Hello Reader,

One of the many rookie mistakes that I see when people create a new character is that they don’t look at characters and or guilds that already exist. Why would I consider this a mistake? Well with out knowing roughly what your going to encounter during RP, you can end up designing a character that just simply isn’t going to work. A few examples.

A villain character while the majority of the RP population play as villains.

A stalwart hero in a setting that has had no war.

A mercenary that has no guilds that wish to hire them.

This can be easily avoided by going to your local RP forum and have a read through the current guilds or character bios that are available. This might show that a certain type of RP is being neglected (perhaps for good reason, so do more research) and should be filled. No matter how hard you look at it, you can’t RP without other people. If you can, good for you. So it’s best to find something that is different which is going to attract people to RP with you and also find you interesting.

While on the subject of interesting, I will cover this more in my next post which will cover a more in depth guide regarding character design, do not be afraid of, and in fact please be encouraged to make a really standard character. You’ll be surprised by the lack of dull and normal characters that exist and I find people are drawn to these ‘normal’ characters more so than the ‘special snowflakes’. Nothing is worse than engaging in some light random RP to find out you’ve accidentally walked into a mine field of drama and that you’re in the presence of a girl who knows 12 types of martial arts and a paragraph of special information regarding her unique and shocking appearance that the game engine doesn’t support.

I digress, The other important thing to look for are guilds. Guilds will be the corner-stone of your RP identity and a good RPer will connect their character to the guild so that they become one. Obviously this is required, but if you plan on making a military based character then he should belong to a military based guild. You should also avoid having your character clash with the goal of the guild. Going back to military based guild. I’ve seen too many laid back angsty anime inspired characters join military guilds and completely missing the point of the guild which is ‘disciplined and uniformed’. These characters tend to ruin the immersion and cause unintentional grief to the guild.

If you have a character idea and it looks like the environment is less than perfect. Don’t be afraid to make a few changes here and there with your character, the majority of the characters information should only be known to you anyway, and should be pretty easy to change on the fly if something was overlooked, or you have decided that the pirate guild looks much more fun, making your originally altruistic character into a casual sinner – with morals.

So in summary. Make sure enough character archetypes exist for your intended RP to work as well as to make sure there isn’t too many of said archetype, check for the appropriate guild for your character and if not available, perhaps start one?

Thank you for reading.