Advice/Help Character Sheets: How can I write a good personality, biography, and appearance? How can I improve my writing?

[nios]

Writing the biography, appearance, and personality of a character has always been my weakest strength. My inability to write these have cost me roles in groups and it makes me feel like a terrible writer.

I was wondering how you guys write super amazing descriptions and back stories? What are key points that should be included? Is there some template I didn't know about? Please share your secrets!

 

[Crayons]

Can you show an example of one of your CSes to help us advise you?

 

[rae2nerdy]

I find the best way to improve writing for characters is to base them on people you know very well IRL or fictional characters your familiar with.

Now obviously don’t copy the person/character exactly but think of the main points of their backstory and tailor it to the setting.

Ex. Annie is the youngest of three girls. Her mother has been divorced three times, something that scandalizes the nobility and negatively effects Annie’s social standing.

A small example of tailoring a real life backstory into a fictional setting.

For personality you can pretty much copy it exactly as it will help you determine how your character will interact in any given situation.

I can’t really help you with descriptions. I tend to find them largely superfluous. I feel like keeping it short and vague let’s your partner use their imagination.

 

[rosiphaura]

I really hope this can help some of you. Do you guys know Jenna Moreci? She's a self-published author and tends to make helpful videos about writing, I hope you guys find this helpful and continue watching her ^^

 

[ashwynne]

Frankly, I'm not a fan of the concept of character sheets in general (as they tend to become either restrictive or obsolete over the course of a roleplay) but they can be useful if you're trying to improve your ability to build a character in general.

When it comes to character appearance descriptions:
Try this exercise. Take someone you know (family member, friend, etc.) and try painting a written picture of what they look like. Feel free to use a picture of them to help you along. Start with whatever part is easiest for you. For me, that's usually the face. Do they have a heart shaped face? Angular? Prominent cheekbones? Dimple? Freckles? What colour are their eyes? Do they have a contagious smile or a unique type of laugh? (and don't forget--having a normal smile and a forgettable laugh is JUST as valid as a 'unique' trait, and often more believable). Move on to hair--colour, style, length, texture. Move on to body shape: hourglass figure? tall and willowy? average build? And finally details: any birthmarks? scars? other defining marks?

Do that with people you know and then read the description back to someone else who knows that person. Tell them you're practicing describing people and ask them to guess who it is based on what you've written up. If they get it, great! If not, tell them who you were trying to portray and ask them if you missed something that might have given them a clearer picture of the person you meant.

For biography and personality I tend to start with biography first. I start by envisioning what my character was like as a child and then work me way up through there, jotting down the key events that shaped their life. Then I take those key events and flesh them out with details--the who, what, when where, why's of every incident.

I find that establishing a biography first makes it easier to figure out a personality. I'll look at the events my character has experienced in their life and then pick out the character traits that I feel would likely develop as a result of those events. So, for example, I may pick three positive traits (optimistic - ambitious - hard working) and three negative traits (unintelligent - forgetful - impulsive) and then expand on them. I'll make each individual trait a header for a paragraph that describes how that trait informs their behaviour.
(ie. Blahblah approaches life with the firm belief fixed in her head that the glass is always half full. No matter how unlikely or difficult the situation, she will always see the positive in it--or the chance for something positive to come out of it. This can rub people the wrong way depending on the situation, but it also means she is difficult to knock down emotionally).
So on and so forth until every trait has been expanded on.

Personally, I believe balancing every positive trait with a negative one is really important for a well rounded character. And not a fake negative trait either, like "so attractive that everyone always bothers them" lol.

From there it's just repetition. The more you practice, the better at it you'll get. Plus, most people have a basic idea of how they want their character to behave (a jokester, serious student, hopeless romantic, etc.) so you're always getting to work with a base concept. The trick is to take that base and build it into something dynamic and beautiful c:

 

[Gowi]

Characterization and Backstory correlate to one-another, so keep that in mind. With appearance, you don't need flowery or descriptive text to get the point across. Describing someone physically tends to go into their attire, physique, complexion, and tone. Sometimes aura and posture are added here to give a better idea of a description.

