Sharpeh's Character Creation Tips and Tutorial

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Character Tips and Tutorial

Character creation, against popular belief, is a science, not an art. You’re not born simply knowing how to make the perfect characters. The only thing that influences your ability to make, quote, “Good” and “Bad” characters is your wiliness try something different. And, of course, your willingness to learn from the characters of others. It’s okay to take bits and pieces of things you like from other characters you find on the net, along with things you see in cartoon characters, movie characters and book characters. What’s not okay, and something you should definitely avoid doing, is simply copying characters almost entirely. Yes, there is a difference.

You can take pieces of a character, but not the whole thing. For example, someone makes a red husky who’s really bold and mentally strong willed but is terrified of spiders. It is not cool to make a black husky or a red malamute who is similarly bold but is afraid of… I dunno, water. It is okay, however, to make a German Shepherd who is very calm, cool and collected except in the presence of cats, which he is deathly afraid of. It’s the same concept- a very serious character that acts completely opposite of his general personality stereotype in certain situations, but that’s the only thing that’s the same about them. Compare that to the first attempt. The breeds were similar (if not the same), the personality was pretty much copied and the only thing that changed was the fear.

The first attempt was changing bits and pieces of the original character. BAD.

The second was actively taking bits and pieces from the original character. GOOD.

Be sure to pay clear attention to that not only when taking influence from original rp characters, but also from cartoons, movies and so on. Outright character theft is not only underhanded and lazy, but it’s also against the law. Federal Copyright Laws. Now, you can argue that all you want, but a quick Google search will tell you all you need to know about the law. Of course, the law is about fifty pages long, so if you don’t want to read all of that, just take my word for it. Theft is a big deal, so you want to avoid it not only so you don’t look bad but also so Proboards doesn’t have a reason to shut the site you did it on down and prosecute the owner.

So… just be careful about that kind of thing.

The “Secret” of Character Creation

Again, it’s not an art. It’s a science, meaning there are important facts and just general know-how to keep in mind when creating a character. I like to call these “The Elements of Designs”, but you can think of them however you like.

Element Number one, the most important and what I consider to be the secret of character creation: uniqueness is appealing. I don’t care who you think you are or what you think you like, unique characters make things fun and interesting. Threads involving them become interesting and unpredictably exciting, like a movie you and your friends are writing. So, whenever you get the chance, make things different! This seems like the hardest thing for most people to do, for reasons I simply don’t understand. It’s not like you don’t have different options pertaining to different aspects of your character. Perhaps you just choose to ignore some changes because you’re lazy? Or you don’t care? Well, if that’s the case then I can’t help you until you give a damn about your characters. But, if you’re reading this thing, I can only assume you do.

In that case, let me repeat myself: uniqueness is key. Kind, caring but a good fighter is not an appealing character, not only because it’s too common place but also because it’s not very interesting. A character like that will pretty much always be there for their friends and family, they will always be able to protect people and they will never get hurt. They’re friendly, never get on people’s nerves and are quick to apologize and easy to manipulate because all they care about is being on the good side of other characters. You know what this is, don’t you? It’s a Mary sue, one of those “perfect characters” people only create in the interest of getting a quick mate or boy friend, which is something we will address later. Make them different, randomly different, a relatively easy task when you break their personality up into situations:

Brave or Cowardly?
Confident or Self-doubting?
Friendly or Anti-social?
Violent or Pacifist?
Selfish or Compassionate?
Arrogant or Caring?
Outgoing or Shy?
Calm or High-strung?

Now, I have these grouped so that each side represents a stereotype. Brave, confident, friendly characters are much too common place and should be (generally) avoided, as should self-doubting, emo characters. It’s okay to have a character who’s violent, arrogant and a general jack ass, just like it’s okay to have a spastic, cowardly, nervous wreck of a character. The more you can mess them up, the better. Now, I’m not saying that outgoing, friendly characters can’t be fun to play, it’s just that the usual characters are very stereotypical in that players never want them to make mistakes or slip up or to not like somebody. They want their characters to be loved by everyone, and when they’re not, they usually get depressed in order to get people to pity them. This is what you want to avoid. Mistakes make rp interestingly dramatic and it’s often what starts plots, so avoiding them is not only pointless but boring.

