Kamon Vondiranach
Heart in a Jar
I decided to write a guide on character creation in following with the efforts of [member="Tirdarius"] (who has offered input) and others in writing guides. I figure it might be beneficial to some people, especially those new to RPing. So here we go.
Step 1: Forget Everything
The point of this step is to not make a character that mimics other characters or follows the typical tropes. No “my mommy and daddy were killed so I decided to be a Sith and I hate everyone” or “my mommy and daddy were killed so I decided to become a Jedi and stop it from happening to others.” It’s overdone, cookie cutter, and your character is likely going to be labeled as boring in the minds of some just because you’re doing what hundreds, if not more, of other writers have done already.
So don’t think about cannon Star Wars characters when you’re brainstorming a character. In fact, the best thing you can do is go outside and watch people and see how they interact with others. Or, better yet, base your character of someone you know and interact with often, because chances are you really know that person and can then write a believable character based off that persons personality and mannerisms. This may be hard if you’re trying to write an evil character, but I’m sure you can find a bully/bad boss/jerk to base your bad guy on. It may also be hard if you don’t like people watching, but, funnily enough, there are people watching videos on youtube.
So forget what you think you know about making a character because you’re likely going to end up with a boring character if you don’t.
Step 2: Develop a Personality
Some people like to think that the first step should be deciding on your character’s name, race, and gender and all of that, but that’s wrong. When you’re writing with people, it’s not your name that’s going to make a statement, it’s your characters personality and mannerisms that will set them apart. Personality is the reason people will remember your character’s name.
If you did what I said in step one, then you’ve singled out someone you know, or perhaps more than one so you can combine personalities, to base your character off of. It doesn’t absolutely have to be someone you know, as obviously people watching isn’t likely to show you someone you know. It could be someone famous too. You just need to know a lot about them and how they act. So now that you’ve done that, start by writing up how your character acts in his normal, everyday routine. Does he wake up early, take a shower, eat some breakfast, brush his teeth, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch the news, and go to bed? Or does he sleep in, smashing his snooze button several times while pulling his blanket over his head, and then muss his hair with a little water before showering himself in body spray, grabbing a poptart from the counter on his way out the door to cruise on his skateboard down to the local coffee shop where he serves coffee for 6 hours before heading to the club and DJing until the early morning and crashing in his bed?
Which one is more interesting? Did you say the second one? It could be, with a little work. But what about the first one? He sounds like a worker drone? What if I said that his job that he goes to is as a hitman for hire, and that he likes routine, which makes him seem stiff, because it is the only way he can unwind after a day of work in which he feels bad about what he did, but he can’t stop doing it because he’s actually addicted to murder? It’s the details that matter here. A hitman that hates killing people but can’t stop himself from doing it is far more interesting than a hitman with a lust for blood who carries an inordinate amount of weapons and has ladies clinging to each arm.
Personality makes the character, everything else is secondary.
Step 3: Choose a Race, Gender, and Age
Nope. No name still.
Race and Gender are more important than the name. If you want to be really unique, don’t be a human. There are plenty of humans already being played. Playing a human is boring. Playing one of the many, many other races will give you different opportunities than a human has, too. As an example, let’s say you choose to play a Togruta. These beings evolved from hunter societies, and still pride themselves on it. They view individuality as deviance, and conformity as the norm. Anyone that is unable to contribute to their society is looked down upon. Humans, however, can be hunters, but aren’t always hunters. They tend to frown on conformity, unless their Imperials, and relish their individuality. By writing a character of a species other than your own, you challenge yourself, but you also give people someone unique to interact with.
There are LOTS of species to choose from, so take your time and think carefully. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.
Once you’ve chosen your species, choose your gender and age.
Step 4: Choose Weaknesses and Strengths
This can be as simple as googling character strengths and weaknesses and finding some that match your personality, which is the easy way out, but acceptable, or it could be more difficult. After all, not all weaknesses are character flaws. They can be physical as well, such as having a serious illness, dwarfism, or missing limbs. Those are just some examples, of course, but it’s important to do this before the next step because these weaknesses may have a direct effect on what is viable for your character.
