ID:1889973
 
What's your workflow for creating characters?
I don't so much have a workflow for characters. They tend to evolve organically for me, maybe because I've internalized so many standard concepts in how teams are constructed. (If you visit TV Tropes and look at all the character types, it's a real eye-opener. Also, I apologize in advance for keeping you up till October.)

For the most part I typically want to nail down the biggest characters (if it's not an ensemble) like the MC and maybe the main villain if there is one. Others fall into place around them. Archetypes are great for this, as there are plenty of good stock choices to build characters around. Examples:

- In Below, the main character is a classic trickster archetype, a consummate liar. His best friend is a big fighter type of guy, a straight man who serves as his conscience. And the villain is my MC's dark mirror in many ways, as he and the MC both share an obsession and are equally deep in lore.

- In my sci-fi comic series that I've been novelizing, the captain and first mate (business partners) are your classic red oni, blue oni, though in the opposite order. The captain is legendarily cheap and a bit of a rules lawyer, and likes to play things safe except when it comes to spending actual money on safety. His partner has looser ethics (he was raised by wild politicians), plays with legal gray areas, and is on a mission to have a girl in every port. But underneath, they have a similar core: They both care about the business and on certain things, neither one of them will budge.

The best thing I can advise though is that if you start with archetypes, don't stop there. Keep molding and adding more features.
Personally I find general character archetypes standalone boring. If a story does this wrong, they'll present the characters and say, "This is what you get" and leave it at that. Really, the most interesting parts of a character are:

A. What makes them what they are.
B. How what they are impacts what they do.

You can be the most interesting character in the world with all of the fixings. But no one is going to care if they don't see it. I guess it goes back to that addage, "Show, don't tell".
Archetypes are only a starting point. Used alone they create very one-dimensional characters.

But yeah, I never invest too much effort in a character's backstory. Define them more by their actions, dialogue, and (when applicable) thoughts. Is a character quick with a quip? Are they swift to agree with others or do they tend to take the lead and make suggestions? How do they react physically to threats or opportunities?
I think how fucked up and demonic can I make this character. Than I just add more shit to his story. Like you know he was forced to eat his own baby, than make him have a hat and ship him into the game.

Oh shit that was a good character. Okay I called it eating his own baby backstory will be one of my npcs

I'm not being sarcastic either baby eating man with a cool hat. Makes for a really interesting npcs. I'm literally going to make him tomorrow and put him in.
I usually have trouble writing with music, unless it's something extremely familiar and backgroundy, preferably something that fits the mood I want.

When I wrote the Affix I was listening to the Gammak Bass a lot, because mixes based on Farscape were the perfect mood setter.
My personal trick to creating very lavish and deep characters is to never really stop asking questions about their background and motivations. You can generally start with very "Mary Sue" style characters with a background of "Orphaned at a young age and left to fend for herself" and as long as you ask more questions and provoke deeper, more specific answers, the characters kind of evolve on their own.

As was said before, start with a trope or an archetype and just develop it outwards. Start with the base, but start pulling aspects of that person away from that archetype.

I also don't just build a story for one character at a time. The world is a big place full of a lot of people and everyone's story typically involves interacting with other people at some point in their lives. Some of these people are important, such as parents and would do well to have their stories at least partially written out to compliment my character's.

One of the richest stories for a character I'd come up with recently was for a Pathfinder game I was running with a group of friends. Her backstory mostly involves her parents and really only explains a little bit about herself, but origin stories can be just as rewarding when fleshing out other details of your character as well.

My character was a Paladin to a very zealous, holy order that viewed resurrection magic in any form as necromancy and heresy. Her home region was controlled by this religious group so most people had a healthy dose of it in their lives daily, like the early Catholic Church, almost. Her father was a knight of the order long before she was born. He and his wife were trying to have kids for years and after the first pregnancy ended in a still birth, they became despaired and tried harder.(Depressing, I know, but not all stories are rainbows and butterfly kisses.)

Eventually the mother would have a child, being my character, but soon after fall ill and die. Her father became maddened with grief and soon fled the country to seek the help of a priest of another order and demand she be brought back, angered at the gods for letting his wife die.

