always have inner turmoil and conflict. You should define any character by what he (M/F) loves, not what he hates. Then define his turmoil and/or conflict.

As in:

Loves Transsylvania. Loves God. Loves Elisabetha. God kills Elisabetha. Bam!

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-31, 11:32 AM
From Mary Robinette Kowal (http://maryrobinettekowal.com/):

http://maryrobinettekowal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/self-definition-2.png




"Character driven stories are a journey of self-discovery. They begin when a character is dissatisfied with an aspect of self and end when the character solidifies their self-definition. This can end in a positive or negative state. Either the character achieves the self-definition they were going for, or they recognize that they never will. Basically, they either like themselves at the end, or they don’t. Happy ending or tragedy.

Now, a lot of people think that, in order to have a character arc, you must have a deeply flawed character in order to give them room to grow. That is an option. But this is often really heavy-handed and can lead to fiction that feels flat or contrived."

Quertus
2018-01-31, 01:42 PM
That's a problem if you're just playing an avatar of yourself, with maybe one or two twists.

Questions like "how did I learn to do what I do" aren't very interesting to me. That's just pre-play history. Which is boring & in terms of importance, mostly irrelevant outside of any motivation it generates

There are several different styles of role-playing. Which style you use will determine the value of various suggestions. I quote Tanarii here because he did a good job listing lots of potentially useful elements.

Do you just roleplay yourself, but with a twist?

Do you create a set of values for your character? (oops, I seem to have cut out some good stuff on that in the above post) :smallredface:

Do you create a background for your character, and let that inform their personality?

Do you try to emulate a character from fiction (or even a person IRL)?

Knowing how you view creating a character can help others provide useful advice.

Knowing how one can create a character may give you motivation to make more and different characters.

Tanarii
2018-01-31, 01:56 PM
There are several different styles of role-playing. Which style you use will determine the value of various suggestions. I quote Tanarii here because he did a good job listing lots of potentially useful elements.With my personal preferences against some inserted :smallwink:

I certainly left out the Import Expy. Because that's rarely one I use myself. That's a very good option as long as it fits the game setting. Even that doesn't matter if the game is just a hodge-podge of whatever the players want to play. Not like that wasn't how Roleplaying games got off the ground in the first place, as a hodge-podge of Expy PCs.