Advice/Help How the bean dip do you describe a personality?

[FoolsErin]

So I generally ditch an interest check if the character sheet includes a personality section. I usually say it’s because I’m not the best at describing characters, plus I prefer revealing personality slowly through the way I write them.

This is an understatement, and kind of a lie. In reality, when I attempt describing a personality, I don’t know where to start and am majorly concerned I’m doing it all wrong. Plus, whenever I backspace an optional personality section on a character sheet, I feel like I’m lazy and not trying.

How does one describe a personality? Do you utilize adjectives like kind, rude, and all that business? Do you describe how they act and how they behave? Do you mash the two together? If it’s the first or third option, where do I find adjectives to describe a personality? If it’s two, how much detail do you go into? Am I even offering valid options on how to describe a personality?

In the past I’ve just kinda tried to wing it with option two, and have summarized the personality sections of wikia pages when it’s a canon character. Is this a good way to do it....or...? Am I worrying too much about this?

 

[rae2nerdy]

So something I think might help you is to simply use your real life friends / family members for personality. So (as an example) make a character and give them your mom's personality. If you ever get stuck when writing just ask yourself, "How would mom act in this situation?"

Then when it comes to the personality section in the CS just describe your mom's personality. Pretend your talking to a stranger and you are trying to describe your mom to them.

 

[Sludge]

So I generally ditch an interest check if the character sheet includes a personality section.

Woah. That's one really elaborate hook for a thread.

I cannot understate how useful I find it to start developing a character by summarizing who they are in one or two sentences. It makes it so much easier to write every aspect of your cs, especially their personality.

Aside from that, you proabaly have some idea of the kind of a character archetype you want, at least most of the time, right? Otherwise there must be something unusual that makes them special. Focus on those things.

Evil but likes cats.
Friendly but has no friends.
A lethargic optimist.

Start there and it will write itself.

You can expand on it by talking about the character's goal and what stands in their way.

A lot of people like to throw in a few quirks / morals / tastes / way of talking or moving. Imo, these things are redundant unless kept to one or two key points.

One or two short paragraphs are enough, even if the background is a three page eassay. The goal is to just give a general idea of who they are and let others plan around that.

 

[FoolsErin]

Woah. That's one really elaborate hook for a thread.

I cannot understate how useful I find it to start developing a character by summarizing who they are in one or two sentences. It makes it so much easier to write every aspect of your cs, especially their personality.

Aside from that, you proabaly have some idea of the kind of a character archetype you want, at least most of the time, right? Otherwise there must be something unusual that makes them special. Focus on those things.

Evil but likes cats.
Friendly but has no friends.
A lethargic optimist.

Start there and it will write itself.

You can expand on it by talking about the character's goal and what stands in their way.

A lot of people like to throw in a few quirks / morals / tastes / way of talking or moving. Imo, these things are redundant unless kept to one or two key points.

One or two short paragraphs are enough, even if the background is a three page eassay. The goal is to just give a general idea of who they are and let others plan around that.

Well I guess my essay-writing skills pay off when I gotta write an opening sentence, huh?

 

[Idea]

This kind of reminds me that at one point I promised to write a thread how to make personalities, guess I forgot. Oops... maybe I'll do that at some point. For now, I'll try to stick with the essentials.

.
1.What Makes for A Good Personality (essential boil down)
I personally cannot work when people don't describe personalities. Among the reasons, a personality is the most defining element of a character for me, both in terms of who they are, but also what can be done with them. You need a personality, even if it isn't stated in the character sheet, for actual character development- otherwise it's just adding stuff and in the meantime you seriously risk making the character out of what's convenient for the plot.

The outline formed here is that a personality is what defines the character as a person, specifically their beliefs and their tendencial behavior. That being the essence of a personality, the better your personality defines who your character is, generally the better your personality. The second aspect is quality in who that person is. This is the form and the content of personalities: A character sheet's personality being concrete, expressive and well-defined makes for a good personality in form. A character sheet's personality which contains a character that fits well into the roleplay, has appropriate flaws and is humanized by the extra aspects of their personality generally means a good personality in content.

Useful facts about personalities:
*A personality is like a picture of your character's behavior at the start of the roleplay. They can start changing as early as the second post, if there is a reason that organically justifies it. This change is called "character development".
*A personality only defines the tendencies of your character, with very rare exceptions- anyone pushed far enough can snap in some way.
*The distinction between a "flat" personality and a "rich personality" has little to do with the amount of traits, or the darkness of the traits. It has to do with how well and how in depth you explore that which a character has. Even a character that is just a regular cheerful ball of energy can be quite a complete and complex character if you just dig deep enough into the why, how and after of the personality.

2.How to Describe Personalities
To answer your question more directly, you are supposed to describe how a character thinks and how a character acts. Both of these involve using adjectives and traits, the only other way would be by providing examples alone, and that would kind of defeat the point.

Personally as a heavily detailed-oriented player with a propension for planning, I heavily describe my character's personalities.

Some things that are not describing a personality:
*describing how other people view them
*describing how the character looks
*describing a character's skills (intelligence is a bit of a gray area, try not to abuse it. Skill's can be included in the personality section though, but as a link, consequence or justification for an actual aspect of the personality and not on their own)
*incidental elements (things that happen so rarely they become irrelevant [unless the point is to emphasize how rare they are])
*contradictory elements (people are complex, not contraditory. While our behavior may seem contraditory, ultimately that's only when the right variables are changed to make it, so for the same circumstances a person acts in the same way. Even if this wasn't the case, saying that the character can be either way is the same as saying literally nothing)
*Things that aren't actually traits, but people for some reason think are traits like "sarcastic" (sarcasm is a manner of speech, not a personality trait. If you see this, know it's wrong, but you can generally take it as meaning "sassy")


3.How to Come Up with Personalities

I have two main sources for this. The first source is the main central concept for the character. I always start characters by building from a central idea for the character, an innitial concept. This concept may include a certain kind of personality, in which case half the work comes done...if not, then I will image whatever I conceived in different scenarios of interactions, low times, epic climaxes, whatever I can think of, and then process how the character acted in those imaged scenarios into a personality (all I need do is essentially try to summarize their kind of behavior).

