I am currently making this post to sort of keep myself awake a bit longer so maybe I can catch the Nintendo Switch presentation, so let's just get right to it shall we?
One of the problems I struggle with when writing is simply coming up with a new character. Or worse, I write a "new" character and realize they are a copy of another character. While working on paintings or other sorts of work, I recently have been enjoying watching Dice, Camera, Action with Dungeons & Dragons. If you do not know what it is, it is a stream in which people play Dungeons & Dragons. One of the players goes by the name of ProJared and he made a video called "Let's Make a Character Together!" In this video, he goes into depth about how one can make a D&D character. I watched this video with the thought of "Sweet! Now I can make my own character!" I ran into a problem... I have no way of playing D&D.
Instead of getting sad about not being able to use this for D&D, I decided I would do almost the same thing, but with writing. It actually has helped a lot and it surprised me. I have currently made about four characters for a radio drama I would love to make one day. I've decided to sort of pass this skill along:
To start, you can either use a D&D character sheet or simply write out the abilities in a handy little Notebook for future reference.
You can either follow how you would normally make a D&D character, or do what I did and literally just roll a twenty-sided die until I filled up with all of the boxes... I never said I was a professional.
From there, I usually decide what their Race will be based on their abilities. For example, I made a medical fairy with a slightly high arcana and a high medicine.
The name usually sort of comes to me once I start picturing how the character will look. Another thing I do a lot of is read Baby Name books. Those usually are for the characters I need to have a pretentious name that means something more than meets the eye. Other times, I go to a name generator site (particularly this one) and I roll my die again and go with whatever name it gives me, or not. I seldom follow my advice.
Finally, I sort of come up with a background for the character. I admit that sometimes, it's sort of difficult to come up with a background for a character. Usually for my male characters, I find myself to be stumped and so I end up just putting them off until one day I force myself to sit down and just write out a few backgrounds they might come from and then go from there.
I could go on for hours about how much I love making characters, I'd much rather save more of that energy for another post going into better details and maybe even using some of my actual characters as examples and explain how they came to be.
Until Next Time,
Kathleen
Comments
Post a Comment