Dingle's Character Guide

[Dingle]

 

DISCLAIMER: Some of the content in this guide will consist of my personal opinion stemming from years of roleplaying experience. I implore all of you to interpret the points and topics in any way you see fit. This is a guide, not a rulebook.

Welcome to my (hopefully) comprehensive guide on how to write characters for roleplaying purposes. Here, I will be giving several tips and tricks that I have picked up over the years, to help you improve your character writing skills, which will ultimately lead to better roleplay, more immersive experiences and memorable moments. My idea of creating this guide comes from rummaging through the many new character pages after the recent lore-wipe, many of which I personally thought could see some improvement. Now ideally, this guide would have been posted before everyone had to make new characters, but perhaps you can use it next time around, or to improve on the character you have already written. I am very well aware that this community consists of many different skill levels of roleplaying, and this guide is solely here to help you get better at writing characters to ultimately improve yours and everybody else's experience here in the community. I will try to be careful giving straight up do's and dont's, but instead give an idea of how you get yourself in the mindset of creating a character, what you need to pay attention to, points you need to adress, and the overall sculpting of the role you are about to play. With all that said, I hope you find some if not all of my points interesting and useful. Enjoy reading!

 

1. I want to make a new character. Where do I start?

You have decided to either pick up a pen and paper, or have sat down at your keyboard ready to start thinking up a new character. Firstly, before we get to any writing, sit down for a minute and think your new character idea through. By no means does it have to be a fully fleshed out character, but a simple idea like; I want my character to be mentally unstable, I want my character to fight the good fight, I want my character to only think about himself. These are the sorts of ideas that can get you going in creating a new character concept.

An important point I want to make here, is to avoid basing your character around an occupation. One of the most used character ideas on DayZRP is ye' good ol' soldier, and I'll use the soldier character as an example here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing a soldier, or a character with military experience, but my point here is to refrain from letting an occupation carry the bulk of who your character is. Behind every soldier there is a man or a woman. Picking an occupation as the definition of who your character is, you often forget to adress a lot of defining traits about your character. In the case of a soldier:
- Who and how were you brought as a child, and who did you look up to?
- Any early losses or gains?
- Why did your character decide to join the army, instead of getting any other "normal" job?
- Any life changing events before or after joining the army?
It leaves the people that read through your character page with a lot of unanswered questions when they don't see any points similar to these adressed. All in all, just make sure that you're careful in letting your characters occupation define them. There should be more to a character. Ultimately, the more sure you are of who your character is, the better you are able to play them, and in turn, better roleplay will come from them.

Before you pick your nationality, ethnicity and occupation, it's a good idea to first get the concept of your character down in general, and then decide on how you can get your character to fit in a certain part of the world. Take some time now to write down some bullet points about who you're going to play.

2. Emotion, feeling and quirks.

Unless you're planning on playing a psycopath, you're going to have to think about how your character reacts in regards to emotion. It's the most human part of us, and stepping outside your own way of dealing with emotion in real life to play a character is both difficult but also fun. Say you in real life, are a person that doesn't like dealing with conflict, roleplay would allow you to experiment with having a short fuse and bursting out with what's on your mind. I will get into the importance of constraints in regards to you as a player later on, but for now, try to think about your characters emotional profile, and how you're going to deal with certain emotions. Does your character have a hard time coping with the outbreak? Is your character afraid of the new life they will have to adjust to? Are they courageous and optimistic? How do they deal with anger, sadness and loss? The more you're able to pick up on situations that involve emotional responses and capitalize on them in roleplay, the better your roleplay will ultimately be, both for you and the ones around you.

Having a character that is good at everything, always careless and unresponsive to the reality of the world around them often ends up being stale. It's not fun to roleplay a character that has no flaws, nothing they can't do and nothing they're not good at. Theoretically, it would be best for your survivability if you didn't have any flaws or quirks, but realistically that's not the case for anyone, and it's not realistic to the world and situations we're trying to portray. Quirks and flaws are important in any character, and ultimately, it'll help your character stand out and create roleplaying situations that the players around you can jump on and play off of. Say for example you have a character that doesn't know how to use a firearm. That would create scenarios in which case you would have to have others around you protect you. It would also lead to a several roleplaying scenarios where you could be taught how to use a firearm, as well as the potential misfire or malfunctioning. Alternatively you could be a shy or socially awkward, also leading to fun and interesting conversations. I can't stress how much disadvantages benefit your roleplay, and how important it is to have them.

Try to take some time now to write down your emotional profile, along with a few quirks and things your character is inexperienced with.

3. Character backstory

Now that we have adressed some keypoints in who your character is going to be, we can start hitting those keys and come up with a backstory. I like to structure my backstories in 3 basic sections. You don't have to, but they give the reader and yourself an easy way to understand the structure of your character. The sections are as follows:

- Childhood and upbringing (Child)
Here you should establish what early influences your character has had. Who were their parents, and how did they treat them? Who was your first friends and what did they do with you? What are some of the first things you were taught? Did you feel loved and at home, or did you feel set aside and unwelcome? These things will build the foundation for who your character is, and how they will go about themselves in the next section. Try to think about the points you have written down in 1. and 2. and try to come up with an appropriate event or path that will lead your character into becoming how you want them to be.