The second source is my golden rule of consistency. You want both consistency of internal logic and consistency of consequence. Internal logic is simply the non-contradiction of facts. Let's say that, for instance, your character is known as someone who never harms a fly and is in harmony with living things...your personality then will probably be more pacifistic and less trigger-happy murder hobo. The fact they value life and peace should not be rescinded, less you make what you said in both times worthless. The non-contradiction can provide content because while it isn't universally the case, when someone definitely isn't in a certain way, they tend closer to it's opposite, or something else that contrasts it. A character that doesn't like being alone probably has some reason for it, and that reason can make up part of their personality or at least you can make out that they then prefer to be in the company of others.
Consistency of consequence is that things have cause and effect appropriate for their internal logic. if your character experienced a horrible trauma in the past, then this trauma ought to have had a lasting impact in their worldview. Conversely, most of a character's personality implies a certain kind of past. This doesn't imply a major event for each aspect of the character, but it does play something about their past informed their current worldview and behavior. So, for any given part of the character, you can ask yourself "how does this affect how the character sees themselves and the world around them? How does it affect how they behave?".

There is also a third aspect, which I mainly draw from to fit in the last bits of personality that I missed with the earlier methods. This source is narrative usefulness. For instance, I often make my characters curious, because that is an extremely useful trait for them to have. It allows me to ask questions, explore things and try to interact with characters a character wouldn't normally bother with, especially if they are cautious.


My thoughts aren't too well organized on this, but I do hope it is useful to you. Best of luck and happy RPing! (and if you ever need help coming up with the stuff, rounding it up or just want feedback, feel free to PM me )

 

[Nue]

Okay, so I relate massively because I have moments where I know exactly what a character is like and how to play them... buuuuuut I have no idea how to actually sum them up. So sometimes if I'm really struggling, I use this method (note: I use this more for like, story characters, than one-off ocs I'll only use in one roleplay, but it might be helpful)

MBTI tests. They're personality tests that usually give pretty in-depth results, and, helpfully, a lot of them have bullet points for their strengths and weaknesses and such. I don't swear by MBTI tests as the most accurate thing in the world in real life, buuuut they are particularly helpful for developing characters. Just go through the test and think about what you think that particular character would answer, and then by the end of it, you'll be directed to a page that lists off traits of people with personalities like that. I often find this helps me be like "ahhh yeah that was the word I was looking for" or "now that I think about it yeah, that's exactly how I would describe x", stuff like that.

Or, you could just skip to the page that lists all the MBTI types, pick the one you think is closest to them and read the page, if you're in a hurry lol.

I don't know if it'll help you, but it usually helps me!

 

[Bone2pick]

In my experience, a carefully considered and thorough backstory speaks volumes about a character's personality. And it often does so more accurately than what's written in the character's personality section.

 

[Wandering Seraph]

I personally really dislike the trend of allowing people to skip out on the personality section of a character sheet. Some RPs don't even include in anymore and it's...yikes. It can definitely seem daunting to lay out a character's personality accurately in just a paragraph or so, but it's a really good skill to have and makes for (in my experience) better, more organized RPs.

So!

First are foremost, a backstory shapes a personality. If I'm really stuck with a personality, I'll write the backstory first and return to the personality. Sure, there are some traits that you might be born with, but a lot of how someone behaves comes from their childhood and their life experiences.

Things to Include:
- How they view the world
- How they usually approach people
- How they move, how they tend to react
- Habits they have
- Fears/phobias they have
- Skills/talents IF they affect/relate to an aspect of the personality

Questions to Ask Yourself
- How physical/touchy is this character?
- How easily trusting is this character?
- Does this character make friends easily?
- How does this character feel about children/animals?
- How polite is this character? Do they understand etiquette? Do they understand it and simply disregard it?
- What scares this character? Is it rational? Do they have any strange or irrational fears?

Things to Avoid:

- "They're random!", "They have a random sense of humor" or any iteration thereof.
This is an easy cop-out and "lolsorandom" characters aren't funny anymore. They never were, but now they're in a league of their own.

- How other people view them or feel about them (can be useful in moderation, but be careful).
This comes across as forceful and controlling when done incorrectly. Telling other people how to feel about your character isn't good practice and it doesn't actually say much about your character as a person.

- Describing their beauty, the beauty of their movement, etc, etc.
Physical description is for the appearance section. I think it's perfectly fine to include how a character moves/what informs their movements in the personality section, but shoehorning beauty into the personality section is annoying.

- "Mysterious", "they can seem mysterious", etc.
Please just don't. It's lazy and pointlessly edgy. If you want to write an amnesiac, someone with a shadowy past, or would rather reveal a character's backstory slowly, work with that in the backstory section of your character sheet. Mysterious isn't a personality trait.

- "Cute, but mean when they want to be", "sweet to people they like, really scary when they want to be", etc
This is a huge trope and frustrating partially because it will make your character seem like a huge brat and partially because it's lazy writing. Most people can be mean when they want to be. Most people are kind to their friends, but can be scary when angry. This is barely a personality trait.

Best of luck!