Experiences Character profile pet peeves

[Requiems]

I'm admittedly new to using character sheets (I'm a strictly 1x1 roleplayer). Most of the time I provide basic information, but I've been giving more detailed ones a shot.
That being said, I've been reading many character sheets on various sites to get a better idea as to what people would like.

That being said:
Do you ever notice a trend that drives you crazy?

For me, it's the weird proportions. I think the worst one I've received was a character who was 5'6" and under 100 pounds. That's not healthy. I've also had people insist their character is shorter than mine, to the point where their character was 4'10"! Another odd one was a character that was ~6'10". Just a normal human, but their height wasn't treated as the almost world record height that it was.

So, what makes a good character sheet for you? Do you have any pet peeves?

 

[kevintheradioguy]

Nothing I can think of, but to add to your proportion frustration, I had a player whose character was a fifteen-year-old(!) Japanese (!!) girl (!!!) of 6'7''(!!!!), and the player saw nothing wrong with that even when I pointed that out.

 

[obieblu]

Back in the old White Wolf chats, we used the term "twinky" for anyone who was using every possible exception to every rule so they could play overly-unique character types. Like a winged cyborg fairy stands out. Technically, some discrepencies between character systems allowed for it, but no one was ever supposed to make it. Yes, I want to play a supernatural cuz life is disappointing and boring. But I want to play a real character with real characters, not the specialist special someone can borderline cheat to make. Unique stats are not a personality or motivation.

 

[rae2nerdy]

*These were from a different roleplay site*

1. Character Threads.
- You literally made an entire thread for each character. With individual posts dedicated to things like backstory, personality, appearance, powers/abilities, relationships with other characters (get into that below). It was exhausting.

2. Relationship Journals
- As near as I can tell this started with rpers that did like slice-of-life roleplays but eventually infected other genres too. The idea is that you would make an entire post where you would put the name of each played character in the roleplay. You would then make a little blurb and a "relationship percentage" for how close your character was to each of these people. So basically I would make a little blurb saying what my character thought of X and then there would be little stat bars for (Friendship/Attraction/etc.) that I had to fill out. Like 1/5 attraction , or 0/5 friendship, or whatever.

3. Character Theme Songs
I don't listen to a lot of music so this was always super pointless and basically served to show off how much music the player listened to/liked.

4. Likes/Dislikes/Hobbies
I don't mind a brief blurb or so but when I have to fill out three-five activities for each section (Likes, Dislikes, and Hobbies) it gets exhausting.

 

[Tove]

Overall I would have to say for me being forced to create a character sheet is a pet peeve of mine. As a one x one writer I like to have the option of whether or not I want to make one. I would rather play my character out over the roleplay instead. I really don't have any issues with what others want to put on their RT, it's their character. Now one time someone decided to make a character sheet with their history merging with my character's not only that but they went as far as to tell the history of my character too and some things my character went through in their life. That's where I draw the line.

 

[Laifan]

Haha regarding proportions I also struggle with those. I either use a body weight index or, most often than not, will not mention my characters' weight.

As for pet peeves with character sheets none come to mind, really

 

[Alvis Delle Pree]

I mentioned this in another thread, but one of my pet peeves is overly detailed personalities and history.

I find it very easy to judge a character on their personality because personalities are very nuanced and difficult to describe. So many characters when their personalities are over describe start sounding very cliche, because it's straight up a really hard to write personalities especially when it's just kind of out of context. Like when you're describing the asshole character and you describe them as an asshole followed by various asshole traits, probably won't translate well as alone description but seen in action or with context of an in character post that cliche asshole character is in such a cliche character in the end... but it's very easy to judge the cliche asshole character as the cliche asshole character based on their general asshole character description.

and history it's more so that I find it easier to sort of developed that and really refined that once the roleplay starts. I am mostly turned off by overly detailed histories because the character starts feeling detached from the RP and I don't feel myself really falling in love with that character.

it's easier for me to be more attached and feel more for a characters history if it's written after the roleplay starts because then I'm invested and that history will probably involve more of my characters and more of the actual interactions.

that said I'm totally okay with like physical descriptions and talking about clothing and gear and that kind of stuff especially if it's really relevant. Such as things like magic and weapons.