Step 5: Choose a Profession
No, this isn’t like choosing a profession in the tabletop games. Here your profession can be anything, or a combination of things. You could be a Jedi, a Sith, a Smuggler, a politician, a crime lord, or whatever you want to be, or a combination of multiple things. A Sith that owns a major galactic corporation. A politician that’s also a secret crime lord. The more interesting the combination, the more interesting your character can end up being. Just don’t do something stupid like making a Jedi that that runs a crime ring. Believe it or not, it’s been done, and it’s bad. Don’t be bad.
If you want some reference on being a Sith, Tirdarius wrote some excellent guides for creating and playing one. Here are the links:
How To Write A Sith – Part 1
How To Write A Sith – Part 2
How To Write A Sith – Part 3
How To Write A Sith – Part 4
How To Write A Sith – Part 5
Unfortunately, there aren’t any guides that I know of for writing a Jedi or other careers or I would link them. What I would suggest you do, if you have questions, is to first read the Wookieepedia entry for what you want to be, if there is one. If you then have questions, or there’s no entry, ask for help on the board. Someone will no doubt help you out.
Step 6: History
Writing a history without a character name? Isn’t that impossible? Nope. In fact it makes a better history if you don’t spend the first two paragraphs talking about your family and how you came into being. Nobody cares to hear about your mommy and daddy hooking up unless it was something forbidden or somehow has a bearing on your character beyond bringing you into the galaxy. Writing your history without a name helps you to flesh out your characters backstory without falling victim to the common thread of writing your name up. If you don’t have a name to trump about, you aren’t likely to trump yourself around.
By this point you’ve come up with a personality, a species, a gender, an age, and a career. With those things in mind, write a history that details your life up until you reached your current age. Dictate how growing up on your homeworld affected you. If you didn’t grow up on the same world your species originated from, which isn’t always possible, dictacte how that affected your character as well. Often this adds another layer on top of your species society. Anyway, right about growing up on your homeworld, or other worlds, and how that influenced your personality and your choice of career. This helps to justify your personality, and should also add dimension to your characters history that you can potentially draw upon in RP.
Step 7: Finish the specifics/Naming
You’ve written a personality. A history. Weaknesses and strengths. You’ve got a career, gender, race, and age. So now it’s time to come up with a name and a vision for what your character looks like, and then fill out the particulars of height, weight, skin tone, etc.
So what should you name your character? Well, anything goes, really. Just don’t be stupid about it. Personally, if I’m playing a species other than human I’ll look at their species page and see if there are any cannon characters of that species. I’ll read through them and mull them in my head until something pops out that sounds reasonable. Compare it to the list again, and then go with it if it seems to fit the general conformity of the names there. You can always use a name generator if you’re really stuck.
Once you’ve got your name, come up with a vision. The easiest way to do this is to find an image that you think fits your character. There are numerous sites out there you can go to for this, or you can just google. Personally, I like to use artstation or DeviantArt. I’ll search by entering my characters species first, and then if I don’t find what I want, I look for their career or I try searching things that might resemble their career. Eventually I usually find what I want. It might take some looking, but there’s always something out there for you to choose. Be patient and look through lots of images. You might see a whole lot of nothing and then after a thousand images strike gold. Once you have that image, you can write up what your character looks like and all the particulars.
Step 8: Finish
Make sure you keep an area to track your roleplays, especially if you’re playing a Force User. These will contribute to your ability to become a Knight and Master rank. Keep an area for listing your equipment and any ships or companions you might have. This is handy for if people want to know what you’re carrying/wearing if you enter into PvP combat.
At this point you’re essentially done, but I encourage you to go back over everything. Read it all through and make sure that it all tells the story of your character as you now see them in your head. Make any necessary tweaks, then post it and you’re all set.
