Character 'types'
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My character type is smarter than yours and does not TS. Also, my PB is not a porn star.
I'm a fucking unicorn.
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I always seem to play lonely people. They hit the grid with few to no friends or close colleagues. I think this began as a shorthand for getting out and roleplaying because this goes alllll the way back to when I began MUing in roughly 2010. My first character was a vampire who worked from home as tech support before the embrace. But this doesn't mean they are loners. They want to meet people and hang out and connect. Once I realized this habit, I rolled up a character who had a rich and varied web of people he's loved and befriended. One is an actual statted Retainer and shows up in scenes. It's been a lot of fun to have so much to draw from.
My characters tend to be good hearted, well meaning folks. I don't play villains but I will happily play in the gray areas or have my "good" people do bad things. That's just not how they begin. I will also play the occasional asshole, but I'm so twitchy about IC/OOC lines that I keep it mild or aim it at NPC types.
Males have dominated in the last few years but that wasn't always so. I felt like my females came out flat and in an effort to try something new I latched on to males and haven't looked back.
I like to, as I say, hit characters at an angle. What I mean is, I steer away from the usual "cliches" and try and do something different with what I've seen out there. Mad scientist Ordo Dracul or uptight military guy. My OD would, maybe, be very mellow but cruel as fuck. My military guy might be a hot anxious mess full of baggage.
My favorite example is my current character Shane. His whole concept when I began crafting him was this: Make Norman Reedus different than what I've seen. He came out as a soft spoken, homeless, ex-con psychic who once had dreams of working in scientific academia. Cuz he's super smart. He's vain and keeps his hair dyed because god forbid someone sees his silver fox roots. He's a family man, driven by love. Most importantly: He's very clean. Leave that greaseball Daryl Dixon at home, y'all.
Lastly, there's my shelf of disabled characters. I've had more than a few and I think it stems from the whole "do something different" thing. Ex-Army redneck guy....in a wheelchair. The ultra religious tent revivalist...who is deaf. I got a blind vampire bubbling in the back of my brain right now. Let's hope I don't find the right Played By.
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@macha said in Character 'types':
I stopped trying to play/create male characters. I just always felt like I wasn't quite 'there' with those, no matter what those around me said.
Whenever I play a male character, including playing male NPCs on games where I have staffed, no matter what background or personality I write for them...they turn out to all be asshole frat boys. I'd probably need a therapist to help me figure out why that is, but meh.
I don't play male characters anymore.
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Alterna-nerds who trend towards being know-it-alls in spite of usually being outside of academia. Acerbic, generous, and overachievers. Romantics, but rarely get the girl; often more sapiosexual than heterosexual. Occasionally loners, but not by choice or design. Also tend to be very eager-to-please while also being disappointed idealists. Usually male, never fighters or interested in macho bullshit.
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I sometimes feel like the male characters I play are easier to differentiate from each other, because I'm a girlcreature IRL and they're very clearly A Character Who's Not Me in that way right off, so I'm probably paying more attention to developing personality. For that reason, I feel like I click faster with the ones that work for me, whereas female characters sometimes take me more time. I went through a phase for like three years where I just could NOT make a female character work, for whatever reason. It was kind of bothering me. Now I'm playing a woman who's probably in my Top Three Favorite Children Ever, though, so the dry spell is over. Things come in ebb and flow and such.
On the rare occasions when I alt successfully it's usually when I have both a male character and a female one since, again, I've got that obvious thing I'm forced to be different about and I have it to fall back on to avoid same-y-ness, until the new thing I'm playing has a personality.
Idk if I have a clear 'type.' I tend to play action-oriented characters as my mains, but that's mostly just a vehicle for plot involvement. Personality and backgrounds I try hard to vary. Sometimes to the point where I'm probably annoyingly self-conscious about it, but I like to dabble and see how something feels.
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@gingerlily I don't know why, but I got a chuckle out of that.
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@gingerlily said in Character 'types':
Whenever I play a male character, including playing male NPCs on games where I have staffed, no matter what background or personality I write for them...they turn out to all be asshole frat boys. I'd probably need a therapist to help me figure out why that is, but meh.
I don't play male characters anymore.
I actually have played a pretty wide range of guys. But I guess I never feel as good as some of my best RP partners about how well I do them.
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I think it's fair to say I definitely have a few types:
- The quiet, smart, bookish type with very few social skills and little romantic aspirations or experience
- The quiet, warrior type with very few social skills and little romantic aspirations or experience
- And sometimes, just to mix it up, the gregarious omni-sexual flirt that will sleep with anything with a pulse.
Nearly always male.
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@arkandel said in Character 'types':
- Is there a kind of personality you choose for your PCs? Do you mostly play military folks? Clever people? Seducers? Jokesters? Do you quip with most of your characters? Are they typically polite or rough around the edges?
Intelligence agents. Spies. Information brokers. Hackers. Quack doctors. People with an agenda they're playing close to the chest. People who aren't what they initially appear to be, who may be subject to misleading rumours and first impressions. Liars, rogues and investigative types. People with trust issues that go both ways: they don't trust people easily, and nobody trusts them.