The things ashwynne suggested are also good to keep in mind. Start from a personality and work backwards or start from a character's backstory and work forward, bridging where you feel you need to.

 

[Cassie Lang]

Writing personalities is a pain, at least for me. It's why I've taken to letting my players write "short personalities"; a few descriptive sentences and/or adjectives to help describe their character. That being said, not everyone works like me, and so I would suggest finding a few adjectives that pertain to the concept you happen to have in mind and use them to help flesh out their personality in length.

As for appearances, I mainly focus on smaller details (such as unkempt hair or weathered skin) more than the bigger details (e.g. they have brown hair or wear a leather jacket). Given GMs tend to ask a picture on top of an appearance section, it's better to focus on what makes them stand out rather than the direct and the obvious, especially if you can manage a nice descriptive flow with your wording.

Backgrounds/biographies, on the other hand, are more of a how to get from point A to point B. Think of an outline, like a rough draft for a speech so that you narrow down the key components. Figure out the main points of their "life" and go from there by "filling in the gaps", i.e. explaining how they/your character went from, say, a horrible household with drunken, abusive parents to flipping burgers and living in a crappy apartment to going into law school and becoming an official lawyer.

 

[nios]

Hello! Life has been busy but I've read through everyone's responses and this has given me a lot of insight on what to do the next time I tried out for a group. I've never thought of basing my character's personality or appearance off of someone I know. Seriously haha. Creating a person from scratch is such a pain. Biographies will still be a challenge but I'll follow everyone's advice!
As for sharing my CS's, I can PM them if you want.

 

[Crayons]

Sure I don't mind looking one over in PM

Here's a thing: In World of Darkness tabletop RPGS, they have a list of character archetypes - super basic categories that give an idea of how your character operates and what is important to them. The player chooses one archetype for their nature (what they are really like) and one for their demeanor (how they appear to others). It might be a good starting point if you're stuck for different types of characters to make. Then you can expand upon it yourself by imagining around it. List of Archetypes

 

[Idea]

I'm a little late to the party, but I had to organize my thoughts on this matter, so here goes.


General Tips
1.Golden rule of consistency
This is what I found to be perhaps the most important rule in writing and roleplaying, consistency, as not only is it useful and important, it applies to pretty much to every aspect of it, plot, setting and, of course, character.

Consistency comes in two flavors, the first being consistency of internal logic. While things don't necessarily need to make sense by our world's rules, anything that is established as a rule or pattern in the story/world/etc... has to be kept consistent with itself and our intuition about it. Applying it to the character, a very greedy character that is stingy with money isn't going to start randomly giving away their life savings for no reason.

Second is consistency of consequence. The idea assumes cause and effect, if something happens then something caused it and in turn, it will cause other things to happen. All of those causes and effects must be able to coexist, and still follow the first point about remaining consistent to established rules.

Consistency not only helps write more interesting, believeable, complex non-contraditory characters, it is also a useful tool from a creative standpoint. Let's take the previous example, of that greedy person, and use consistency of consequence, in this case looking at causes. Why is the character so greedy? Maybe they were never a very talented person, they could do ok in most things, but overall nothing really made them stand out at all, until they discovered how good they were with numbers with just a little bit of effort. People were indeed impressed with this, and praised them, leading to them working harder and focusing more on their studies, at the detriment of the time spent with their friends. Their friends feel the distance growing between them, some feel intimidated, others jealous. Because of the praise the kid doesn't realize why their friends are acting like that, the adult support the studies and say their friends weren't real friends, unknowingly making the problem worse. As numbers continue to replace friendships, the the kid ends up becoming more and more obsessed with them and something they came to associate with them: money. They are stingy and always looking for bargains, they attract attention, but their expectation that those that want to be their friend will stick with them even if they don't give them attention drives them away, until finally they are alone with nothing but the money and their career to comfort them, the only thing they feel they can trust.

It took me maybe a couple of minutes to come up with that backstory, because it was just a chain of believable events that lead to the current result. And assuming I did my job well, which enhance one's perception of that result as well.