The mother would be resurrected, but outraged by the fact that she was brought back to life, being her religion was extremely important to her. She went back to her home and plead the order's counselors to show mercy for her husbands recklessness and was killed at their feet. A party was sent to track down and kill the husband while my character was left orphaned with the counselors of the order. She was raised by the clergy and bred to become a powerful paladin to cleanse the world of its "impurities".


This story started as a simple, "My character was an orphan raised by her clergy to fight evil.", but by asking the right questions about her past, I was able to build a story that revolved around her parents, but ultimately determined what kind of person she would become later in life.

Obviously this is a bit of a watered-down example, but it shows enough to not be too boring and not too dry.
In response to Kats
The trouble of too intricate a backstory for me is that it can take over the actual character. For instance that girl was an orphan from a very young age. It'd probably be well into her childhood or adolescence before she ever found out what happened to her parents, so most of her baggage would have come from the orphanage itself. The story is somewhat removed from her motivations, at least until she finds out about it.

For me backstory also grows characters in the wrong direction: forward. I want to know the character traits first, then work backward. Obviously there are limitations to that technique, as certain characters could only get into their positions certain ways, but for the most part working backward is a lot more effective for me.
In response to Lummox JR
I have a tendency to work from the past forward. A character's motivations and experiences typically come from their past experiences and knowledge. The story above is hardly the characer's whole story, but I just didn't want to bog down the thread with a huge block of TL;DR. Lol.
The problem of working from the past forward is that you lose control over the story you actually want to tell--and lose some focus on it as well--in exchange for a richer backstory. Well-developed characters have a tendency to surprise us and move in unexpected directions. One whose history is so well set in stone is more apt to completely change the story's course.
In response to Lummox JR
I guess that's fundamentally how I write stories to begin with. It works in many cases, but not others. It's an option, though. I'm very good at steering natural progression, though, so I guess that's just how I do business.
like i said baby eating man, the most interesting character you can have...

you dont need past, just baby chunks on his wall
My workflow for character creation?

Usually lots of DEX cos I like using bows and shiz. Then some CONS but not to much and finally as much INT as I can get so I can do all those cool intelligent things like magix.
In response to Kats
Kats wrote:
I guess that's fundamentally how I write stories to begin with. It works in many cases, but not others. It's an option, though. I'm very good at steering natural progression, though, so I guess that's just how I do business.

My characters resist steering. But it's one reason I'm a pantser, not a plotter.
Yut Put wrote:
for main characters:
i draw the character while listening to music you'd hear while the character does his or her thing and reference things that inspire me-

then, the story for the character slowly develops in my head over time as i develop the game. usually the story isn't even there until the game is playable and multiple levels have made it in. the less I think about the story, the more fun it is to tie together all the weird pieces I threw in and the more original it becomes.


for side characters:
use a trope(every character in AVIA, for a saturday morning cartoon feeling and because speedy development)

Never thought about basing our characters around music. Will try thanks.

I use graphic organizers. My favs are storyboards and web charts. With web charts, I start with a central concept and branch out characteristics. It helps weed out odd traits.
When designing a character, I actually don't start with the character. I start with my story and design characters around it, if that makes sense. I talked about this with Popisfizzy ( who doesn't seem to frequent the forums anymore ) and I guess I'll reiterate here. You should go find him in the kiwi thing, he creates worlds as a hobby.

So basically I start with an idea. My 2nd book I wrote, before I even wrote anything, I told myself "I want to write a book where the protagonist has to destroy the world".

From there, I design a protagonist who has characteristics and will experience certain events that will drive him to that point where he wants to destroy the world. To do this, I had to obviously come up with a world that was corrupt ( so that destroying the world wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, and it wouldn't make my protagonist a villain ), and I also had to bombard my hero with unfortunate events so that he'd eventually snap ( for my hero, it was him witnessing the corruption of his father and the "formatting" of his Mother. I know that doesn't make sense but just know that the setting my story was written in was in the future, where everyone and everything was essentially a "file", so if someone was "formatted" it basically means they lost all their memories, and corruption was an injury where if your file was slightly damaged, you could be repaired but if you became too corrupted, you'd be a completely useless file and you'd just be deleted ).