 

[Lost Swordlance]

Faceclaims or photos of a random korean boy.

It angers me. It really angers me because it is sooo creepy.
Seriously, if you do this, I don't feel ashamed by calling you a creep. I would use a stronger word but that may be biased.

 

[rae2nerdy]

Faceclaims or photos or random korean boy.

It angers me. It really angers me because it is sooo creepy.
Seriously, if you do this, I don't feel ashamed by calling you a creep. I would use a stronger word but that may be biased.

So for face claims do you mean this specifically or do you mean this/this/this ?

As in do you only mean photos, or do you mean hand drawn and anime images as well? (those are all cats I found on the interwebs btw, nothing creepy)

 

[Lost Swordlance]

So for face claims do you mean this specifically or do you mean this/this/this ?

As in do you only mean photos, or do you mean hand drawn and anime images as well? (those are all cats I found on the interwebs btw, nothing creepy)

I mean people using pictures of actual people or stars to play their character. Drawn, anime or anything else is fine.

 

[rae2nerdy]

I mean people using pictures of actual people or stars to play their character. Drawn, anime or anything else is fine.

Fair enough I just know that some times people say face claim and they mean literally everything but a written description. Other times they mean photos specifically, or just anime/drawn images. It's a very versatile word

 

[Alvis Delle Pree]

See I think stealing someones art and using it as your faceclaim is shitty and unfair to the artist. I am not a fan of celebrity FCs because I tend to associate them to the characters they play.

But I am not so weirded out by models. I use them all the time and 90% of the time I use those FCs to draw my characters and then drop the RL FC I was using.

So honestly I would be so hard on people that use RL FCs and I would say be more strict on art theift. No one wants the OC stolen and rewritten into something they are not.

I think in general people should accross the board use description, but I won't piss on people's parade if they use RL FCs. Specially if they later get original art made and design an OC from the reference.

 

[rae2nerdy]

See I think stealing someones art and using it as your faceclaim is shitty and unfair to the artist. I am not a fan of celebrity FCs because I tend to associate them to the characters they play.

But I am not so weirded out by models. I use them all the time and 90% of the time I use those FCs to draw my characters and then drop the RL FC I was using.

So honestly I would be so hard on people that use RL FCs and I would say be more strict on art theift. No one wants the OC stolen and rewritten into something they are not.

I think in general people should accross the board use description, but I won't piss on people's parade if they use RL FCs. Specially if they later get original art made and design an OC from the reference.

There is actually a website that lets you make computer generated human face claims (This Person Does Not Exist). It's kind of neat because the people aren't real and are generated at random by some kind of algorithm.

I also recommend doll generators (Doll Divine ~ Dress Up Games) to those who insist on anime face claims. They have similar styles to traditional anime but the generators are made with the express purpose of someone making their own character. And you know for a fact the artist won't mind (sometimes they ask that you link back so other people can use the generator too but that's not a big deal)

 

[Fable]

For me, it's the weird proportions. I think the worst one I've received was a character who was 5'6" and under 100 pounds. That's not healthy. I've also had people insist their character is shorter than mine, to the point where their character was 4'10"! Another odd one was a character that was ~6'10". Just a normal human, but their height wasn't treated as the almost world record height that it was.

So, what makes a good character sheet for you? Do you have any pet peeves?

Oh man, I stopped asking for height/weight stuff because all I got were some weird numbers, like a 5'9" female that weighed 106lbs! I ended up constantly having to provide a link to a height/weight calculator. I get that it's not a thing that everyone understands, but you figure they could get an idea based on their own height/weight or google something like an average height/weight calculator (which there are many).

I've also personally decided to just opt out of including a section for personality. Just too many times I've seen hypocritical characters because the player just wants to cover every aspect of every personality trait they can think of, even if they are contradictory. Personalities are also not exactly what I would call static. We act differently in a familiar friend group than we do with strangers. The same can be said through character development in the RP, so I think requiring a personality section is extremely limiting and can actually create rather flat characters at times.

