Writing Multible Characters & Creating New Ones

[Voices of The Deep]

You ever just be scrolling around through google and just...looking at pretty pictures or artwork just to find insperation to make a new tech sub, a new faction, or just whatever? Cause i do. Every single day. Which is why everything i create/do on this site had tooooooons or artwork or imagery to go with it and make it 'pop'. Reading words on a page is fine and good, but seeing art representing your stuff, makes it much more vivid in my opinion cause you can actually visually put things together.


Buuuut thats not what this thread is about. Frankly, i'm mainly just curious. How do you guys come up with new characters? Yet alone write multible alts? I can't do it. I just have Winter and recently Cypher that i threw together in a couple of hours. I find it so hard to write more than one character because with me. Once i make that one character i go ALL OUT, no holding back. And to do that with a Main its hard for me to just...make another and do the same thing, ya know?

Plus...i put 'hella' effort into my characters before they are even made. Backstory, personality, talents, future plans, ect. All that is planned and blueprinted in my head before i even start on a template. Which in itself takes me an entire day.


Like, as we speak. I found this image and now i want to make like...an Anubian or Siviesthian (However the frack you spell it) based on all this art i'm finding...guys halp, i have an addiction. Once i see something pretty i wanna make it into a character.

Help meeeeeeeeeeee.




But seriously. How do yall do it? Whats your method? Where do your ideas for characters come from? I'm curious. All characters i create come from artwork or from an FC. That simple.


Look forward to hearing from yall. Cheers ^^

 

[Gherron Dragovalor]

Gherron (this character) literally just sprung forth from the deep recesses of my mind. He's me in a lot of ways. However, other characters come up in weird ways. I might be looking through google, see a weapon, armor or person that makes me think, "Okay, THAT would be an awesome character to make." Other times, I'm inspired by people around me in real life, or even characters from movies, games, and shows. It's all random for me.

 

[Ryn'Dhal]

I had made my first character, [member=Neiros Starwind], mostly because I just needed -something- to be able to RP with when I first joined. He wasn't well thought out, and honestly, didn't go too far.

Then, there was this little rapscallion here. I had a general concept, but not a race, really. I did some idle-research, wanted to make something abnormal.... And I saw [member=Kitty], around the same time I discovered the Felacatian race. And I decided, "Yeah, that'd be freaking awesome!"

The next character I had a lot of fun with making and writing was [member=Rys'sya]. I wanted to make a Sith, but not a murder-fiend. I wanted a manipulator. A controller. One who sought to subjugate. To lead. Then, I just kinda hunted different types of picture ideas seeking something that fit a good aesthetic for what I wanted to be. But then I realized, Miraluka are freaking amazing, and a few google searches later (the first one made me realize a friend turned off safe-search. Cringe-factor-9000), I found her pictures and fell in love with the character.

Lastly, we have [member=Jessica Justice], whom I literally made because my buddy/fellow writer [member=James Justice] had acquired one Brat, and I was determined to NOT be outdone! XD

 

[Voices of The Deep]

[member="Ryn'Dhal"] : Oh Kitty, i remember her!

Man. Such quality in her writing. I wish she'd come back i've been stalking her threads ffffff.


And ya know. That image i linked above...it's got my imagination going. I might make a species based on that image and we could do some threads. =P

 

[Eralam]

I don't really write multiple characters so much as different aspects of the same one. Sure, they all have their own unique backstories and skills and whatnot, but they're really just fragments of a whole that's been sitting in my head since I was old enough to appreciate writing for fun. When I first started writing, I had this image in my head of this ultimate badass: swordsman, soldier, leader, mad scientist, arms dealer, pilot, the list goes on. He was everything I wanted to be and more, the embodiment of childhood wish fulfillment. It didn't help that I read a lot of bad YA novels at the time, which fed the idea that you could have this perfect character who was everything surrounded by a bunch of inferiors that depended on them for their very existence. Severe case of Chosen One syndrome, if you will.

I got older and realized that most of the stuff they shoveled into our brains in the school libraries was pure horse crap, and that if the characters in the stories I wrote for myself and my friends actually took the time to master everything I said they could do, they'd be in their 80's by the time they finished. I started adding flaws, making the characters more focused, that sort of thing. It was still a bunch of juvenile crap, but hey, I was in middle school.

Once I get into RP, I reverted back to my old ways because early JvS was an absolute madhouse where only the ubermensch stood a chance. As time went on and things got more sane, I killed off the original and spun off a couple of different characters based on the fragments of the original and, well, here we are.

 

[Ilias Nytrau]

How do I do it? Ah, well, to be honest, I don't. I can't write every character on my docket on a consistent basis, so it becomes whatever character(s) I'm feeling most lead to write. Some become mains, some become secondary.

I might go through a time where I can't write a certain category of characters (in recent times, that was darksiders!) but I have all the fire for another category (the "good" guys, for example). Other times, the focus is on my characters' relationships, or... whatever. Really, so many different things drive what characters I'm writing and why, but after seventeen years as a roleplayer, I've found my want to create new characters has slowed down a lot, leaving me with more of a desire to focus on what I have.

None of this does anything to solve the stupidity of my desire to write on two to four different RP sites at once, with as little free time as I actually have. Some habits are just hard to break, I guess!

....

Now, where do I get character ideas? Mostly, it's just... discussions with other RPers, other IPs, or finding a playby at random that I feel absolutely must be used. Jannik Morlandt, for example, came from finding on another site that no-one had claimed Hugh Dancy, and is nowadays one of my best characters. You never really know which ideas will flourish, and which ones will flop.