2.Characters are not real people
A second point to make on this matter is that characters are not real. Forgetting this will result in pretty messy characters for one of two reasons, either you forget that you to need to MAKE the character seem real yourself, or you forget that there's a limit to the immitation and end accidentally making a caricature of a person, instead of purposefully.

Characters not being real means that you have to put in the effort to humanize them. By default a character is actually nothing, so what you put into the character is what they become. You want a character to be deep? Then you need to actually create that depth. You want them to be perceived as deep? Then you need to hint at the existence of that depth. Same with reality, except that with reality you can't actually make the character be that, real. But, you can hint at a character's realness by using elements that ground the character.

If one problem comes from putting too little into a character, then the other comes from putting in too much. When you straight up try to actually make the character a real person, you forget one simple thing: You don't even fully know a single real person in real life. Heck, you don't even know yourself fully! A real person, built up from more factors than we can imagine, second after second worth of memories and experience for years on end, a baselines personality, genetics, everything in the infinite depth and complexity of reality, how can one reckon they craft all of that on a weekend inside their own, limited mind? They can't. So when you try to, what you get a character full of your outlook on other people, with an idea of what is 'real' but fails at actually being- and in process, often jeopardizing the character's function in the narrative in the name of "realism", or excusing poor characterization by suggestion "I know/saw/heard of" someone like this.

Character's not being real people, ever, ultimately means one thing. Showing that a character has some reality is important, but this shouldn't come at the expense of the character functioning well within the narrative. By the same token, it also means that you have some extent of creative license for characters inherently, to make their design more fun and interesting and work better with the story or roleplay, even if it comes at the expense of realism.

The priority is the narrative. Sometimes realism helps the narrative and thus it’s good. But if they are in conflict, then the narrative is more important, so you don’t need to be bound by realism.

3.Tropes are not your enemy
One of the biggest worries people have is that their character will seem “cliche”. Now, a character being cliche is a problem for sure, but there is a distinction between cliche and a trope. A trope is a pattern in the story or characters which is seen many times over. There’s nothing wrong with that, because there’s always a way to put a new spin on things, and just because something has been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done well again or that your work is worth less by there being something else that’s similar to it out there.
A cliche, on the other hand, is a trope being used unironically for the sake of using the trope itself. A cliché is meaningless and serves to check a box or just to lazily write a character without putting thought into it, or any of those other manners which boil down to: the character doesn’t happen to fall into tropes, but nothing is done with the meta knowledge either.
A character being a trope isn’t a bad thing- as long as it is still a good character, by itself. And in fact, the character being a trope can be used to get inspiration for details or their development, or to subvert expectations or anything of the sort.

Besides, everyone wants to be original, but every idea has been done in some way or the other. Trying to escape falling into some trope is just defined the gaps in your awareness, this is, if you think you're doing something entirely original the odds are you just haven't yet seen the other stories with it, rather than they not existing. But the others might have. This doesn't mean, however, that you can't be original. Every broad idea has been done before, but you can still do the same ideas in a different way, your own way, your own spin on what has already been done. You can take new angles to explore the depths of the idea.

In short, don't let your focus be on avoiding tropes, instead whatever ideas you do have, try exploring them in depth and see where they can take you. Someone else doing it is just background noise that will be drowned out by the ochestra of intelligent character exploration.

4. Share the spotlight
Whether you're in a group or a 1x1, you're always working with other people, who have their own characters. This represents an opportunity to work together with them, by making space for them in your spotlight. Other players will appreciate your character more if your character can contribute without stepping on their toes, this by creating a character which complements others and lets them complete you as well. If their characters are great cooks, then maybe your character doesn't have to be one, and could instead be great at, say, obtaining food such as by hunting. If others are making very shy characters, then making a more energetic and social character to help bring their characters out of their shells could be pretty great. If someone has a group in their backstory they hate, your character could be part of that group, thus helping them not only express that element of that character, but potentially start a character arc between the two. It doesn't even necessarily need to be a game of opposites though. What if someone has a very competitive character? Your character could be just as competitive and become their rival.

Sharing the spotlight makes interactions with other characters more interesting, and helps other players feel like their presence is more appreciated, not only because you are playing off of their character, but also because it shows that you went out of your way to learn about what they worked on and made a genuine effort to understand and support it. Furthermore, this even helps you develop a better character, as it can help you decide where to create gaps for your character, flaws and handicaps.