Other than that, I would say very long CS's asking for every minor detail. Favorite foods, colors, scents, clothes, etc. I mean, those are good for practicing character development, but to require it all in a CS leaves no mystery to the character and can even lead to accidental metagaming.

 

[Alvis Delle Pree]

There is actually a website that lets you make computer generated human face claims (This Person Does Not Exist). It's kind of neat because the people aren't real and are generated at random by some kind of algorithm.

I also recommend doll generators (Doll Divine ~ Dress Up Games) to those who insist on anime face claims. They have similar styles to traditional anime but the generators are made with the express purpose of someone making their own character. And you know for a fact the artist won't mind (sometimes they ask that you link back so other people can use the generator too but that's not a big deal)

Oh yes totally options. I prefer to collect from FC references, a whole collection of outfit references, then draw my own OCs (even if I am shyte at it). But yeah TOTALLY an option to use the doll generators, I've done that in the past.

 

[rae2nerdy]

Oh yes totally options. I prefer to collect from FC references, a whole collection of outfit references, then draw my own OCs (even if I am shyte at it). But yeah TOTALLY an option to use the doll generators, I've done that in the past.

Yeah I can't draw a circle with the bottom end of a mason jar so I'm like... you can have a written description or you can draw it yourself.

 

[Jannah]

I mean people using pictures of actual people or stars to play their character. Drawn, anime or anything else is fine.

On other sites I'm on it's required that people use celebrities as FC's because of the prospect of avoiding legal issues and such. Typically this can be actors, signed models(so not just some random person you find on Instagram or something), or signed musicians(again, not just some random Youtube musician or something). I'm personally not a fan of drawn or animated FC's unless the RP itself is in some cartoon fandom universe.

I think biggest pet peeve I have with character sheets(besides having to do them at all, lol) is when people give their character some sort of sob story or dark history simply for the sake of being edgy. There's ways to do it realistically without being an edgelord.

 

[SP3CT3R]

When there's a minimum length requirement for backstory. If I want my character to have had a normal upbringing, I have to go into excruciating detail or add some random defining moment to fill it out.

 

[kevintheradioguy]

*These were from a different roleplay site*

1. Character Threads.
- You literally made an entire thread for each character. With individual posts dedicated to things like backstory, personality, appearance, powers/abilities, relationships with other characters (get into that below). It was exhausting.

2. Relationship Journals
- As near as I can tell this started with rpers that did like slice-of-life roleplays but eventually infected other genres too. The idea is that you would make an entire post where you would put the name of each played character in the roleplay. You would then make a little blurb and a "relationship percentage" for how close your character was to each of these people. So basically I would make a little blurb saying what my character thought of X and then there would be little stat bars for (Friendship/Attraction/etc.) that I had to fill out. Like 1/5 attraction , or 0/5 friendship, or whatever.

3. Character Theme Songs
I don't listen to a lot of music so this was always super pointless and basically served to show off how much music the player listened to/liked.

4. Likes/Dislikes/Hobbies
I don't mind a brief blurb or so but when I have to fill out three-five activities for each section (Likes, Dislikes, and Hobbies) it gets exhausting.

This all made me visibly cringe, mate. Ugh.

 

[forsythia]

Oh man, I stopped asking for height/weight stuff because all I got were some weird numbers, like a 5'9" female that weighed 106lbs! I ended up constantly having to provide a link to a height/weight calculator. I get that it's not a thing that everyone understands, but you figure they could get an idea based on their own height/weight or google something like an average height/weight calculator (which there are many).

oh geez that reminds me; i once saw this one person put in a cs on another site where their character was 6'9" and 110 pounds. when we pointed out that he was extremely underweight, and the person just passed it off as "lol he just doesn't eat that much," and even seemed shocked when we mentioned that his height/weight wasn't good for the character's overall health.

i've also seen characters that are supposed to be super buff, but they're still underweight for their height. heck, even if they were at a healthy weight for their height, it wouldn't match up with some of the body types that the roleplayer was going for. people not really understanding weight is honestly why i never include it.