After I'm done deciding what I want my character's goal and trials to be, I then focus on his actual abilities, as in what actually makes this guy a hero? Is he strong? Is he highly intelligent? Is he the bravest in all the land? My hero in this particular story was very smart, and he was also a skilled infiltrator. He actually didn't spend much time fighting his enemies, he sort of just figured out ways to outmaneuver them and avoid a confrontation altogether while being incredibly difficult to track down. I also did this for another reason: because my character needed a weakness. Every character needs one. The hero was actually a hacker, and in a virtual world, this means that he could pretty much conjure anything he wanted. For instance, he could enter a command to make an assault rifle appear right in front of him, or make an atomic bomb randomly fall out of the sky. As awesome as this sounds, it turns out hacking and altering the world to that degree causes immense strain on your file, so basically every time he hacked the world, he was corrupting himself. So even though he could've just snapped his fingers and destroyed the world, he had to do it the hard way or else he would've killed himself in the process, and this special ability of his ends up being something he must use sparingly. After that point in the story with his Mother and Father I mentioned earlier, he becomes enraged and, in an attempt to kill the main antagonist, ends up corrupting about a fourth of his body in the process, which comes back to bite him in the ass toward the end of the story when he's unable to beat the main antagonist in a fight.

Speaking of antagonists, let's talk about them for a quick second before wrapping up the hero talk. I typically start with a similar process, but instead of "what do I want the antagonist to do", I usually ask myself "why is this guy a douchebag?" Was he touched inappropriately as a child? Was he forced to listen to Bieber's new single? Did he have his thread locked by Nadrew? I force myself to come up with reasoning behind their sinister actions because I really hate antagonists who are all "hurr durr, I want to kill everyone just because". As I got older, this was one of my qualms with the Dragon Ball series. People like Majin Buu, Frieza, Cell etc. had no actual reason to do what they did - they were just evil for the hell of it. People like Sasuke from Naruto DID have a reason. You're able to look at what Sasuke went through as a child and say "Yeah, I think if I watched my older brother slaughter my entire clan, I'd be pretty messed up in the head and fixated on vengeance too." So I try to keep my villains evil, but I also like to include some background for them as well, so the viewers can sort of understand why this particular individual became the demented freak he is today. It also allows the reader to sort of choose who the hero truly is in their own opinion, which I think is neat and a good discussion piece, because you WANT your readers to talk about your story. They can sit around and, going back to the Naruto example, debate with each other about whether or not Madara is justified in his actions. Is Madara the true hero of the story? Is he correct when he says that humans aren't capable of peace? That conflict will never end unless someone comes along and creates an alternate reality in which peace does exist? Or is Naruto right when he asserts that people can come together and understand one another, and that a new world is not the solution?

One last note about the personalities of my characters. I hate pure good and pure evil. Goku is an example of this. I don't believe in a person who is incapable of doing wrong. I also don't believe in a person who is incapable of doing right. Kid Buu for instance. There's nothing more boring than a hero who is all happiness and flowers and righteousness 100% of the time, and the super psychotic maniac villains that absolutely cannot be reasoned with are just as ridiculous. Because of this, in my stories, I typically inject certain moments to where the hero ends up having to do something slightly evil to get ahead, and the villain ends up not necessarily joining the good guys, but doing something good because it benefits himself in some way. Not sure if you've seen Maleficent ( the one with Angelina Jolie ), but there's a scene in which Maleficent, despite being evil, saves the life of a baby. Even though she did this just to see her curse come true, it was still technically a good thing to do. An example of the hero doing evil might be in Guilty Crown when Shu became like, top dog around the school and started ranking people by their voids, and even at one point was willing to leave one of his best friends to die underwater because "if he's too weak to survive, then he deserves to die". He may have had some sort of reasoning behind becoming super anal about people carrying their own weight and being competent, but as Obito taught us, "those who abandon their comrades are worse than scum".