It’s also important to remember that character creation isn’t only about personality. It’s also about history, appearance and even the name you choose.

Appearance has to be the one area of character creation I understand least. I mean, I don’t know why everyone’s character always looks exactly the same. It makes no sense. Even for sites where you’re limited by photographs you can find on the net, there are millions and millions of images out there of millions of different dogs and breeds. So, why is everyone’s husky black and white? Why do they all have blue eyes? Are huskies with brown eyes ugly? Are they…. smaller? Inadequate? There’s no good reason you can give for always having a husky with blue eyes, the same way you can’t justify always having a German shepherd who’s brown with a black saddle. This page clearly shows every possible coloration of the GSD, easily the most popular breed of dog in stray dog rps. So, why is it I’ve never seen any sable shepherds as characters, even after rping for eight years? Why are they all black or white or the average saddled variety? Never blue, never tan and brown, never brindle.

Do not get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a tan and black saddled shepherd, but if all you have to say to describe their markings is “the usual GSD markings”, then you need to rethink that character’s appearance. I’m not saying you should sit there and type a novel describing the color of every last hair on the dog’s body. I’m saying that if you don’t know or can’t describe your character’s markings for at least a paragraph, you probably should find out. At least know whether or not the saddle reaches the back of the shoulders or the back of neck, whether it goes down to the elbow on the front legs or if it stays off the legs. Does it extend down the tail or stop at the rump? Or maybe it goes half way? Markings are often the most interesting part of a character’s appearance. Nothing is more striking than a thick, solid black mask on a shepherd or husky, not even blue eyes.

You know what’s not striking? A character design of original origin with obscenely bright, strange or otherwise mismatched markings. Some sites, such as Kay Fedewa’s BBA forum, allows you to create a custom character that does not have to be from a photograph and does not have to be the normal natural colors of an animal of that sort. That does not automatically mean that all of your characters need to be rainbow/techno colored in order to be interesting. When used very carefully, bright or unnatural colors can be really appealing. However, when you simply throw them around with the attempt to make your character “more interesting”, you’re just creating a Technicolor mess. A dog whose face is half bright blue and half purple with a green tail tip and a white underside is an ugly mess of things that make no sense. No dog in real life has a face that is two separate colors that are completely different from the main body color. It just doesn’t happen. And just because you are ignoring realistic coat colors doesn’t mean you should ignore realistic markings too.

Trust an artist when I say that markings are very important to a viewer’s recognition of a character or animal of any sort. If you create a Doberman that is no long black and tan, that no long has the chest spots, that no longer has the eyebrow spots, that no longer has the markings on the legs, then it will not look very much like a Doberman, no matter what you say. So, while odd colors can be interesting if done right, always try to tie back into realism when designing your character. This makes them easier to recognize and more appealing. Also, try and pick colors that match when designing characters from scratch. Either choose analogous colors (colors next to each other on the color wheel, such as green and yellow or red and orange) or choose complimentary colors (colors opposite each other on the color wheel such as blue and orange or red and green), and always- I repeat: always use the colors throughout the character’s entire design. Don’t switch it up and make every single paw a different color. That does not make things interesting, it makes them tacky. Choose a color scheme and stick to it throughout the character’s whole design.

Scars, odd accessories like collars, bandanas or harnesses, even some of those silly clothes people put on their dogs can also help a design if you color them correctly. A bandanna that is the same color as a character’s eyes will often bring the color throughout the design, uniting it and making it seem more natural. Even if you don’t personally agree with the action of dressing dogs up, your character does not necessarily reflect your personal opinions or ideals, and if you believe that’s not true, you should stop rping right now. It’s wrong to take what happens in character and apply it out of character to the player. I seriously hate dog fighting with a passion, I love pitbull terriers and I think they are the greatest personal pets on the planet. I plan on owning a few and using them as animal ambassadors to show the world that they’re not the ones to punish for dog attacks and dog fighting, that breed bans solve nothing and only punish the good and righteous dogs. However, this does not mean I have a thing against dog characters or even human characters that are involved in dog fighting. Many of my ABPT characters have been involved in dog fighting in their histories, some even enjoyed it. My characters and I are different people, different creatures and we truly have nothing to do with each other.