 

[Fable]

oh geez that reminds me; i once saw this one person put in a cs on another site where their character was 6'9" and 110 pounds. when we pointed out that he was extremely underweight, and the person just passed it off as "lol he just doesn't eat that much," and even seemed shocked when we mentioned that his height/weight wasn't good for the character's overall health.

i've also seen characters that are supposed to be super buff, but they're still underweight for their height. heck, even if they were at a healthy weight for their height, it wouldn't match up with some of the body types that the roleplayer was going for. people not really understanding weight is honestly why i never include it.

Yeah, height/weight just doesn't work out. You can ask for something like height, but it's better to follow up asking for a physique rather than weight so it's more of a descriptive element of a character. That way someone can say they have a 6' character that's athletic and you can get the idea better than 6' and 200lbs of muscle. XD

 

[Idea]

So, what makes a good character sheet for you?

To answer that question, I believe it is important to dive into what the point of the character sheet is to me. Character sheets have four primary objective functions:
1.Being a center of cannon information of the character at a given point
2.Establishing the character's existence and locking in the presented aspects of the character (outside of development)
3.Creating a solid basis for developing the character
4.Allowing the GM to see whether the character is something that works in their roleplay

So, while this seems to be an unpopular opinion, I do actually think character sheets benefit entirely from being longer and mroe complete. Now of course some details are frivolous, even pointless, there's no reason to have an eye color and hair color segments for instance if you're going to have an appearance section anyway. But I think every essential aspect to the character should be covered in the CS- The personality, appearance, powers and backstory. Oh and their name/age/other basic info. A good character sheet also needs consistency, both of internal logic and of consequence. Consistency of internal logic is a matter of the CS not contradicting itself nor it's own established rules (including rules from the setting). Consistency of consequence is a matter of things having appropriate consequences and causes. Your backstory should have an effect on how your character's personality should be, and their capabilities and personality should in turn be reflected on how they look, their backstory, and so on. Basically connecting things in a "logical" manner.

One more thing to discuss is character potential. Now when I say character potential what I mean is the narrative potential the character has, what room there is to explore attached directly to the character. Where good potential character arcs could exist, what fun interactions etc... The best characters always come utterly charged with character potential.

If you have that info properly presented, you have consistency and some character potential I'd say you have a barebones decent CS. Want a GOOD CS, well, that's way more complex a question which would require me to dive into every single one of the specific elements in a CS and discuss different contexts... But three golden rules for what to think about:
-Consistency is key.
-Remember to account for what you can actually roleplay (if you're not good at making solo posts, maybe you should reconsider making a loner, if you can't come up with a plan to save your life, then making a character with great leadership skills may not be for you. If you aren't good at keeping to the right personality, then maybe using a simpler personality might work better).
-Account for the needs of the other players. What kinds of characters would add variety to the existing ones, which would compliment or help to bring out and explore the other player's characters, which characters would be best to hang out with them, etc....

Of course, whichever my rules, ultimately the most important thing is to always remember you came to roleplay what you wanted to roleplay. Things will not always go your way, but you don't have to feel pressured to make a character you don't like. Just make sure to know what you really want so that you can have things you're willing to give up and can tell them apart from what will kill the experience for you.

Do you have any pet peeves?

.

1.Contradictory or Vague Characters
Few things about a character annoy me more than what is in the CS is clearly barely related to how the character is. Contradictory characters and vague characters annoy me for different, yet eerily similar reasons of simply not providing the kind of solid information that I ask for in a CS. The contradictory CS was not thought through or not taken seriously enough to correct the contradictions thus is a flip of the coin. The vague CS is even worse, a roll of the die being generous on how the character will actually react.

I can't deny there is also an issue on my part regarding this however, which is that I simply can't trust that people have actually thought through and made things solid about their character if I don't see it written down. I expect that such CSs will then bring contrived storytelling and an abuse of convenience, and low and behold that expectation is seldom disappointed when I do encounter such a CS.