Congratulations, if you followed this guideline correctly, you’ve not made a cookie cutter character and have something reasonably interesting to write about. Now get out there and prove it.
Step 1: Forget Everything
The point of this step is to not make a character that mimics other characters or follows the typical tropes. No “my mommy and daddy were killed so I decided to be a Sith and I hate everyone” or “my mommy and daddy were killed so I decided to become a Jedi and stop it from happening to others.” It’s overdone, cookie cutter, and your character is likely going to be labeled as boring in the minds of some just because you’re doing what hundreds, if not more, of other writers have done already.
So don’t think about cannon Star Wars characters when you’re brainstorming a character. In fact, the best thing you can do is go outside and watch people and see how they interact with others. Or, better yet, base your character of someone you know and interact with often, because chances are you really know that person and can then write a believable character based off that persons personality and mannerisms. This may be hard if you’re trying to write an evil character, but I’m sure you can find a bully/bad boss/jerk to base your bad guy on. It may also be hard if you don’t like people watching, but, funnily enough, there are people watching videos on youtube.
So forget what you think you know about making a character because you’re likely going to end up with a boring character if you don’t.
Step 2: Develop a Personality
Some people like to think that the first step should be deciding on your character’s name, race, and gender and all of that, but that’s wrong. When you’re writing with people, it’s not your name that’s going to make a statement, it’s your characters personality and mannerisms that will set them apart. Personality is the reason people will remember your character’s name.
If you did what I said in step one, then you’ve singled out someone you know, or perhaps more than one so you can combine personalities, to base your character off of. It doesn’t absolutely have to be someone you know, as obviously people watching isn’t likely to show you someone you know. It could be someone famous too. You just need to know a lot about them and how they act. So now that you’ve done that, start by writing up how your character acts in his normal, everyday routine. Does he wake up early, take a shower, eat some breakfast, brush his teeth, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch the news, and go to bed? Or does he sleep in, smashing his snooze button several times while pulling his blanket over his head, and then muss his hair with a little water before showering himself in body spray, grabbing a poptart from the counter on his way out the door to cruise on his skateboard down to the local coffee shop where he serves coffee for 6 hours before heading to the club and DJing until the early morning and crashing in his bed?
Which one is more interesting? Did you say the second one? It could be, with a little work. But what about the first one? He sounds like a worker drone? What if I said that his job that he goes to is as a hitman for hire, and that he likes routine, which makes him seem stiff, because it is the only way he can unwind after a day of work in which he feels bad about what he did, but he can’t stop doing it because he’s actually addicted to murder? It’s the details that matter here. A hitman that hates killing people but can’t stop himself from doing it is far more interesting than a hitman with a lust for blood who carries an inordinate amount of weapons and has ladies clinging to each arm.
Personality makes the character, everything else is secondary.
Step 3: Choose a Race, Gender, and Age
Nope. No name still.
Race and Gender are more important than the name. If you want to be really unique, don’t be a human. There are plenty of humans already being played. Playing a human is boring. Playing one of the many, many other races will give you different opportunities than a human has, too. As an example, let’s say you choose to play a Togruta. These beings evolved from hunter societies, and still pride themselves on it. They view individuality as deviance, and conformity as the norm. Anyone that is unable to contribute to their society is looked down upon. Humans, however, can be hunters, but aren’t always hunters. They tend to frown on conformity, unless their Imperials, and relish their individuality. By writing a character of a species other than your own, you challenge yourself, but you also give people someone unique to interact with.
There are LOTS of species to choose from, so take your time and think carefully. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.
Once you’ve chosen your species, choose your gender and age.
Step 4: Choose Weaknesses and Strengths
This can be as simple as googling character strengths and weaknesses and finding some that match your personality, which is the easy way out, but acceptable, or it could be more difficult. After all, not all weaknesses are character flaws. They can be physical as well, such as having a serious illness, dwarfism, or missing limbs. Those are just some examples, of course, but it’s important to do this before the next step because these weaknesses may have a direct effect on what is viable for your character.
