Character Development

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 12:28 pm

I love making characters as well. I have RPG books stuffed with PC's and NPC's that will never be used. However, I'm all about the process of discovery, and if I know everything about my characters going in, I'm going to get bored with them really quickly.

As far as needing the backstory and not having it...well, that's when you just make it up! Joyful, spontaneous creation, man! Your readers are never going to know that you didn't know this stuff all along.

Jim North · Post by **Jim North** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 4:27 pm

They will when you mess up and contradict something from earlier in the story. This is especially important when you're running an RPG campaign, neh?

And you get bored with characters you know really well? That's weird . . . glad that's never happened to me. I like going back through and/or working with my oldest characters. It's like slipping on a old and worn by extremely comfortable t-shirt.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 5:01 pm

Maritza wrote:
Joel Fagin wrote:
Maritza wrote: You can't prove anything
Hey, if you ever holiday in Australia, could you be sure to give me plenty of warning so I can go.. Oh, I dunno... anywhere else.

- Joel Fagin
I thought the whole Australia was "anywhere else"

Ouch...

Joel Fagin · Post by **Joel Fagin** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 5:30 pm

mcDuffies wrote:
Maritza wrote:I thought the whole Australia was "anywhere else"
Ouch...

Oh, that's fine. We like people to have that impression. After all, "When everyone discovers the best place on Earth, it ceases to be the best place on Earth."*

- Joel Fagin

* The Sage, Groo the Wanderer, by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier

HeDanny · Post by **HeDanny** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 7:10 pm

AUstralia has so many nick names and ways of referencing it, Someone could write a book.

Some personal favorites of mine..

- XXXX
- The Last Place On Earth / End of The Earth
- Not Kansas
- The Land Noah Forgot
- Gonnawondaland

Somehow I think Joel will know the origins of all of these. They are all from, shall we say, literature. (Using the term Literature rather liberally in some cases)

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 12:59 am

Jim North wrote:They will when you mess up and contradict something from earlier in the story. This is especially important when you're running an RPG campaign, neh?

Nah, we just roll with it. We're all about the having the fun, not niggling over teeny details. In fact, there have been times where we've decided that the contradiction is better for the story and just rewritten history. I run a highly cooperative game.

And you get bored with characters you know really well? That's weird . . . glad that's never happened to me.

I like to discover new things about my characters along with everybody else. Having a big, dusty "Everything You Need to Know About Character 'X'" tome sitting around just seems like a major drag to me.

Back to the RPG parallel, here's something that's going to blow your mind. When I GM games, I never do any prep work. 100% improvised, every time. And we have a hell of a lot of fun.

Jim North · Post by **Jim North** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 1:27 am

Doesn't blow my mind at all. I used to GM impromptu games all the time, myself, and we had plenty of fun with it. Even now, they're often about 50/50 . . . but overall I prefer to have my games (and stories) planned well ahead of time, since I've found that it makes things run much smoother for me. My players seem to still enjoy the heck out of the planned games just as much as if not more than they did with the unplanned ones, too.

And as for characters coming up with surprises as you go along . . . pre-planning and mapping out the character doesn't preclude that at all, nor would I ever say it would. Even after all the planning in the world, I've still had instances of a story or RPG dipping one way or the other unexpectedly because a character threw a curve ball. The thing is, tho', having thought it all out ahead of time, I've found it much easier to catch that surprise and run with it without it causing any major damage.

I find it funny that some people, like during the thread about story pacing a while back, seem to think that planning things out meticulously means completely and utterly sacrficing spontenaity. If you're doing it right, it doesn't have to mean that at all. Pre-planning merely involves channeling that spontenaity into a more useful form before the fact, and molding it and weaving it into the existing story more effectively after the fact.

Glambourine · Post by **Glambourine** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 2:59 am

Apologies if I'm reviving a dead, verbose thread, but I don't think anyone has posted about my method of character creation yet. The basics:

(1) Find something you seriously hate or love
(2) Drop it into an ongoing story
(3) See where it goes

It's the easiest way possible to ensure that you have some kind of emotional stake in the story, and if you have a stake in the story, other people likely will as well. The three major characters in my comic were all initially defined by qualities I couldn't stand. The three or four minor characters in my comic were all just created either because I thought they were intellectually interesting or just to fill certain social spaces within the comic, and I barely ever think about reusing them or redefining them in any way: why would I, if I don't care about them?

I totally agree with Wolf, as well. It's a lot more interesting to figure out where a character is going when you already have them up and running in the plot. The important thing about characters is usually their relationships, and that's difficult (if not impossible) to plan out in advance.

Rkolter · Post by **Rkolter** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 7:15 am

Spontanaeity in Planned Games...

I recall a campaign I worked a long while on. During the first few weeks of play, some players couldn't make it to one session or another. Rather than run the characters as NPC's, I just made them disappear in a flash of blue light.

