Your RP characters

[Caedes]

So as I am unable to play for the time being, I have been reading a lot of RP stories and biographies and the characters are all so diverse, very few 'regular joes' and almost all with interesting stories.

I'm also typing up some stories for some characters I plan on making, so I was wondering; How do you choose the personality and alignment of a character?

For example, I'm not the most imaginative person, so most of my characters are aspects of my own personality (Normally amplified as I'm a dull, lifeless man).

My trader is a man who, while he desires wealth, he is not greedy, he's very cynical and understands that you need money to do anything, he does not like the idea of answering to any higher powers, so he currently refuses to join any corporations. So he's pretty much entirely neutral.

My Order agent is 'lawful good', he believes in honour, justice and has made an oath to serve The Order to protect humanity, which he would rather die than betray. He would rather not fight or kill any humans, but will defend his allies or follow any and all lawful orders. He believes in sacrifice for the greater good and gave up a chance at a normal life, friendships or love for the two years he spent on covert operations.

I'm going to make another trader, less for the trade and more for the corporate RP, he will be greedy and self serving, dishonest when it saves his skin, he won't be a hardcore douche, the worst thing he'll do is probably bribe officials, police, other corporate traders, etc.

I'm planning to make more but as I barely have time to play the two I already have, it's not really feasible for me to have more.

Feel free to share!

[Hidamari]

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[TheJarl]

I supposse this would also be interesting for you:
http://discoverygc.com/wiki/index.php/Player_Characters

And if you are there, read Tharog Frosthearth's page /shameless self-promotion

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[Bazza]

My character started out as a random nobody freighter captain. 2 years of storyline later and she's somewhat infamous, ever-so-slightly reviled and also the mother of a discobaby fathered by another character in canon - something I'm actually quite proud of.

I found most of the background traits and events for this character were teased out of them through interactions with other people. She was originally a silent, newbie trader...:)Then she gained a voice as my experience playing the game grew. I often created background, family members, history and personality traits on-the-fly as required and jumbled everything together until I created an entire sodding wikipedia page about her.

There's nothing wrong with having only one or a few characters. It allows you to put more effort and time into them and eventually create something that feels "real".

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[aerelm]

My main char, Saerieve, is the char I've put a good chunk of my Disco time on. The char started as a Pirate IDed Freelancer IFFed Roc, or to put it simple - a 'just another pirate, bullying defenseless traders', and what I like about that char is... I didn't plan anything for him. I just drew a rough outline of his personality for myself, then went on the server and started flying around, interacting with random passerby. While most of the interactions were short/aggressive type, some of them actually played a major role in the character's development.

The char's development was pretty much writing up some forum RP about "how it went" on the server, and after a while, it had progressed enough on its own to form a totally different char from what I started with. Right now, that Pirate IDed Freelancer IFFed Roc is a Freelancer IDed IFFless Katana working for Golden Chrysanthemums and the Blood Dragons, and all the key parts of these changes happened on server. So, to put it simple... To answer "How I develop my RP chars", I just create a rough outline of what I want the char to be, then get on server and then wait and see how it develops.

My other char, Gullveig, also had a similar development process. I just started the char as a Merc IDed Excal-Eagle back during the Merc-Rush'„¢ days, and just flew around shooting random targets from random boards. What the char is right now however, is incomparable to what it was when it started. Funny is... That char has the minimal forum RP - A half written bio, a comm channel thread or two, and a two-page group RP -. So imho, although having some background written on forums helps with a char's development, but it's not a must. A char might be poorly-developed even with tons of forum RP, and another might be well-developed without even an RP post on forums. It just depends on how solid the idea behind the char is, and how well it's played on server.

[Osilon]

My reasoning: There are a million billion people in the freelancer universe, signified by NPCs. These NPCs make up the most of the population, leaving us to be the interesting ones.

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A million dollars isn't cool. You know what is cool? A basilisk.

[TheJarl]

My reasoning: There are a million billion people in the freelancer universe, signified by NPCs. These NPCs make up the most of the population, leaving us to be the interesting ones.

That be true. Though I can reason it also a bit differently: There are no normal people. Look in RL, everyone you know has a personality, has had things happened to him or her. My main char is a rebel and professional idiot. I look in RL and I see plenty of people like that as well. There are more weird people than you would think.

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[stardust47]

James.Barett, my Bretonian freelancer, is world-weary but it takes a lot to send him into any kind of emotional extreme.
Catherine.Herstal, my Junker, is full of energy and borderline insane. She is also extremely protective of James and other Junkers.

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[SeaFalcon]

I actually have only one character with a 'real' story.

And no 'normal' people are mostly find in stories, otherwise they are boring.
sleep, eat, work, bar, sleep, eat, work, bar, eat gets pretty the same all the time.

Carrie.Dababi's story, is still taking shape by the day.
Funny how some encounters go I never predicted of happening.

Her story:
http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?sh...c=99681&hl=

In a very short summery:
A girl ending up with the wrong people, doing a 'wrong' job, while believing it's all for a good cause.
Although getting what she is hopping for is still not truly answered.
And only just yesterday a lot has changed.

But I still have to add that part to the story.

[Blodo]

Seems like most of the chars here kind of evolved from nothing as time went on. This is interesting as most of my chars were actually preplanned with a specific purpose in mind. Take for example my RHA characters: true, one of them (Kaspar Meisnerr) was originally used as a "typical grunt" but got reimagined when I got to be the leader of the faction eventually (happened really quickly after I joined, so I didn't have time to build on the first incarnation of the story very much anyway). The other two characters (Gunther Hoerst and Katsuo Okazaki) were created with a specific purpose from the get go and the story was tailored toward that end.

If you compare both of these profiles with some other characters, you will find that they are far less personal than most other ones. They don't dwell on the minute details of the characters' lives, but more on the greater events that they are a part of. And if they do describe the finer details, these are usually the events that made the most significant impact in a character's life, making way for his/her later accomplishments and inevitably leading to other events.

This all in the end reflects my preference for political/military documentary like storytelling.

As to the traits of the characters themselves: I find that the characters that I invest the most time in always reflect some aspect of my own personality - just like everyone else's characters do. But what I always put a lot of effort into is to always make my characters describable in shades of grey, as black and white storytelling is about as boring and predictable as it can get.