So, there’s another element of design for you: don’t make things personal! It’s okay to love your characters and value them personally, feel like they are a psychological manifestation of yourself or whatever it is that makes characters important to you, but you can’t make every little detail about them personal, okay? If you create them properly, they will get into fights, they will disagree with certain characters and fall in love with others. That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s life. It happens… and if you create a character and play them to avoid such things, you’re making a bad character. You’re making an unrealistic character… and a boring one.

Third element of design: history is important! I mentioned it before, but allow me to elaborate. A lot of people hate to type up histories for their characters. They’re hard and can be long and time consuming. Plus, since they happened in the past, they have nothing to do with the character’s present. Right? WRONG. Wrong wrong wrong. The history is your chance to explain yourself and your character, your chance to justify their personal quirks and to further give them that realistic depth I’m pretty sure I mentioned before. Even on a fantasy role play, realism in behaviors is important and appealing to a degree. It makes your character tangible, believable, gives other plays the sense that they’re really talking to a real person, that the rp is really happening somewhere with real creatures that really exist. Realism gets people involved and, in reality, people have histories. And not everybody’s history is traumatic or depressing. Mine hasn’t really been, for example. I’ve never been abused, my parents aren’t drunks and have never been divorced, my boyfriend wasn’t killed. Now, don’t get me wrong. Traumatic histories usually make for involving, emotional, dramatic characters that invite both pity and envy. That kind of thing is good, but just be aware that it’s not really realistic in that most people don’t have histories like that.

In fact, happy, healthy, hearty characters probably didn’t have traumatic histories. Just use your common sense here, folks. I’d be very surprised if someone lost their family in a traumatic, scary fire of doom when they were five but still grew up to be a happy, trusting member of society. You would be too, if you met someone like that. At least make them afraid of fire or skittish, timid, insecure. Childhood traumas are called traumas for a reason: they usually affect a person for the rest of their lives. So show it! If your character’s parents ignored them and left them feeling neglected and dejected, show it! Have them be a reserved, quiet individual, almost anti-social, because that’s how I’d expect someone to be after being neglected all their lives. But maybe that’s not how you see it. Maybe you’d be very clingy and crave attention from everyone to gain what you didn’t have when you were a child. That’s fine. The world comes in many colors, it depends on whose eyes you’re looking through. So do what you think is logical, not what you think everyone would like. Don’t make her father a drunk who beat her just because everyone else’s character had a father like that. Remember, uniqueness is key, even in the history.

Avery important element is number four? Are we on four? I don’t even know, I’ve been typing this so long, but, whatever number this is, it’s a very important one: Specify! That’s it, that’s all you need to know. Specify! Be specific! I’m not saying you have to write a lot, even though that’s what a lot of people do when trying to explain things. But you don’t have to write a lot to be specific. “Bold, brave and a good fighter”. We’ve all seen personalities like that. Dull, boring, two-dimmensional. Let’s add a third dimension, shall we? Make this character tangible, help the viewer visualize. How is he brave? Is he the cocky type of brave, where he’d charge head long into any mess without thinking about the consequences? Or is he intelligently brave? Does he stop, identify the threat, identify the victim and then deal with the problem in a calm but fearless manner? You could just expand the personality a little and say “he’s smart and brave”, which is getting somewhere, I admit… but that’s not what I mean.

Give examples. Tell us how he acts. Don’t just tell us how his is, tell us how he feels, what he feels about, how he behaves when theses feelings are about. Don’t just say he’s brave. Tell us he’s brave because he charges into situations without fear, that he’s willing to give up everything. Give us an example:

“Shank is a foul-mannered, ill-tempered, anti-social jerk. He generally tries to keep to himself and prefers to be alone and in silence. Though he's definitely not against socializing with others, he's easily annoyed and often ends up furious or bored with whoever he's talking to, so he usually doesn't bother.”

