Guide to (roleplay oriented) character creation

Guides
1

Yes, this is real and 100% serious.

0. the beginning

Why would would i even do guide to character creation ?

  • This guide is targeted to people who want to create believable character and improve their roleplay experience. I think it might help people develop something more interesting and clarify their already existing ideas.

1.Character creation -basics

I have a few starting points i like to focus at:

  • 1.backstory
  • 2.basics (character race, name, sex, age and experience)
  • 3.traits
  • 4.behavior
  • 5.relations

Ad.1 Backstory

When creating a character its good to think a bit about their past because its usually a great starting point. The rest of the character basics should be cohesive with character past and/or directly linked to it.

  • Do your character have family, friends ? What is their relation with them ?
  • What is the most important memory your character have from their past ?
  • What is their biggest mistake ?
  • What happened in character past that shaped the way they are now ?
  • Is your character driven by their past or would your character rather forget it ?
  • What is your character relation with nanotrasen ? Would it betray the corporation ? Why ? Why not ?

Ad. 2 Basics

Character race, name, sex, age and experience should all be believable and linked all together.
Everything included here is almost entirely roleplay “fluff” and depend on you. However:

  • Experience leads to character age. Similar to real life it’s very unlikely that your character by the age of 18 finished studies and is well practiced in medicine.

  • Character race and sex leads to certain character naming (for more information on naming guideliness check here)

Ad. 3 Traits

This is in my opinion, most important part of character creation.

When creating your roleplay character your goal should not be to create most efficient and most experienced character walking in space. You should accept that you won’t always win. And neither it should be your goal. This is not what roleplay is about.

When deciding on character traits, take into account those negative ones. They spice things up, make your character more believable and often create a challenge for you and for other. As well as make things more “fun”. It can be a nice way to refresh your ss13 experience. Try it!

When choosing the traits of your character you should take into account their backstory.
For example:

  • they were a witness of a traumatic experience ? pacifism is your way to go!
  • Your character had a serious accident ? prosthetic limb!
  • Your character were born with progressing ilness ? brain tumor.
  • Parents of your character were musicians and they taught you how to play guitar ? musician

There is many many possibilities and nothing stops you from creating your own traits that are not listed in game.

Ad 4. Behavior.

Many players tend to play as themselves instead of playing as a character.
As mentioned above, don’t focus on trying not to loose. Try to think how your character would think in certain situation. How would they react. Would they like it ? How would they behave ?

You can use these guideliness to help determine your character behavior:

  • What your character values the most ? Themselves ? friends ? money?
  • What is your character motivation ? money? helping others ? promotion ?
  • How would your character act in danger ? pass out ? scream ? run ? pick up a fight ?
  • What your character enjoys in free time ? partying ? playing games ? reading ?
  • How would your character react if a stranger asked them for help ? Laugh ? ignore? help them ?
  • Would you describe your character as friendly or unfriendly ? aggresive or calm ? intelligent or unintelligent ?

Ad 5 Relations

Huge part of your character is how your character treats other people and your character relations with them. Don’t be affraid of interacting with other characters and creating friendships. After all this game is all about interacting with others. (You can score a lot by just talking and asking other people to help you)

character creation ending note

Don’t forget that ss13 is a game that allows for character growth. You can left some of the questions regarding your character unanswered and let the game lead your character story. Let your character develop and don’t be affraid to modify its traits over time.

small trick:
If you have problems roleplaying as someone else, create a character with traits/behavior similar to your own.

5 Likes
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Unfortunately, even at sage there is limited people to roleplay that deeply. But I’d like to see that kind of feature in game. If people really intents to roleplay, this feature is one of the fundamentals.

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Ngl, this might be more appropriate for hrp. As termaus already mentioned, very, very few people are willing to rp that much. Most people just have a gimmick to their characters.

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This is just asking for people to put Metagruges in their bios.

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This is obviously not what I meant with that. It’s serious misinterpretation.
I intended to show the value of interactions between players. Rather than doing everything by yourself you can ask people who are actually responsible for that.

You can also form friendships or even form current round enemies. But as per rule R2. “IC conflicts will arise, dickish behavior and harassment is not allowed toward other players outside of the scope of such IC conflicts” and R9 " Taking action against another player based on events your current character couldn’t know about, or that occurred in a different round, is called meta-grudging and is against the rules as well."

“Players are not allowed to use information gained in any way other than from their living character’s point of view during an ongoing round”

However, currently our rules allow for a bit of leeway when it comes to friendships with other players. You can safely assume that your character worked on this station before and known some of the characters better than others. (1. This is also great example why you don’t introduce yourself each round to everyone. 2. And as long as you don’t show bias towards them based on previous rounds events)

1 Like
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It’s a great opportunity to start changing.
Start the change from yourself.

Also I noticed that level of Roleplay you experience tends to be equal to the level of Roleplay you are willing to follow yourself.

Which means that if you are willing to interact with other people and initiate conversations, other people will want to initiate with you more frequently too. And you will attract people who are willing to.

At least that’s how it worked with me.

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People who are not willing to put any efford into Roleplay should remain on golden instead.

This guide was made for people who want to enhance their characters,
As well as improve or experience something entirely new in ss13.

There are other ways on how to create your Roleplay believable character, I just presented mine.

Note that this guide is optional but roleplay on sage is not.

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my favorite way of a reason why you would know someone between rounds is “knowing em from space college” or something like that, but i guess its mainly due to character age/background

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"Is your character a person who can stay calm in any situation, regularly ignores orders, doesn’t have a problem with bashing in someone’s skull with a toolbox if needed, never even feels slightly sick at the sight of gore, can take ridiculous amounts of pain without flinching, and is only mildly afraid of death?

If some or all of these points apply to your character chances are you haven’t been roleplaying."

Come to LRP.

1 Like
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I was reading the responses. Do people actually think a basic backstory and believable name is HRP? lol

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no dont tell em to come to lrp they’re too unrobust

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wolves require sheep to eat

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Step 1: create character thats totally believable and fits into the setting cleanly.

Step 2: get Ruko’d

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Yes. People think it’s HRP when I ask for the reason they’re patrolling the halls with a chainsaw.

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This is a fantastic guide, although it’s only viable if you have people to role-play with

“You need two to Tango”, as they say.

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Imagine being able to RP as a character that isn’t just a bastardized version of yourself

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Chaplain literally has an chainsaw for an arm half the time and you bwoink for that?

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Opinion coming through:

I don’t like backstories. They can work in long sessions where there’s plenty of time for them to matter, but in ss13 the rounds are short. Only roleplay that matters to me is how well you can mechanically implement your intentions into actions, and how well those intentions align with someone of your position. Writing prose, “bar RP” or being obstructive on purpose in already short rounds is just bad form.

For example as a member of security, I’d prefer having well organised squads, raids and combat training drills than having people talk fluff or pretend to be handicapped, lenient or otherwise breaking protocol.

Sadly peak roleplay is usually perceived as having a “flaw” and not being good at more than 1 thing.

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Backstory is something that links your character together.

Ofcourse it can work without it, but your character is usually better “builded” (make more sense) if you have that main link (which is backstory)

Furthermore, you don’t always have time to care about your character past in ongoing rounds, but sometimes when there is more time to chill and interact with people it really shines.

At least from my experience.

You could also treat past rounds like your character “backstory” or rather your character past and experience.

In my situation, i chosen for my character to vaguely remember past shifts and traumatic experiences in form of “nighmares” (or when drunk) but she doesn’t treat them as they were real otherwise.

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Background? The secret ingredient is crime
(and depression)