Almost never anyone who seems like they could conceivably be someone important, fancy or respectable. The characters will be underestimated, never overestimated.
For me, a character is successful if it surprises people enough to make them ask questions.
- Do most of your characters fall within a certain range between 'good' and 'morally gray'?
Usually grey. I play morally-driven and amoral characters in equal measure, but on both sides they're always somewhat grey. Which in my view is just a matter of realism: no one's purely bad or purely good. They all have at least one thing they would sacrifice anything for, whether it's their lover, their friends, their government, their cause or their own skin. Even amoral characters have a sympathetic reason for why they are that way. (Maybe they lost a child, a loved one, or learned some hard lessons during their upbringing.) So I generally favour anti-villains and anti-heroes.
And for two more - this time controversial - bonus points!
- Do you judge others either for the types of PCs they usually play? As in, do you ever roll your eyes and go "pft, that @Arkandel rolled a snarky hipster in his early twenties again. Is that all he knows how to play?"
Yes.
I judge people who across the board always play pretty, perfect, wealthy people, with supermodel played-bys and so on.
I just find this style of wish-fulfilment RP kind of shallow, and rarely very engaging for anyone other than the person it's meant to serve, who is playing the character in question.
- And finally... do you judge others for the type of character they are playing and if so do you associate the player's views with the character? For example if someone played a Slaver on Shang, or a racist on a nWoD game.
Almost never.
However if there's a visible pattern there are times that I'll squint, for example if I've known this player for a good few years and I notice that all of their characters are white nationalists played by white blonde models, and their description always focuses on just how flawless their alabaster skin is; or if they're known for really getting their jollies from rape RP on a regular basis; or if they're a grown-ass 40 year-old playing (or fucking with) a series of sexualised teen/child characters.
One incident I'll handwave, especially if I wasn't privy to all the details. (Maybe they faded? Maybe they were making a pointed, thoughtful attempt at social criticism?) But when it's a pattern, especially an exclusive pattern (e.g., ALL of their characters are flawless-alabaster-porcelain-skinned white nationalists) then ... yeah. I'll squint. Especially if they make their political opinions OOCly known at a later/prior date.
I otherwise wouldn't care or judge someone for playing a slaver, a racist, a chauvinist or any other evil character, unless it seemed to align with their OOC behaviour. That's just their character. It's a story. Stories can have villains.
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I tend to think in terms of what story I can drive with what characters, how I can be entertaining, who needs what. I'm most comfortable on male characters I can be funny with, whether it's making fun of themselves or a character that quips or whatever, because it's no fun to play characters incapable of changing the mood of a scene that's obvious no one else is enjoying. It sucks to be on a character where it would break character to be anything but a passive witness to a scene that everyone else finds a drag, and you know you could change easy.
And I guess I kind of judge people, in the sense of seeing problems coming from miles away about what headaches a concept will generate and thinking the person either doesn't care to fix it or won't. I try to give the benefit of a doubt till I see it but it's so very rarely wrong, and such a shock when someone is super chill about the incredibly obvious consequences that come from the storylines a particular character generates. Like the honest truth is the vast majority of people that say, 'I am totally fine with all the consequences of my character acting like X! Hit me! No boundaries!' are totally full of it. I've seen that statement like dozens of times and I honestly can't think of a time that didn't blow up.
I've had so, so, so many conversations start with, "Hey, I'm cool with there being consequences to my character's IC actions but" and almost none with, 'Oh yeah I'm fine with whatever.'
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I tend to play bright, cheerful characters because I hit my stride, RPwise, when I have the freedom to write a lot of humor into my poses. Not that they are upbeat all the time -- I prefer there to be layers so when I am feeling like a meaty, character building scene that is more thoughtful, it's not out of form for my character to have those moments. Despite the happy impression that most of my characters give off, they are the most fulfilling to me when they possess a neutral moral alignment (chaotic neutral is my fav) -- I love it when people will write my characters off as adorable and harmless, not realizing that they are manipulative AF with all kind of morally grey ulterior motives.
When I am on a WoD game, sometimes I'll play characters that are super angsty -- just totally wounded, broken and barely maintaining people with tragic backgrounds. And while I can go down some dark, twisted roads with those characters and write some beautifully sad stories with people, I can only bear those roles for so long before it just gets too depressing and I need a break.
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Most common:
- Earnest scholar. Often shy. Sometimes stammery. Librarian types, but the good librarian that wants to help you find what you're looking for and helps empower people. Sometimes has a tragic/traumatic past, but is least likely to of the archetypes on this list.
- Sociopath that can fake seeming normal at least most of the time. Tragic/traumatic past. Doesn't let people see the 'real her' very often, because it is scary. Straight-up murderer or at least completely capable of it.
- Standoffish person, likely with resting bitch face. Guarded for reasons (see: tragic/traumatic past) and generally hiding a good person under all that. Cares more than they let on. Prickly. Rude to people to help keep them at arm's length.
