I am a big fan of role playing, and everyone wants their character to have a little bit of a spotlight, but sometimes characters go too far.
Unfortunately, the most annoying traits are oftentimes the most common ones, much to the dismay of all dedicated RPers out there, so I'm hoping to put forth a little bit of a guide to help people out.
The Most Common Mistakes:
*The first mistake is that you give your character a tragic past. This makes it absolutely necessary for your character to need special treatment, and frankly... no one wants to give that to you. Honestly, why do you want to have a miserable character? It's an obvious attention cry and it's very irritating!
*The second mistake is that your character probably never had family or doesn't have friends. This doesn't work, because if someone siriusly didn't have friends or family, they would be severely emotionally impaired. When you join an RP, it is unlikely that everyone else will ignore you outright (and I'm sure you don't want them to) and you're bound to wind up with friends anyways, so stop ruining your characters lives. I love my characters, I don't want them to be sad all the time.
*The third big no-no is having unexplainable, powerful magical skills, and this gets even more overwhelming in RP's like Harry Potter. The most important thing to do here is to be realistic. A first year can't run around Avada Kedavring people, if you want to keep your RP even slightly like the original story, just try to be realistic. Students will not have a large wealth of powers, they're students, they're just learning this stuff, and unless you can find a really good reason for them to be just brilliant, avoid it. Absolutely have your character excel in a class or two, but certainly have them struggle as well. A character who's all guns and glory is frankly, very boring.
*No-no number four is falling for a canon character. Everyone does this, I've done it, and when you get lucky and it actually works out, it's amazing. However, there's a good chance that it probably won't work out, because there are so many other people playing. If you want a story where you and Harry Potter get married and sail off into the sunset on his Firebolt, you need to invest your time and effort in fan fiction, not role playing. It's a much better idea for you to expect nothing romantic to happen (especially on the very first day of school, come on now!) that way you can actually offer something to the story line and other players, instead of just yourself. Sorry to sound harsh, but it is a rather selfish playing tactic when your only concern is if Professor Snape hanging on your every word. There is only one of each canon character, and if you've made any of the other fatal mistakes I've listed above.. well I hate to say it, but they probably won't like you, and neither will the other players.
*The last error I'll bring up is relation to the canon characters. While this isn't nearly as irritating as people falling in love with them, being so-and-so's lost lovechild is really really aggravating.
To sum up, your characters are (likely) just ordinary human beings. Your Original Character is, essentially, YOU. So don't run around crying about you've never had any friends or family and your boyfriend was killed by you-know-who because he was Dumbledore's great-grand nephew, and now all you want is for Draco to pay attention to you but he's so mean!
No one wants to play with characters like that. So if you actually want to play don't do it, and save it for the sappy fan fiction, please.
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The Trials Of Hogwarts
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HogwartsTeachers
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