The trope that most makes me squirm among these types of characters is "they have trust issues and seem cold, but inside they have a heart of gold and would do anything for those they care about". Not only does it have just about every issue I could find in a personality tied up in a neat little package, it also seems to be a go-to for people who haven't actually thought of anything regarding the personality.


2.Messenger Characters
The problem here is less the character itself and more the player (though these characters also tend to be pretty bad). Messenger characters are characters that come charged with a message. They are either are built to convey/preach a message or are built about a particular charged topic or otherwise revole the character around what seems to be a political statement. These can range from making a character be entirely defined by their sexuality and everything about them seem to also be builtaround that, to the character the embodiment of some political system and outright trying to preach that.

While these characters are often poorly built and outright cringy, the real issue comes with the fact the players that make these characters tend to be time bombs, seemingly waiting to set off at the smallest thing and create drama with imaginary issues where everyone else was trying to have fun. In their iddle time, they spend it bragging or constantly bringing up whatever message they wanted to discuss (at least some 2/3s of the time).

Now I have some a rare exception once, though even that exception did do the iddle obsession stuff I just mentioned too.


3.Microsheets
I already discussed why I think character sheets are important and what their function is. I also tend to put hours or even days of work and thought into my CSs. On top of this I am an uber-detailed roleplayer and a planner by nature, so when I see a CS that barely has a few lines for personality and backstory that tends to tick me off a little, but I normally just try to politely ask that they expand the content a little if we're to be working together. I want to see some reciprocity for what I made, I want an enjoyable CS to look at, and perhaps most importantly, I want a CS that actually informs me and lets me create great scenarios for our characters.

4.All About the Looks
It's quite annoying when the CS barely says anything about the character and instead entirely focuses on supposedly false perceptions other people have of the character. It tells me nothing about the actual character and to make matters worse it typically doesn't mean anything to the roleplay either, because you can't enforce those false perceptions on the characters of others.

5.All-purpose pre-made OCs
The problem with characters being able to fit any story is that no story fits them. I spoke of how consistency is pretty important to me, in fact its a golden rule to pretty much all my writing. These characters on the other hand, feel disjointed from whatever they are being inserted into. The setting did not influence their creation and their presence in the story is often almost coincidental.
Then there is the concern of the OC being more important than the story to the player. If they are bringing a pre-made OC, a player probably cares more about playing the OC than whatever plot we may have come up with. So when deciding the good of the OC vs the good of the story, they are likely to go with the former.
Lastly, I just feel a little cheated when I spend so much time and effort into making a new OC for our RP, and the other person just wips out some random OC that had nothing to do with anything and they are just copy pasting it into the setting.

6.Demons and such
Really personal one, I just have a pet peeves against the usage of religious stuff in general without it being given the appropriate nuance or understanding the idea, demons in particularly annoy me because they are often used because it's edgy or because the word has just become so standardized it has lost all meaning among the general public.


7.Self-Inserts
It's too personal to the player, so they often embody general poor character design as well as traits from the all-purpose OC and the messenger character.

8.Stealing my Groove
I found recently that a big pet peeve of mine, petty though it might be, is when someone steals my spotlight. I often strive to have my character fill some unique spot on the team/group and when someone comes and makes another character for the kind of role I chose to do that with or otherwise gets in the way of me exploring my character, that can really piss me off, leave me down in the dumps, even make me consider dropping the RP altogether.




So, those are my thoughts. I do hope you find them useful. Best of luck and happy RPing!

PS: on the height/weight issue, I just don't like using those in CSs. Like, maybe height for height charts, but even then I can barely imagine what the weight of fruit would be like, much less what a fictional half-dragon martial-art trained monk would weight.
I also want to mention I have an issue with shitty characters in general of course, but it takes a lot of pushing that to make me actually irritated.

 

[MsPyromaniac]

I'm someone who, on another website, used to review people's OCs, and one slight trend that I saw which annoyed me was when they compared their original characters to cannon characters. For instance, "My character is smarter than [insert cannon character]", "My character is better at [blank] than [insert cannon character]," "My character's power is like [Insert cannon character's]," "My character looks like [Insert cannon character]," Etc. Often times with this trend I see it whenever they're essentially trying to create a better version of whatever the cannon character has. Like removing the flaws. Other times it's done out of laziness.