One of the players asked for information on teleportation while researching at a library. Without thinking about it I mentioned that teleportation makes an audible popping noise and there's an accompanying flash of blue light.

This intrigued the players, who decided that someone was casting illusions to make their friends appear to teleport at random intervals.

Yeah, my quick method of getting non-played PCs out of the way turned into the new quest for the campaign. I had maps of the areas of the world and points of interest designed, so it wasn't a big deal to let them reroute themselves. A few months later, they defeated some mage I had made a minor note of (never intending the characters to meet him). The mage was using the non-played PCs as adventurers on his own (thus explaining how they'd get experience without having been with the group, or come back with gold but no memory of where it came from).

So I have to agree with Jim - spontanaeity isn't lost when a game is planned. It's just easier on the GM. As a player, I prefer planned games, because it means the GM has invested time into the game and generally, the quality of gameplay improves.

Jim North · Post by **Jim North** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 1:00 pm

glambourine wrote:Apologies if I'm reviving a dead, verbose thread

Oh noes! You revived a day old thread!

BURN THE HEATHEN!

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 2:29 pm

Jim North wrote:
glambourine wrote:Apologies if I'm reviving a dead, verbose thread
Oh noes! You revived a day old thread!

BURN THE HEATHEN!

No, don't, he AGREES WITH ME TOTALLY!

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 2:44 pm

glambourine wrote:Apologies if I'm reviving a dead, verbose thread,

You will be properly punished.
*sends him to Maritza*

Jim North · Post by **Jim North** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:35 pm

Kevin Wolf wrote:
Jim North wrote:BURN THE HEATHEN!
No, don't, he AGREES WITH ME TOTALLY!

BURN BOTH THE HEATHENS!

And how can you have an emotional stake in people you don't even know yet? I care deeply for my characters well before I've started a story because I've already taken the time to get to know them.

And with the excitement that comes with where the characters are going as they're running with the plot, you have to remember that even if no one but the writer is seeing it yet, the plot is running when you start writing it. The only real difference in this respect is the point at which you start showing that plot to everyone else.

And (another and) I've never had problems with working out relationships ahead of time. If you've set your characters up right, really, you don't have to even worry about it . . . they'll do it all themselves as you write 'em. And when you're writing the scripts before putting them up for everyone to view and the romance takes a course you don't want it to take, then you can just go back and fix the derailment, no fuss and only a little muss.

Shame real life isn't that way, neh?

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 5:21 pm

I'm of the opinion (and I'm not alone in thinking this, by the way), that a writer should seek to avoid having an emotional stake in his own characters. All the better to put them through the ringer that way.

I could kill every single one of those bastards tomorrow. All it would do is give me an opportunity to come up with more characters!

Jim North · Post by **Jim North** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 5:26 pm

Oh, it makes me unhappy to do it, but I've cracked the hell out of characters I've had an emotional stake in. There's a number of them that I plan to kill at just the right time, too, even though I'm going to be going "Oh, lordy, why must I do this horrible thing?" the whole time I'm repeatedly shoving the knife into their back.

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 5:30 pm

I killed an extremely popular NPC once as a casual aside because he had become entirely too popular with the gang. He was a comic-relief sort of character of an invented monster race called a 'Tree Goon'. He was introduced as an annoyance, but once I realized he had actually become sort of a pet of the group I fed him to a dragon.

They were furious. Ahh...good times.

Man, I haven't role-played in forever.

TheLoserHero · Post by **TheLoserHero** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:15 pm

You guys don't play RPGs with High-School/College students, do you? Cause every time I see them try, when they break for snacks, they go play Smash Bros. Melee and don't stop for the rest of the night. Lousy attention span, freakin' grade school heylookitsabunny

Oh yeah, character development... um. Well, it's not always one isolated event that changes a person. Usually, it's a series of events that changes someone.

Like that loner assassin who saw his love lost to a rain of bullets, and thus swears to never kill again. Yeah, that could work... but there's more emotional baggage if he goes undercover as a little league coach or something for a few weeks. Being around all that young energy, man, it just gets to you.

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:18 pm

TheLoserHero wrote:You guys don't play RPGs with High-School/College students, do you?

Nope. Not since I was in high school, which was 15 years ago.

TheLoserHero · Post by **TheLoserHero** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 6:36 pm

Good! Cause High School students are retarded, College Students are drunk, and College grads wish they were back in high school or college.

Vorticus · Post by **Vorticus** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 8:05 pm

Kevin Wolf wrote:I'm of the opinion (and I'm not alone in thinking this, by the way), that a writer should seek to avoid having an emotional stake in his own characters. All the better to put them through the ringer that way.

I could kill every single one of those bastards tomorrow. All it would do is give me an opportunity to come up with more characters!

Yes and no on this. While it's good to have to option of sending your characters through the ringer, killing off characters has a tendancy to thwart character development.