Kiddo — Roleplayer Guild

Hmm, let me see if I can describe this to you in the way that Chubster failed to do so:

I think that what he means by your character “needs to feel a bit more like a person” is that you need a hook, or a, as I like to call them, fantasy that the character fulfils.

Think of your character like a song. Right now the song that you’ve created is okay: there’s nothing technically wrong with it, it just doesn’t make people want to dance. It needs that extra synth line to really put it up there where people care about it.

Or maybe it’s a recipe that needs more ginger. Or a book that needs a twist. Or a movie about two lovebirds which is just like all the other movies, and really could use a gimmick.

We want to have characters who aren’t super-abnormal, but we also want them to be unique. We want to be able to look at them and quickly distill them into their unique parts, what I call fantasies.

Right now your character is a little too average, it’s hard to pick out a fantasy.

For instance, if we look at Theo, his fantasy seems to be “war-torn lady boy.” Or possibly “lady boy with gasmask.” The fantasy for Dallas is “brooding-looking prick with a heart of gold.” They just have these things that make them into a “real” person instead of just a generic person.

Now, a fantasy doesn’t mean that a character is necessarily good. For instance, I’ve run into characters whose fantasy was “dude/tte who blows up everything.” I’m sure you can see the intrinsic balancing issues in a character like that.

Once you’ve found a fantasy, it’s then time to shrink your character down so that the fantasy is apparent. Theo, for instance, is a bad example of this: he has extraneous stuff that takes away from the main story that his character should tell. (I am assuming that Theo’s fantasy is “war-torn lady boy”, since “lady boy with gasmask” is problematic for reasons that I’ll explain to Mono if that is, in fact, what we’re looking at.) What you want to create is a consistent character where, no matter where you look, you see the fantasy.

As an exercise, let’s figure out the fantasy for Avis (since I haven’t looked at that CS in a while and already have some pre-conceived ideas of what the fantasy is from when I first read it).

Hmmm, so, looking at Avis, I’m actually having a hard time, which throws some red flags for me. The feeling I walked away with last time was “Hulk SMASH”, because I saw ways that that can be abused by the GM to create some interesting interaction, but I don’t get the feeling that Mysty was going for that as the primary fantasy. But then, I have a hard time picking out the fantasy because there’s so much in there. This is probably a better case of extraneous stuff than Theo is, so you can see that we don’t require a well-defined fantasy to accept a character (Theo has other problems). What I see here is that Avis is:
1) HULK SMASH
2) Kid who picks himself up by his shoelaces
3) Grumpy-till-you-know-him
4) An atheist who blames the God that he doesn’t believe in for bad things? (not sure how that works)
If Avis were my character, I would prune some of that off until there was a solid single fantasy (probably Guy-who-is-super-loyal-and-if-you-mess-with-his-friends-look-out).

But even with 4 disconnected fantasies, you see how that’s a character that is easier to remember than yours?

Your character does have the inkling of a fantasy in his biography: his relationship with his father and the past related to that is an interesting point. You just need to find some way to spread that out and better-define it, and I think your character would have that thing that it presently lacks.

(Disclaimer: this is in no way meant to bash anyone’s characters, I’m trying to be helpful TT^TT)

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