Do you see how I did that? First I told you that he’s mean, anti-social and has a short temper. But then I gave you a sort of situational example. I made sure you were aware that he’s not anti-social because he’s timid, but because of his temper. I told you that, in the event he actually has to talk to someone, he will but he usually gets annoyed or bored. It’s an example. How about a more obvious version?

“Shank is mean, rude and has a short temper. When he does talk to people, he gets annoyed really easily so he usually tries not to talk to them at all. Otherwise, he might loose his temper.”

That’s it. Give us a situation and tell us how they would act. That’s probably the best way to give your character depth, because then the viewer can picture your character and maybe one of their own, together, in that situation and they’d know exactly how your character would respond. They can picture it, feel it, imagine it… and that’s what role-playing is really about: imagining that which is not real. Make-believe…

Recap

So, to summarize, the first step to making a good character is realizing that there really isn’t such thing as a bad character. As long as you enjoy what you’re doing, you keep doing it, that’s all that really matters, that you’re happy. But be aware, even though there aren’t bad characters, there are good and better characters. There’s always room for improvement…

And it starts with you caring about your characters. If you don’t care, then I can’t help you. You’ve have to be willing to spend that extra five minutes to type up a quick history or explain traits in the personality. If you’re not then you’re never going to get better.

The most important thing to remember about characters is that uniqueness makes them appealing and makes them fun. Odd, strange and different traits are what cause characters to make mistakes and mistakes are what make life (whether real or made up) interesting and involving. That’s what drama is guys, and humans, by nature, love drama. So, the more unique you can make a character the better. Mental problems, deformities, siblings or family, they all help, honest.

Appearance and history also play a very big role in character development. They give a character depth and make them more tangible and interesting to the viewer. So, make your character different. Make your German shepherd brown instead of black, make your husky have brown eyes and not blue, give them a few scars, a bandanna or collar that isn’t a choke chain or have spikes on it. This applies to human characters too. Make a female character with short spiky hair, instead of the usual long, flowing stuff most “pretty girls” have.

However, make sure that when you design a character, that you are smart about it. Don’t throw colors together wildly, whether you be designing clothing or the fur on an animal. Try to make sure that all of the colors on the character go together and are not conflicting or too random. Random colors = tacky design.

Don’t make things personal! You can create a Nazi character if you want, even if you don’t necessarily believe in those ideas. Heck, I did once. I had a Doberman who was a nazi, had the swastika hat and everything. Why? Certainly not because I’m nazi. Don’t limit yourself to what you think other people will like. This is your character, do what you want with them. But don’t baby them, okay? They’re going to make mistakes, mess up words, trip over things, fall into things, get tricked and trapped and kidnapped. That’s what makes rp fun so if all you’re doing is trying to dodge all of that, then you’re being rather silly. That’s life, let it happen.

Histories are very important too, even though people seem to like leaving them out. The history is your chance to give your character that third dimension, to tell the world why they are the way they are. It really gives the viewer the chance to visualize and relate to your character so it’s best not to leave it out, especially when you consider that it can and often does influence your character later on down the line.

Finally, don’t stress yourself trying to type a novel for no reason. Bios don’t have to be super super long. They just need to be specific, that’s all. Give details and tell us what you mean, okay? “Bitchy” can mean a lot of things to a lot people, so can “dark” or “evil”, so tell us what you mean. “Evil”, then say “likes to kill innocent children and beat puppies with kittens”. Fine, that works better than simply saying “he’s evil”. This on its own will make your bios appear longer but that’s not why it’s important. It gives your characters depth and makes it easy for viewers to visualize them. A pretty picture isn’t always enough to help a viewer visualize a character.

Final Note

Listen, you don’t have to argue with me. You don’t have to take this personally and act like I’m attacking your method of creating characters. Like I said, if you’re happy with what you’re doing, then just keep doing it. But, on every site I go on, people constantly hound me with compliments on how “good” and “awesome” and “amazing” my characters are. I’m just here letting you know why that is and how I do it.

Now, you can take my words to heart next time you make a character, or you can completely ignore me. Doesn’t matter to me either way… but, in case you are one of those people that realizes your characters are getting bland and boring and that you need help fixing them, my services are here.