Which leads me to....

Personality

5.Serious Flaws
When it comes to character weaknesses, they can generally be divided into two types: Handicaps and character flaws. Confusion between the two happens more often than ideal, so I'll make the distinction between the two. A "handicap" is a lack of ability, a "character flaw" is a negative behavioral tendency. A handicap deals with exterior elements of the character, it and tends to be relative (it compares what the character should or could have with what they actually do), whereas a character flaw deals with the character's core personality. Things like being greedy, vengeful or antisocial are character flaws. Lacking skill in something, having lost a limb, not having a lot of money, having an urge to kill due to their species, having some kind of mental disorder, on the other hand, are all handicaps, they aren't part of the personality. Granted, things like the mental disorder and intelligence both fall into a bit of a grey zone, which will depend on how integrated with the person's behavior they are.

When it comes to character growth, a handicap (if it can be solved) needs a training montage or arc, where a flaw needs emotional impact or time and experience for a character to internally change. That said, I would add two more categories to this. The first would be "pseudo-flaws", flaws which are only 'flaws' because someone else exploits them, the "they are too kind" type flaws. Sometimes they blend in with regular flaws like the "being too trusting" "flaw", which is almost being naive, except that a naive character tends to drag themselves into trouble because of their lack of comprehension of the world around them, while the 'too trusting' character doesn't cause trouble at all, they just get tricked more easily.

The second other category I would add is a "serious flaw". I would define this one as a "Negative behavioral pattern or tendency that is universal, significant, and which could reasonably cause the character to fail at an important moment". A serious flaws is 'universal' because it doesn't just randomly show up, it's either always there or has some very concrete triggers. A serious flaw is 'significant' because it fundamentally changes the character's overall behavioral tendencies and does so in a manner that's rather visible. Lasty, a serious flaw 'c ould reasonably cause the character to fail at an important moment', because that is the entire point of a serious flaw. Whether exploited by others or better yet, by your own doing, a serious flaw creates stakes in the story by legitimizing a reason why not only could your character actually fail at achieving their goals, but it could be entirely their fault.

A mixture of qualities and handicaps is a character with a perfect personality even though they lack in skill, they can be fun for a simpler story if done well, and are extremely boring in any other case. A mixture of non-serious flaws and qualities is a character that only pretends to be flawed, while the only reason why they aren't doing everything absolutely flawlessly is because of the player's limited capacity to make them even more perfect. A character with only pseudo flaws and qualities is a mary sue among mary sues. On any of these, you can't build a character arc. One doesn't have character flaws to begin with, the other has such insiginificant flaws that solving them doesn't amount to much, and the last one actually becomes a worse person when they try to solve those 'flaws'.

A serious flaw gives nuance to a character and potential for their development. It makes characters more dynamic and interesting, and ups the tension as they clash with the values or perception of others, and as their personal tendencies jeopardize the goals.

6.Commit to things
When I review characters for my RPs one case I see often and deeply saddens me is how characters can have these interesting traits or bits of backstory the players chicken out of at the last moment. A character that has temper issues, but it shows when you push it really, really far- so you know, just a normal person without those issues in the end. Or a character that has these sadistic urges, but only against evil people that totally deserve it.

There are reasonable ways of doing all of these, and they can make great characters, however the most common scenario is that the player is doing is just an excuse not to have to commit to their decisions about the character. A way that, without strictly breaking character, they can say "oh but my character isn't always like that" to avoid the character doing something inconvenient. Another common cause is the player hasn't really thought that much about the personality or is to used to coming up with it as they RP, so they just fill space with things that are essentially meaningless. This reflects on how they end up playing the characters, from my experience.

7.Motivations are key to interest
Much like a story, a character needs to have direction, somewhere which they are headed, though it doesn't necessarily mean they can't stray off course. Giving a character solid motivations will not only help you decide what they should or would do, but also keep the character interesting and create fuel for tension and conflict.

I wanted to say more about this one, but that's pretty much all there is to it.