Now that we have all the complex crap out of the way, we still need one more thing: a name! It's how you top it all off. I typically like to stick to one language, so if I'm going to go weaboo-mode and base my story in Japan, I'm not going to be using names like "James Brown", I'm going to call people "Katsumi Yamada" ( and if you don't know who that is, you've obviously never watched one of the most hilarious shows on television ). Anyway, once I've figured out my language ( which is usually dependent on setting, I'm not going to use English names if I'm writing a story about samurai ), I find out which names complement the character. If my character likes to wear all white or has white hair, or perhaps is very innocent, "Shiro", which means white, would be a suitable name. Let's say you have a band of hoodlums who are all related, and one of them is very strong. "Laron" is a French name that means "thief", and "Aillard" is a French name that means "strength", so one of the hoodlums can be named Aillard Laron. It's quite simple really. You don't have to use this formula but I used to sit around all day trying to think of names, but Googling names and finding out their languages and meanings makes it a lot easier. I know this thread is about characters, but I repeat this same tactic when naming countries and continents. If there's a particular nation that's very forested, I'm going to find a fancy word that means "trees" or "plants", and I also make sure that the characters from that nation have traits that make it obvious they're from that part of the world. So if my character is from "Silva" ( latin for "forest" ), maybe the "Silvans" will be people who have studied the forest so much to the point where they've developed the ability to animate trees and use them as guardians, or maybe they have a special bond with creatures and things like bears and panthers and can call upon them fight. They might get really angry when they see people killing animals and using them for food, and due to their years spent navigating dense forests which are easy to get lost in, they've become really adept trackers and make extensive use of traps and poisons.

That's creating a character in a nutshell. Congratulations, now that you've spent 2 or 3 days just figuring out who your characters are, it's time to spend another 3 days just coming up with a summarized version of your story. Congratulations, now that you've got your summary, it's time to turn your summary into an actual story. Get ready to spend hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing some more, revising some more, sending it to other people so they can critique and revise it, writing and revising some more after the feedback, sending it back for more feedback, writing and revising some more, getting it proofread, and then releasing it to the masses. Although we are talking about games though, so your story doesn't have to be THAT great. As long as your setting isn't full retard like Kingdom Hearts, you should be okay.

[EDIT] I can't believe I wrote all that and still have more to say. I forgot to mention that when designing a character, make sure you try and make a character that's not cliche. For example, I can name like, 20 stories off the top of my head in which the hero is washed up on a beach or something somewhere and has lost his memory and doesn't know who he is, and then some 5 year old girl finds him and calls their Grandma, and then Grandma takes you into her cabin and nurses you back to full health, and then you go on this long quest slowly but surely piecing everything together and then finally you realize who you are and then you save the day. It's been repeated so much it's disgusting.

Try your best to tell a story that hasn't already been told a thousand times. Don't write a story where your character has amnesia, or I will find you and punch you in the knee. Another one is the self-pity bullshit where the protagonist does nothing but whine about how he couldn't prevent a loved one from dying, and then the damn girlfriend/mother/son or whatever appears to them in a vision and says "DON'T WORRY, I FORGIVE YOU, IT WASN'T YOUR FAULT" and then that gives them the strength required to slay the beast. My God, if I see that plot one more time I might just have an aneurysm.
Starting with a story and writing protagonists into it? That's ass-backwards. I wouldn't be surprised if you write your characters into a corner because you started with a solution and went looking for a problem. I'm sure GRR Martin said, "You know what, I just made an incredibly deep and detailed world. I better add some characters to serve the setting now". The point is, if you're crafting characters to fill the story, you're missing the entire point. Why does the audience care about your character when they're just a tool. They could've easily been anyone else. It just happened to land on them. Characters create stories, not the other way around.
In response to Lugia319
Starting with the characters and designing a story around them is like a chef grabbing a handful of pepperoni and Parmesan without having prepared the dough first. You can't build a house until you've laid out the foundation.

Satoshi Tajiri created Pokemon because he thought the concept of catching monsters was cool. Not because he had an idea for this yellow rat named Pikachu, and then designed a world of dueling monsters around it.
I've been preparing to write a pretty extensive chain of novels (or series of small video games) for a few years now. I've gotten to the point where all I really need is to flesh out the actual story itself.

I have a really good memory. Not the useful kind of good memory... the kind of memory that lets me remember incredibly useless and bullshit stuff for no reason. So I've molded an entire world in my head and bothered to write........... maybe 1/200th of it down in actual words.

http://originchronicles.wikia.com/wiki/OriginChronicles_Wiki

Don't look if you don't want to be confused.
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