Jay Scott Clark said:
By showcasing vulnerability, conflict, crisis, real humanity, physical loss, and tangible growth during an RP.
Assume nobody reads your profile. If they can't guess your character's weaknesses after two threads together? It didn't matter anyway.
I agree with this 100%, though I am likely late to the show. In 10 years I've been roleplaying on the internet, I have learned that no one cares about your profile,
really and if they do it's to glean information that would be better learned about through roleplay. Hence why I stopped my bio at appearance.
However, proper weaknesses are something that is very complicated. Consistent weaknesses, especially. I'm not talking "Well, I'm not very good at chess" as a weakness, but as people here have said, mental disabilities and the like. I am usually cautious when it comes to mental illnesses in character, because there is a consistent theme I have found on the internet where people tend to misrepresent these things, and even worse, romanticize them...
I am no innocent in this myself. But I thought about weaknesses. There is a thing about weaknesses. They are not mutually exclusive to Strengths. The two can be the same thing. "Your biggest strength was your biggest weakness" is a very true statement, but this doesn't always work.
Then you have mental and physical disabilities. When played correctly, this can be really good, so long as it doesn't start to dive into the realm of "Pity me for I am crippled." This is annoying. I find a good way to go about this is find a trope that is founded on a weakness, and think of a way of tackling it that isn't just a blatant rip off. Everything is a trope. The only difference between a good and bad trope is how you display it. How you make connections with other character and if you are good at sharing the road.
I made a sociopath once. Before I made the character, I rigorously learned what made a sociopath a sociopath, what common ticks and tendencies they had, and how they operated. This is very important to do when dealing with a behavioral afflictions. If you don't know how to follow the template, how are you going to break it in an interesting way? Knowing the Rules before you break the rules is key.
Then I figured out a longterm goal. This is the goal that has plagued the character for a long time, and will continue to plague them for a long time to come. This motivation is key because it acts as a trigger for responses. The Motivation dictates what they react too, and the Affliction modifies how they react to it.
So I made her want to have her own family. She had a rather typical sad story background which made her angry, but Sociopaths are made via intense truama and abuse in developmental years so this was kinda a requirement. Abandoned by her mother, lived on the streets, bad things happened to her. I can already feel people losing interest due to the pity party those lines of the backstory call up. But, given she had been abandoned by so many people, she thought that if she could just have a child ((Father staying in the picture was not required)) then she would have someone she could make sure never abandoned her. Never left her. Never hurt her.
This was her only goal. But she couldn't let any tom dick or harry be the father of her child! She was a genius! A mental prodigy, and certainly no slouch on the physical. A perfectionist by the whole meaning. No. The father had to be a perfect specimen. Smart, strong, brave, and you see where this is going.
This was a weakness. Her being a Sociopath wasn't exactly a weakness, if anything it was a strength. It was this *motivation* that made it a weakness. Sociopaths hide their traits from people, the same with Psychopaths. They are invisible, which makes them dangerous, until you know they are a sociopath. So, they act normally. She would act like your typical 39 year old woman, drinking coffee, doing work, chatting with co-workers and flirting with the occasional prospect.
Then someone would make a joke about her biological clock running out, and they would have a knife to their neck so to speak. Someone would threaten to fix her, and she would lose her mind. She would be overcome by the anger that Sociopaths are afflicted by, and blow her cover entirely. She would attack anyone, friend or foe, who implied threatening, or inadvertently threatened her ability to have children, and the older she got, the more violent her reactions became, because she was aware that the clock was ticking. It was a constant burden, and constant clawing in the back of her mind.
Hell, she almost killed the one man she actually developed a modicum of emotions for, simply because once she was pregnant, he pulled her and dipped her to the floor, and she felt like he was going to drop her, which could have hurt the baby, which might have lead to her losing the baby, which would have lead to her possibly never being able to have children again, and she saw red.
TL;DR
Weaknesses are complex and can come from a variety of things. Social or physical, if done well they can make a character that will be remembered for a long
long time. But I try to dig real deep into the character to figure out where the weakness actually comes from, and I try my best to put the weakness on a drip feed to the other players so that I don't call for a pity party every time I mention them.
I don't stop at the affliction, I dig into the motivations and goals of the character, both short term and long term, when trying to figure out where the true weakness comes from. Why does X become a weakness? Can that weakness be turned into a strength? Lots of stuff go into it. *shrug*