8.Layers, not contradictions
Some say the human condition is contradicting. I disagree with this notion. Human beings are not contradicting in the slightest, but are extremely complex, and like the flap of a butterfly's wings causing a hurricane, such complex personalities can have very different outputs for slight changes in circumstances. Characters don't have the luxury of this level of complexity because as I mentioned earlier we are not able to conceive of it in our minds, it's too complex to envision. However, your character CAN be complex, but if that complexity is just contradiction it isn't complexity at all, it is poor writing.

There are many ways of creating character complexity, after all it's just a matter of the number of elements in a character's personality and how they play off one another, but I'd like to focus on two for now, the two which may seem like contradictions but actually aren't. The first method is a method of circumstance. For any set of circumstances, the character behaves in one way, but in certain circumstances they behave in another way entirely. These circumstances are well-defined and concrete though, making the change predictable to an extent. maybe your character is an extremely calm person, but when it comes to someone dissing their parents they will know hell!!!!!

The other method, which I personally prefer, is to have conflicting desires without necessarily being contradictory, because they are not the same trait. A character may wish for both peace and to take vengeance, and thus find conflict in themselves over the fact that these goals may not align at all. A character may be lazy but protactive of others, thus finally putting in an effort over their laziness but when and only when they find the people they care about are in serious danger.

What doesn't work is, say, a character being very honorable, but also playing dirty if they feel like they would loose otherwise, or a character that has temper issues but is also very patient etc.... One trait either eliminates the other, or the character flip flops between the two, making them unreasonable to work with, and become quite contrived.

Backstory
9.Keep it normal (except when it isn't) and personal
It's a common temptation to make these over the top victimization backstories for one's character. There seems to be this notion going around that your character will not get taken seriously if their backstory doesn't have enough tragedy, like there is some context for who can be the most miserable and hurt by the world before the story even begins.

However it's not just that the character suffers- the suffering seems to be over the top, as does the successes of the character. There's some person who killed their entirely village, an organization seeking to oppress and control people, something of that sort, and where the character succeeds they have to be extraordinary in that field, they learn martial arts (unspecified) in the blink of an eye, they discover something nobody else had even thought of before, and again, this is all before the story even starts. The parents are always dead, the character is always the only one that fights against discrimnation, if the character screws up at anything the entire world seems to turn against them.

Needless to say, this isn't an average person's life. While it is true that not every character, heck, most characters certainly don't have to abide by any "normal", it's both predictable and perplexing just how few actually have any sense of normalcy. A few odd or extraordinary things in a backstory make it curious and can really help us relate to those odd experiences through the lens of the more mundane ones. A backstory entirely comprised of the extraordinary comes off as cartoony and like you're trying too hard to make him a special snowflake, which ironically makes the character more commonplace. It fails to communicate what's interesting about the character, or to dive into those things because it's so over the top that one could not possibly relate to it or take it that seriously.

That said, extraordinary events can be done well, and actually explored, but they are a gimmick or a plot device most of the time, hardly the real point. Anything you can do for a character with them, you can often do better on a smaller and more intimate scale. There's a reason we may care more about a character who's kept a stuffed animal since they were a toddler, keeping it clean and hiding it, but always staying with them, even as it begins to deteriorate with time, and then is lost, sending the character in a frenzy to look for them and a whole new feeling of lonelinesss....than we can care about someone who's entire life crumbled after their parents were murdered by an evil oppressor. That reason is that we get to connect to the character's emotions and distress, whereas the other tends to be treated like a checkmark.

Whether going into extraordinary or mudane events, the most important thing is to show the effect it has on the character, their life and their decisions. The character is your focus, or at least, it should be.

10.Don't waste potential without payoff
Chekhov's gun. If there is a gun in the wall in the first act, it has to be shot by the third act. I'm sure you've heard of it.

This general principle applies well enough to backstories, except rather than being self-contained, your pay-off can come in any part of your character or even create set ups (that you actually plan to use). If you include something in the backstory, it shouldn't be futile. If possible, even transition moments should have some meaning.

