Well-Written RP Characters
I’m sure everyone has wondered how to properly create characters with room for character development. Here’s how I do it. I’ll cover the essentials first, most RPs expect basic information (name, gender, age, etc.), a biography, and a personality.
Now, identificational information holds a relatively important role, it includes their name, age, gender, sexuality, and face-claim. ID determines how your character’s first impression will be, which is why it’s beneficial to write ID, first.
For biographies, I like to start with a set of points to navigate easier. I build biographies from 3 categories; childhood, parents, childhood extended (high-school/adulthood).
Childhood revolves around their parents, their friends, and major events while they were a youngin’. What affected your character? What was important to them? What were they like as a child?
Parents is where we go deeper. Who were their parents, how did their financial position affect their child, how much attention did they give their child; how did the parents affect the child?
Childhood extended varies on what the RP really is about. Any major event happened in their high-school? Grievances, school, work, how are they managing? Take it all into account.
Personality! Here’s where people go wrong. Not everyone needs to be exceptionally bad or good, it’s not all black and white, there are middles! People can be chaotically-good, lawfully-evil, anything is possible! And the way to do this is through…
Quirks! And! Flaws!
No one is perfect, RP characters certainly shouldn’t be. They need to be just as human as you. Without flaws, there’s nothing to build on, making character arcs impossible. Characters need to improve (or worsen, hehe) during the RP.
If you’re struggling to think of flaws, here’s a helpful website.
Now, after you’ve thought about flaws, think about how events in the character’s life really changed them. How did their personality morph throughout their childhood? Always ask why. Why are they naïve? Why are they closed-off, what made them this way? And that’s all there is!
Thanks for reading, let me know if you have any questions! <3