- Formation and early life (Teens)
Here you should establish how your character is developing. How are they first starting to tackle the world with the mindset, morals and treatment they have recieved during their upbringing? How does your character treat people, and how do people treat your character? Have they achieved anything? Has there been a change of surrounding for them, e.g: having moved countries or moved away from home? Have they lost or found something? All of these things continue to build on your character, and help set the scene for how your character is heading into adulthood, and the decisions they might make there. I like to throw in a life changing event, or some other curve ball like and injury or the loss of a loved one, and explaining how my character dealt with said change. Try to build on the points you have written down in the previous section (Childhood and upbringing), in creating a story for where your character will eventually end up.

- Voyage into the world (Adulthood)
Here we should reach a closing on who your character has become through their life, leading to where we ultimately start off when you spawn in on your new character for the first time. The last thing we need to do is explaining what your character has done with everything they have learned in their life so far, along with how and why they have gotten to where they are today. Now we can concisely tell a defining story of who your character is and has become, and tie together the paths we have been building in the two previous sections up with who you wanted your character to be. From here, all you need to do is figure out a way for your character to have found themselves in the apocalypse, whether it was business, pleasure or you lived where the outbreak took place.

When writing your backstory, I highly recommend writing it in first person. Try not to explain, instead tell a story. Writing your backstory in first person forces you to get in the head of the character you are about to play. Make an effort out of trying to write the same way your character would talk and conduct themselves. A good way of doing that is imagining you have someone in front of you that you have to tell your story too. Make it interesting, exciting and living. Sprinkle in some memories of things you remember, good or bad. A mental image of something you have seen. Be colorful and descriptive, and you will end up with a very believable backstory.

4. Longevity

Now that you have started writing your character, let's talk about something that will keep you attatched and involved with your character for hours to come. Usually when you burn out from a playing a character, it's because they stop moving and evolving. Adressing the longevity of your character early on will help you cope with getting stuck in your character's development. Optimally, you want your character to constantly be moving, evolving and growing. Being static and set in stone is going to get boring, and the people you roleplay with around you are also going to enjoy seeing your character change over time. It makes other people as well as yourself feel part of a story, and thus it makes people remember you and your development in tandem with their own stories.

A good way of providing longevity for your character is going to be goals and milestones. Those quirks and disadvantages we talked about in 2., are going to partially help with this. Having things that your character is bad at is only going to leave room for improvement. Improvement you can choose to roleplay. Things like will give you something early on that you can work on with your character. The same thing goes for emotions. Is your character bad at keeping their temper in check? Strive to have that change over time, whether it improves or gets worse. Make an effort out of developing your characters traits and remember that your traits and how you handle them can go both ways. They can get better, but they can definitely also get worse. 

Make sure that almost everything about your character is subject to change. A good way of thinking about this is having your character's opinions and morals in a bag with you that you carry around, instead of being said morals and opinions. If you find morals and opinions that are more interesting or better than the ones you already have, swap them out. Let your character be influenced by the people and the world around them. Try to put yourself in situations that might be life changing. It's important for your character to sometimes be wrong and make the wrong decisions. That's where learning experiences come from, and ultimately it's going to lead to development of your character.

Take some time to think about your characters goals and milestones. What would they like to achieve? What would they like to get better at? What would they like to change around them?

5. Closing thoughts

Now you should have a pretty good idea of who your character is, how you're going to play them, a good backstory, and how you plan on developing them for the time to come. Hopefully the points I have brought up have been helpful, and have shed some lights on some aspects of roleplaying you weren't familiar with or haven't focused too much on previously. The more aware you are of who you're playing, and the more aspects of your character you take into your own hands and adress, the more convincingly you'll be able to play your character. Having a fleshed out character is going to no doubt improve your experience with roleplaying. After all, you're going to spend all of your time on the server being in the head of your character. I hope you will surpass this guide and strive to become even more in depth and talented in the future, but hopefully this guide put some solid ground beneath your feet to get running on in your character writing. There are definitely more and different ways roleplaying and character creation can be tackled and approached, and I am by no means an expert. As mentioned, this is by no means a recipe or a rulebook for character creation. Instead it's meant to serve as an eyeopener to the different aspects of character creation that you can choose to focus on and pay attention to. I hope you had fun reading through my guide, and creating your character. Best of luck with writing, and I hope to meet your character in game!

You're always welcome to DM me about any questions you might have in relations to this guide, as well as feedback for character ideas and concepts. I won't however read through your background story or write them for you.

Having written this entire guide, I feel like I have to put my own character page on the line. Almost all of the points I bring up in this guide I personally use for my own character creation, so by all means have a peek at mine to see how I do it: https://www.dayzrp.com/characters/display-296/

- Dingle

Edited June 8, 2020 by Dingle

[Humanitas_]

Well done, my friend.

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Also..

Edited June 4, 2020 by Humanitas_
Misclick

[Aisling]

I approve. Good work.

[Eddie]

Good shit Dingle! This is a good guide man  !

[Dingle]

22 hours ago, Humanitas_ said:

-lmao-

19 hours ago, Aisling said:

-snip-

15 hours ago, Eddie said:

-snip-

Thank you all for the kind words!

[ImKrullix]

good work my boy