Now, one's first instinct to this might be "well, then I'll just cut off the parts that don't already have weight/purpose/meaning". That's a negative though, as if you'll do, you'll fall into the trappings of what I mentioned in point 9 all too easily. Instead, try to think of how each element you do put in your backstory affects how your character comes to be in the end.

11.ACT!
As a last point on backstory, I'll keep it simple: Don't make your character passive. Whether it be by being a victim, or getting pulled away by circumstances, these backstories don't really create dynamic characters 90% of the time. A character whose backstory is directed by their actions and choices, and the consequences of those, rather than by being strung along, is a character who has motivations to resolve, real demons of their past to come to terms with, and just make for more interesting backstories overall. On the other hand, a passive character in the backstory tends to be likewise passive in the present, and depending on the degree they may come off as whiny, Mary Sues or worse because the character is treated as guiltless throughout, at least in the writer's mind. Even if others may blame them, the way the passive backstory is written always suggests it wasn't actually the character's fault. What does the character have to learn if they never made a mistake that wasn't forced on them in the first place?

Appearance

Being honest, I don't have much to say here at all. I usually like to use faceclaims and don't bother with a description of characters until I get to the IC, unless there's some extra detail I want to add, or something very specific I want to make stand out.

So I suppose that's what I would recommend. Not necessarily doing what I do, but delivering on the most important parts of the description, what's relevant for others to know, and what stands out about the character.


Well, that'll be all. I do hope this helps (though I am quite late to the party), if not you then others who might read it. Best of luck and happy RPing!

Oh, and avoid using subjective descriptors like "beautiful" or "terrifying", as those won't necessarily be true for every character.

 

[Archie]

For characters, write the history before anything else. People are made by their past. Then, everything becomes easy.

For writing, keep in mind the goal is to captivate your audience and keep their attention. The most important thing is a concise balance between show and tell. “Mike knew that this had to happen, that the only way to get out of this situation was what he was planning. He liked the idea a lot and decided to do it” is bad, but so is “Mike scratched his head, then cocked to the side. He raised his eyebrows, then sighed, staring directly into Morgana’s eyes”. #1 is pointless, because people make inferences. #2 is annoying, because nobody likes many actions happening in one sentence, and having to figure out everything with no explanation. Both will cause RP partners to be frustrated and skip over your work.

Much better is “Mike scratched his head as he pondered how the the group could escape. He felt despair overcome him as he sighed, his head turned downward”

In general, the cooler something is, the more time you should dedicate to writing about it. If you know the exact movements involved, you can literally write paragraphs about tornado kicks and backflips and people will still find the post interesting. You can write essays on the cosmology of the dragon summoning spell you’re casting, or the human sacrifice in which the heart is eaten by a golden alpaca, and people will read the whole thing. However, if you write just four lines about getting up and stretching, people will stop paying attention.

The best barometer is just how you feel. I’ve found it impossible to finish a book if there was nothing going on. You should write posts to the extent that they excite you and create an emotional reaction in you. You should stop elaborating when further details do nothing for you. Chances are, they do nothing for anyone else either. If all possible actions in the post bore you (thisnis the very definition of writer’s block), then it’s time to push the plot forward, which you can do, GM or not. This is what I call a “breakthrough” in the RP, which is done by having your character try to move the group to a new location or set peoples minds on a different task.

Ultimately, we’re not writing poetry here. The most important thing both for RPs (and pop fiction books with the intent to appeal to a broad audience) is to grab attention and keep it.

 

[Northless]

I kinda hate writting backstories as well, but I learnt I also have somewhat of a system. I write the general stuff (Age, occupation, where they live) to give context, then I jump at them acting in a way you don't expect them to. Like, "They had a happy family, but given what his dad did, he couldn't help but feel... off. Around a year after, he left without a trace."

Tell a history, and show us how this person is given how they act, how they react to what happens around them, specially if it's out of the norm somewhat. I'm a psychology nerd, though, so I love explaining this kind of stuff. On the matter of appearance I don't think I can help much... I mostly read other people's posts and try to not write much less/too much more than them.

Best of luck tho!

 

[nios]

oh jeez i'm reading everyone's advice as i'm making a character sheet.
so i'm going to try writing the biography before the personality-- i have an idea of what i want to write