Welcome to Gaia! ::

Good, morning, evening, night, or whatever you may be at the time you read this. This thread is for you to ask those questions where you just don't know if your character is strong enough. One of the purposes of this guild is to help our members become better at role playing so everyone begins to enjoy the activity at a greater level, and to deepen respect for the art of role playing.

Every once in a while, I will post something that may help you understand how to truly develop and maintain a character's personality, history, and a bunch of other things that will help you.

Okay, this problem comes from us not remembering exactly what we think our characters would act and instead think on how we would act and put that into the rp. If you start to lose personality, the only way to gain it back is to start acting like it again, we are all trying to think of new things when in reality we need to stick to the basics. Now to use this in character development, we need to always..ahem..ALWAYS remember that these characters are not us and we need to think that every time we post a reply. Now you need to base the character's personality on it's history. How have the acted in the past and if they act different this time, why? They can act differently as long as you think there is a good reason for it. Everyone has habits, so give your character a habit and play off of that to give you ideas. Now I'm going to use my main character Lash for an example. He s dragons, and although I won't tell you why, there is a reason for it, now in order to develop his fear, I should put him in a battle with a dragon right? No, he can fear something after seeing it once then for some reason never see the monster again. Or he happens along a dragon what does he do. There is never a set in stone reaction to things. There is however usually only two reactions although there are often several more. I'm referring to the fight or flight reaction. Now remember that, fight or flight is something you need to remember when creating and developing a character. Lash usually does flight because he is good at it and is afraid he will lose a fight with a dragon. However, he may fight in the scenario that he knows his friends are in peril and he has to save them. You need to gauge exactly how your character will respond, not yourself. One thing I must say Galythia is that I think Adela has a great emotional conflict. She doesn't want to hurt people by getting in the way but she wants to help in anyway she can. I think you do a good job by judging the way she acts and reacts. So to answer your question I think you have her just as well rounded as when you started her.

I use Marcus' never ending grin in a way like that. I remember that what ever he's saying, he's saying it with a smile.

Making the character personal not only makes the RP interesting, but it makes the character real. For example, many of us have probably forgotten which character we used in the Osculan Peron Wars, mostly because the characters weren't real. The history just isn't enough to make a character real, you want to explain stuff. For example, phobias. If you have a character afraid of... squirrels, then you should provide a little bit of background as to why (s)he is.
I tried to do that in Forerunners, explaining why my guy was so afraid of Tiamat, and why he had so much rage.

Or you could just imagine them as a crazy psychotic person who could at any minute pull out a knife or a gun and try to kill you right there in the middle of the street, no matter how many witnesses there might be to the scene. That's how I imagine everyone I ever meet. It makes life interesting.

((I think Noftin has lost all touch with reality and sanity. Beware. BEWARE!!!))