Many of my characters are sarcastic.
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More important than anything else, if I'm going to stick with a character for a long time, they have to feel real and solid to me.
So, I tend to make characters that are subtle or layered. If they have a tragic backstory, it's unlikely to come out in RP all at once, you might pick up hints of it in some RP, but my character will likely never drop the full story. For example: Cerise on Fate's Harvest has been abandoned/left/betrayed by nearly everyone she ever cared about, but that happened years ago now, and so she's trying to pick her life back up and move on. So, she's not overwhelmingly sad, she's not twisted and tortured, she's doing what humans do ... dealing, and it's how she's dealing that plays into how she approaches the world. Bad relationship with rich, big city parents? Find a town on the edge of nowhere and waste that Harvard education working in a book shop.
It also plays into why I shy away from Superhero games. I mean, maybe I could be lured to one if someone promised me grittiness, real, substantive costs, and limited abilities, but I get the feeling most games aren't that. I also have trouble on WoD games playing the major spheres. I can't ever quite get into the headspace of those characters and empathize with them. I think I've decided I need to do a becoming or two on screen to help with that.
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@lisse24 said in Character 'types':
More important than anything else, if I'm going to stick with a character for a long time, they have to feel real and solid to me.
I concur with this, and feel the same way.
I find that I drift away from characters where I don't get the chance to have them feel real and solid.
It doesn't matter their background or who they are. What matters is the situations I get them into, where I can slip into them and be them, success or not.
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@lisse24 said in Character 'types':
More important than anything else, if I'm going to stick with a character for a long time, they have to feel real and solid to me.
So, I tend to make characters that are subtle or layered. If they have a tragic backstory, it's unlikely to come out in RP all at once, you might pick up hints of it in some RP, but my character will likely never drop the full story.
I'm with you on this. Nearly all of my WoD characters had substantial backgrounds which I always wrote for me, for my own benefit. Most of the details never came out in RP but I needed to go through that process to get into the head of the character I was creating and so I would know how to feel, how to react, how to move forward once IC. I know a lot of people can just roll out with a rough outline, a general concept and GO but I've always needed more to get into the skin of my PCs.
(do i have a problem?)
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@sockmonkey said in Character 'types':
I'm with you on this. Nearly all of my WoD characters had substantial backgrounds which I always wrote for me, for my own benefit. Most of the details never came out in RP but I needed to go through that process to get into the head of the character I was creating and so I would know how to feel, how to react, how to move forward once IC. I know a lot of people can just roll out with a rough outline, a general concept and GO but I've always needed more to get into the skin of my PCs.
(do i have a problem?)
Nah, just a different style.
My thing is the polar opposite; @Aria can testify that getting me to give any details about a character or a dynamic before I get on the grid is like pulling teeth. Until I have a scene or two in, there's just nothing there for me. I start out with a general concept and a few really key history points, but I need to play a character to figure them out.
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@lisse24 said in Character 'types':
If they have a tragic backstory, it's unlikely to come out in RP all at once, you might pick up hints of it in some RP, but my character will likely never drop the full story.
Same and - OH GOD - if you're telling me your tragic backstory in our first scene, five seconds after we've met, my character's reaction is probably going to be, 'Holy shit wtf did I do to prompt this overshare from this rando? Edge awaaaaaaaaaaaay.' Not becoming besties or something.
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@three-eyed-crow I have one weird exception to this,and it’s somewhat limited: if the characters meet in a crisis situation, and the traumatic event (note that isn’t plural) is somehow relevant.
For instance, if a character has a rat phobia due to being swarmed by them as a kid and our characters have been chased into and abandoned subway tunnel? Sure, OK, that’s fine to mention as the reason they’re freaking out more than normal so long as it doesn’t totally dominate the scene. It’s the classic ‘action movie quick trauma reference’ sort of trope.
If we’re strangers chatting in line for coffee, or that segues into how Creepy Uncle Bob touched them where their bathing suit covers and how they really hate beets? No. Just no.
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@three-eyed-crow I once had someone do this to me and their tragic back story included all sorts of sexual torture, which they described, in detail. I was like nope. Nopenopenope. Done with that character.
@surreality I agree. One is an engaging drop of a backstory the other is ...too much.
Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that all my characters have lengthy or tragic backstories. On RfK both Kara and Mackenzie lived relatively normal lives. Kara embraced her family and lives and sought to make the world better, while Mack was a bit of a rebel. In fact, when I made the first iteration of Cerise way back on TR, her background was very sketchy and it developed over time. She changed from small town girl who didn't quite make good to poor rich girl. My point is more that I have to understand what drives the character, who they are, and their mindset in any circumstance. I have to empathize with them. I struggle to empathize with vampires, even when I have a concept I think is cool.
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@lisse24 said in Character 'types':
I struggle to empathize with vampires, even when I have a concept I think is cool.
And I'm the complete opposite, which is why we work well together. You take the normal mortal, and I play the broken vampire.