I also don't like "likes" and "dislikes" lists. There are many things that a character is going to like and dislike.

Character sheets with a full on story in their bio with dialogue is also what I don't like. Luckily I have not come across many.

And one more thing to add: When the creator tries so hard to not make a Mary Sue, and they keep pointing out all of these flaws. From what I've seen it's easy to spot characters like this, and they're usually very boring.

 

[Jannah]

2.Messenger Characters
The problem here is less the character itself and more the player (though these characters also tend to be pretty bad). Messenger characters are characters that come charged with a message. They are either are built to convey/preach a message or are built about a particular charged topic or otherwise revole the character around what seems to be a political statement. These can range from making a character be entirely defined by their sexuality and everything about them seem to also be builtaround that, to the character the embodiment of some political system and outright trying to preach that.

While these characters are often poorly built and outright cringy, the real issue comes with the fact the players that make these characters tend to be time bombs, seemingly waiting to set off at the smallest thing and create drama with imaginary issues where everyone else was trying to have fun. In their iddle time, they spend it bragging or constantly bringing up whatever message they wanted to discuss (at least some 2/3s of the time).

Now I have some a rare exception once, though even that exception did do the iddle obsession stuff I just mentioned too.

To be fair there's people like this in real life. There's people who actually do seem to build their entire identity around their sexuality or some cause they care strongly about. Sure, it might make for a boring RP character, but it's not inherently unrealistic. That being said, preaching is better left for one's personal writing, imo.

5.All-purpose pre-made OCs
The problem with characters being able to fit any story is that no story fits them. I spoke of how consistency is pretty important to me, in fact its a golden rule to pretty much all my writing. These characters on the other hand, feel disjointed from whatever they are being inserted into. The setting did not influence their creation and their presence in the story is often almost coincidental.
Then there is the concern of the OC being more important than the story to the player. If they are bringing a pre-made OC, a player probably cares more about playing the OC than whatever plot we may have come up with. So when deciding the good of the OC vs the good of the story, they are likely to go with the former.
Lastly, I just feel a little cheated when I spend so much time and effort into making a new OC for our RP, and the other person just wips out some random OC that had nothing to do with anything and they are just copy pasting it into the setting.

Omg, yes. One reason why I'll rarely use the same character twice(and if I do then I'll modify them so much that they're barely the same character). I get the impression that people using the same one or two characters for every RP either lack creativity or are simply just lazy. If somebody is too lazy to create a new character then clearly they're bound to be too lazy to put effort into plot development and even posts.

6.Demons and such
Really personal one, I just have a pet peeves against the usage of religious stuff in general without it being given the appropriate nuance or understanding the idea, demons in particularly annoy me because they are often used because it's edgy or because the word has just become so standardized it has lost all meaning among the general public.

As a Christian this one peeves me too. Like, if you're going to use religious themes, fine. Just be respectful with them and do proper research. A lot of the portrayals of demons, angels, etc. use a lot of incorrect tropes.

 

[pasta]

1. i don’t particularly enjoy writing detailed biographies or personalities in 1x1s. i prefer to use bullets for the bios and traits for the personality.
2. it’s also extremely annoying with the body weight to height ratio. that’s why i usually base my characters weight and height off of the fc.
3. im not a fan of animal character sheets but i suppose it’s bc im not interested in that type of stuff.
4. Dislikes/likes — all that jazz. i find those to be extremely difficult to do. my mind goes blank.

Faceclaims or photos of a random korean boy.

It angers me. It really angers me because it is sooo creepy.
Seriously, if you do this, I don't feel ashamed by calling you a creep. I would use a stronger word but that may be biased.

so using random Instagram accounts or using actual famous people/models? usually, rpers don’t use random people, they tend to go for well known singers/actors/models. i think it’s weird if someone uses random people but they generally don’t, thankfully. i really don’t think people should take from private instagrams.