Character Profiles

The character profile is a staple tool of most roleplayers looking to define their character. It's useful – it helps you to put onto paper a personality, history and list of aims to help reduce the frequency of out of character actions, make concrete things such as age and birthplace and just generally make a character real in your head. Being able to write down these basic facets of your character also helps a lot if you need to submit an application to a roleplaying guild, too, so I thought I might jot down a few tips for those looking to finalise a character, join a guild or even the obsessive cataloguers amongst you.

Firstly, don't bog yourself down with too many overlapping categories. I know if you're submitting to a guild they may have a format you have to follow, but whenever you have a chance keep it as simplistic as possible. Having a personality subtitle and then strengths, weaknesses and flaws as three more simply doesn't make sense; you'll either catch yourself omitting things from the main personality section to flesh out the other three or leaving the later ones with a few lines to avoid repeating yourself. And I assure you, avoiding repeating yourself gets very hard when you find yourself filling out personality, strengths, weaknesses, notable skills, general abilities, particular flaws... Either remove the personality section and provide a few more specific fields or trust yourself to put all the important things, nicely summarised, into that larger section without direct prompting

Linking closely to the first, don't go over the top filling out each section. You don't need a huge, in-depth essay on everything – your character's age is your character's age, and if you only have a rough number give that and stick “(approximately)” on the end. Apologetically tapping out “I am not sure of the precise dates but I believe she would be between twenty and thirty however if this does not fit I will gladly change it as soon as I am made aware” is not only useless but actually counter productive, because if you're using this sheet as reference when roleplaying a new character or one you've only recently put concrete dates to you'll have to trawl through all the waffling to find the information you actually need! This is especially relevant if you're submitting an application to a guild, too, as confident responses give a much better impression.

Furthermore, you may find a less specific history to be beneficial. Leaving gaps where normal life would commence as usual allows you to add in things later that link to new roleplay, whilst choosing to outline the basic relationship between your character and people from their past, such as lovers or family members, rather than depicting those side character's personalities in minute detail will make it a lot easier for anyone else to play those people should you ever decide it would be a fun roleplaying plot. After all, it's great to get friends involved with your character's roots, but they're not going to enjoy it quite as much if they've no room to interpret their new character in a way they want.

And don't forget, a good character will develop the more you play them, so leave space for explanatory background for any new traits you may come up with. You may even need to change them massively because you find you prefer to stress the ruder sides more than you originally thought you would, or maybe you'd like them to be a bit more upper class. Suddenly that extensive essay you wrote may feel like a waste of time!

In fact, my first real roleplaying character was Miriah, for whom I wrote out a bit of her life just before her death in story form. I was really getting into this tale when someone informed me the people of Stratholme had only just been infected when Arthas came to butcher them – suddenly my story was wildly lore inaccurate, simply because all the sites I'd referenced when researching that time period forgot the little detail that they were mostly normal humans when the destructive prince popped up. As if that wasn't bad enough, Miriah's mother was originally the High Priestess and there was a lot of stress on a regional dialect, when in fact everyone speaks common and being the daughter of a prestigious, fan-created character pushes one towards the Mary Sue danger zone. While it had never really harmed my roleplay because Miriah dwells in the present and shuns the past for the most part, the whole thing K.O.ed that story straight out.

But you know... you don't need to explain everything in your character's current personality through their distant past. What you're roleplaying now, in their present, is far more important than backstory, to the point at which a super elaborate backstory will limit and stifle your character's all-important progression as you play them. It's a balance: though a well-thought out history will appeal to a guild and, indeed, come in handy as you play, overdo it and suddenly people will be less willing to roleplay with you because you're too bound to events that were never actually played out. So yes, I definitely back this method of cataloguing your character. But as you're doing it think what you want to get out of it rather than let yourself get carried away by the writing – is your aim a superbly detailed profile to admire as an example of narrative prowess or a basic springboard to better roleplay? Probably the latter.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have such beasts as this profile here to polish. And dem, it takes a while.