 

[JD Lykaios]

Ooooooh, I feel ya on this one. Sometimes I'll see a piece of art, get inspired, and waste a few hours thinking about the different stories or characters that it could represent. Since I have ADD, it usually results in a mess of thinking. A sort of monster-web of ideas that also somehow manages to look like a Jackson Pollock painting. For me, the problem is less "focusing on one character, but going super in depth" and more of "trying to remember and work on the plot for 16 novels, the history/details for 897 characters, and still have enough time to sleep because curse this feeble mortal body". If I didn't have an uncanny memory when it comes to writing, I'd probably be drowning in half-there ideas scrawled on missing scraps of paper.
'Course, I'm half-drowning in a sea of mostly-there ideas as it is.

 

[Nikolas Faselli]

Writing multiple characters is difficult. That's why most of my characters end up just sitting in around, not being used at all. But when I do write a character I have a huge inspiration for, I go all in as well.

I never plan anything for my characters anymore. I've done that in the past and it left me unable to write for a while, made me really consider leaving Chaos and destroyed the character which had the most potential out of all of my characters. After that, I've stopped doing that. Even when I start writing the bio, I have no idea who my characters are. I plan nothing out beforehand. And when I get to writing the bio, I just improvise, write automatically.

I feel like this way you can write the most authentic characters, at least in my case.

But how do I come up with characters? Well, I either have an idea of something I've wanted to do for a while (pilot, Mandalorian, businessperson, etc.) or I just see some nice artwork and instantly associate it with a character.

Simple.

 

[Ellie Mors]

How to write more than one character:

• Divide days up for each character if you can't churn out posts like a spambot. (I'm looking at you, @Cira)
• Limit threads per character so you're not swamped. Alternatively limit characters if having 2 per character is overwhelming.
• Only write characters that aren't completely spur-of-the-moment ideas that weren't totally thought through and don't really fit into SW.
• Only attempt if you have free time.

How I create new characters:

• I base some on myself in a SWRP role. (If I were rich and had tons of clothes and a nice car, I'd totally be Lily.)
• I base some on past characters. (Lily is a mesh of Silara(who I based on me) and Alric, as she's their daughter and thus would logically be similar to both)
• I base some on (but never copy outright) characters in pop media. Copying characters in terms of just carbon-copying them for the sake of writing a SW version to satisfy an impulse or urge will only end up with you scrapping the character when you no longer have that urge. Basing one on the character, like saying they have a similar personality and maybe look similar or similar set of skills, but mostly making a new character (see above two bullet points), will ensure you stay interested and emotionally invested with the character.
• Take a species from either Chaos or canon and use it as a base template and fill in the blanks with a generic character and start from 100% scrap.

 

[Bolt]

I come up with the ideas first. There have been a few minor occasions where a character was based on a pre known idea, but as Braith said, they died down...

Zaiden James-Greyson was my first char on the site, and second longest living. The idea behind him however? It was to wing it. I knew he was going to be a stealthy assassin, that was it. So with that in mind I figured, well then the avatar needs to be dark and shadowy. Looked up a few people, but within a few minutes settled on Gandy. The only time he changed faces was during his bout as an Andolith. In the long run, he was hated by the masses because he was written to be the best fighter (don't set real goals. Mediocre ones are fine, but that whole, 'I wanna be the very best'? Yeah don't do that.)

Damien was supposed to look good, but be slightly darker. With time his character changed progressively darker, and with each next step he Masked his appearance with a new look. But what made him was the urge to have a mentalist (shout out to Tirdarius)

I have had several that I put on hold, including Nerius, Han'zel, etcetera. But that stems from wanting to give a few my full attention rather than simply short handing every char I have.

Tempist was a spur between Damien (Fos) and Deneve Verd, who also has a twin sister. She is the emotional untrained powerhouse, to counter her sisters collected restraint.

Lastly Valashu. I have attempted an archer character for three years now on this site. Couldn't make any of the predecessirs stick. But then I read a boom, kind of enjoyed the main character, and decided to snipe that name. From there it was a matter of adapting him into the drug addicted, cigarette smoking, rum loving, trash talker he is. Now he spends his nights attempting to be a superhero all the while during the day making an ass out of himself.

 

[Jsc]

[member="Queen Sovereign"]

Just keep writing. That's the secret. Never. Stop. Writing.

Big picture. The game is not about characters, avatars, profiles, tech, factory subs, judges, admins, doms, invz, rebelz, or blah blah blah. Nope. It's just writing.

Never stop writing.

 

[Micah tol Powl]

I have something of a rotation going, so as muse dies for one character I probably have some inspiration for writing another.

But, I don't claim to have a main. I'll write Boo for a little while, then stop writing him. Write Zak for awhile, then put him on the backburner. Write SJ or Three or Jon Jon for a piece, and usually when I'm done with that I'm ready to pick up Boo again.

Then there's this character. But I'm still figuring out how to write this character so I'm not sure how he'll figure into my rotation yet.

 

[Haruka Zanzamoto]

[member="Kiriko Howlingfjord"]

I have a rotation too, but at the same time, I'm starting to lose the rationality I had about it since I've been making characters and updating old ones to the point where I'm angry that I can't get rid of ones I completely lose muse and want for. I PMed Valiens about it too now.

 

[Micah tol Powl]

[member="Ryan Arthmael"]

Don't forget you can re-name a subaccount in the Rank Request thread. That way, you can recycle the subaccounts for the characters you no longer write.

Case in point, I used to write BB-4001A, Polydroxol, and a Mando whose name escapes me now... and in their place, we have a bear!

 

[Haruka Zanzamoto]

[member="Kiriko Howlingfjord"]

I know, it just infuriates me that we can't clean a list because of something I forgot about.

 

[Darth Carnifex]

Do what I do.

Write only one character.

Forever.