Step 5: Choose a Profession
No, this isn’t like choosing a profession in the tabletop games. Here your profession can be anything, or a combination of things. You could be a Jedi, a Sith, a Smuggler, a politician, a crime lord, or whatever you want to be, or a combination of multiple things. A Sith that owns a major galactic corporation. A politician that’s also a secret crime lord. The more interesting the combination, the more interesting your character can end up being. Just don’t do something stupid like making a Jedi that that runs a crime ring. Believe it or not, it’s been done, and it’s bad. Don’t be bad.
If you want some reference on being a Sith, Tirdarius wrote some excellent guides for creating and playing one. Here are the links:
How To Write A Sith – Part 1
How To Write A Sith – Part 2
How To Write A Sith – Part 3
How To Write A Sith – Part 4
How To Write A Sith – Part 5
Unfortunately, there aren’t any guides that I know of for writing a Jedi or other careers or I would link them. What I would suggest you do, if you have questions, is to first read the Wookieepedia entry for what you want to be, if there is one. If you then have questions, or there’s no entry, ask for help on the board. Someone will no doubt help you out.
Step 6: History
Writing a history without a character name? Isn’t that impossible? Nope. In fact it makes a better history if you don’t spend the first two paragraphs talking about your family and how you came into being. Nobody cares to hear about your mommy and daddy hooking up unless it was something forbidden or somehow has a bearing on your character beyond bringing you into the galaxy. Writing your history without a name helps you to flesh out your characters backstory without falling victim to the common thread of writing your name up. If you don’t have a name to trump about, you aren’t likely to trump yourself around.
By this point you’ve come up with a personality, a species, a gender, an age, and a career. With those things in mind, write a history that details your life up until you reached your current age. Dictate how growing up on your homeworld affected you. If you didn’t grow up on the same world your species originated from, which isn’t always possible, dictacte how that affected your character as well. Often this adds another layer on top of your species society. Anyway, right about growing up on your homeworld, or other worlds, and how that influenced your personality and your choice of career. This helps to justify your personality, and should also add dimension to your characters history that you can potentially draw upon in RP.
Step 7: Finish the specifics/Naming
You’ve written a personality. A history. Weaknesses and strengths. You’ve got a career, gender, race, and age. So now it’s time to come up with a name and a vision for what your character looks like, and then fill out the particulars of height, weight, skin tone, etc.
So what should you name your character? Well, anything goes, really. Just don’t be stupid about it. Personally, if I’m playing a species other than human I’ll look at their species page and see if there are any cannon characters of that species. I’ll read through them and mull them in my head until something pops out that sounds reasonable. Compare it to the list again, and then go with it if it seems to fit the general conformity of the names there. You can always use a name generator if you’re really stuck.
Once you’ve got your name, come up with a vision. The easiest way to do this is to find an image that you think fits your character. There are numerous sites out there you can go to for this, or you can just google. Personally, I like to use artstation or DeviantArt. I’ll search by entering my characters species first, and then if I don’t find what I want, I look for their career or I try searching things that might resemble their career. Eventually I usually find what I want. It might take some looking, but there’s always something out there for you to choose. Be patient and look through lots of images. You might see a whole lot of nothing and then after a thousand images strike gold. Once you have that image, you can write up what your character looks like and all the particulars.
Step 8: Finish
Make sure you keep an area to track your roleplays, especially if you’re playing a Force User. These will contribute to your ability to become a Knight and Master rank. Keep an area for listing your equipment and any ships or companions you might have. This is handy for if people want to know what you’re carrying/wearing if you enter into PvP combat.
At this point you’re essentially done, but I encourage you to go back over everything. Read it all through and make sure that it all tells the story of your character as you now see them in your head. Make any necessary tweaks, then post it and you’re all set.
Congratulations, if you followed this guideline correctly, you’ve not made a cookie cutter character and have something reasonably interesting to write about. Now get out there and prove it.
