Membership The diversity of "your cast"

[Josie 198]

So, how diverse is your cast? I speak not only of skin color or origin, but also gender (or lack thereof), sexuality, age, religion, occupation, personality, and even species. There's a lot of different kinds of diversity, after all! Do you tend to make characters that share the same set of traits? What can you do to increase the diversity of your characters? Why is diversity in RP important (or not important) to you?

 

I lean strongly towards making male characters in the age range of 30 - 50. I simply prefer males to females, and that's the age range that typically allows for the most flexibility in most of the settings I play in. It's also not uncommon for those characters to be an enforcer of something- either of the law, religion, or even the enforcer for a criminal organization.

 

That all being said, I also REALLY enjoy playing characters that are very young (as in fifteen or younger) and very old characters (seventy or older). On most sites where I play more than one character, they tend to be about the third I make. I like to put these characters in positions that allow for a lot of surprise as they grow and eventually show their cards, because children and the elderly are pretty consistently underestimated.

 

In certain settings, I also really enjoy playing characters whose genders are basically decided for them by their profession. For example, in one game series, anyone of any sex can join the military but they are automatically considered to be men, then. It's fun to play an anatomical female in that position- or one who has left that life, but hasn't known anything different and has the chance to learn about femininity (if they choose). 

 

There's not a common ethnicity, religion, or sexuality for my characters. I suppose it can be said that I often play characters of a certain personality "type," but I tend to play what is needed and that's often bad guys- so I play a lot of those. 

 

In order to increase the diversity of my cast, I tend to look at what I currently have the most of on a site and then consciously make the polar opposite of that for a new character. If I'm playing all males, for example, I will absolutely make a female as my next character. If I'm playing a bunch of grunts, I'll create someone who's the brain instead of the brawn. If I'm playing too many clever characters, I'll make an airhead. You get the picture.

 

Diversity of characters is important to me not only because I like to see a lot of different kinds of people represented, but also because the more diverse my own characters are, the wider range of plots and stories I get to write with other people. I like to have lots of different kinds of opportunities, and there's no better way to make that happen than by having a very diverse bunch of characters!

[KARA BELLA 18]

Truthfully I think in a lot of those ways mentioned by character's lack diversity.  Right now on one site i have five characters and three of them are female and two of them are male.  The ages range from late twenties to sixties.  None of them are a person of colour, they are all straight, religion wise I don't really know, only one of them has ever went to a church of any kind and that was when he was growing up.  He grew up Catholic.

 

Species wise my characters are always humans just because the only types of sites I join are ones that only have humans.  Their jobs are always pretty diverse.  I have a character who is a former Navy SEAL and he now owns a bar, I have a character who is a photographer and owns her own studio, one character co owns the family ranch with her brother.  Another is a retired teacher and one is an er doctor.

 

For the most part I avoid playing characters that are in high school mostly because I like the plots I can do with older characters more.  However I have played them in the past.  I just don't really like playing those kinds of characters anymore though.

 

I am not actually sure how I could expand my diversity of characters except to go out of my comfort zone because I tend to stay inside it when making characters.  I would need to work on that to make my characters more diverse probably.

 

Honestly I have not even thought of why diversity in roleplaying is important to me.  

[Morrigan 1,826]

For me it depends on the site. On the main site I'm currently on I have:

1 of nearly every type of creature.

Primarily females (although I have 2 more males in the works).

They range from teenager to mid fifties.

I lean a little heavily on white people but have diversity.

For the most part my characters grew up where the setting is but a few are from foreign places or other parts of the country.

They all have their own motivations.

Primarily heterosexual.

Personality wise I think I'm the least diverse. I like happier characters but I have some pretty dark ones but there is certainly more optimists in my groups.

 

I like to play out stories so whether or not there is diversity I don't care. As long as I get to play.

[VirusZero 176]

Most of the characters I've played tend not to be human. (At least not fully anyway. Loads of hybrids... Even more pure machines.)

 

Beyond that though I don't care about other factors. In fact I don't even consider sexuality at all. (In a few cases I've even had characters themselves remark that they never think of sex or human connection... again simply because the human element isn't present.)

 

Spoiler

 

I mean what does it matter to a character about race, gender or sexuality when all of that can be changed with relative ease? I mean a male robot that wants to be female can simply have their processor/memory core installed in a female frame. (Or programming downloaded. Or even have their body remodelled.) Skin colour can be just as easily changed. Sexuality could be as simple as a few lines of code. 

It means nothing to them or anyone else since the conversion is perfect. It's not like with humans where, currently, any kind of transformation takes years and lots of sculpting. (Or is impossible entirely like with sexuality... )

 

Age, for machines, is just a number and means little. A robot that's been maintained (in this universe) can live over 200 years without problem (possibly longer even though none have ever done so). So if they're 45 years old it doesn't necessarily mean anything compared to a machine that may have just rolled out of the factory. 

 

 

When I have played (half) humans... I've played both men and women. Though again I never consider sexuality because I don't really go for sex in roleplay. I don't do romance stuff (I've been told I'm good at it... but I hate writing that stuff). 

 

[CovertSphinx 710]

90% of my characters are female. I've got...maybe 98% straight just out of sheer happenstance (I don't plan sexuality, I let it flesh out in RP), and I suppose most would be white by assumption- though I wonder if ethnicity really counts when it comes to inhuman creatures. Which is about....85% of my characters.

 

I never thought about diversity aside from character history and personality before tbh.

Edited January 18, 2017 by CovertSphinx

[jenneral_jennson 154]

The majority of mine are males and hetero. Ethnically they're pretty diverse. Species wise, I tend to play the fae or wolves that are on CW and have a couple of the other species but it's pretty one sided in that regards. 

[Death Kitten 200]

My first character for any given RP I join tends to be female. In Star Trek in particular, there seems to be an over abundance of male characters, so this happens to help balance the load though it's not the primary reason I usually start with a female character.

 

When I start getting into NPCs, I probably still skew a little female, but I have a pretty wide offering of male characters. The only characters I've explored outside the male-female assumed binary were Andorians, partially because I'm afraid of getting something wrong. I did have one androgynous background character in the shared history of a couple characters, but never really got much of a chance to explore them.

 

I have a lot of species in my range though: Andorians, Klingons, Ferengi, Tellarite, Trill, Orion, Nausicaan, Romulan, and various mixes of those and others. I love exploring these cultures and expanding on them. In the few games I've joined that weren't Trek, I try to strike a balance between playing with cultures I'm somewhat directly familiar with (German, because the family of my grandmother on my mom's side was German, Serbian because the family of my grandmother on my dad's side is Serbian, etc), or I'll cautiously try to explore cultures I have less familiarity with but try to research enough to not just make a total mess of it.

 

Age range tends to be mostly 20s-30s, but that's partially a product of the environment. Star Trek tends to select for those ages in ship crew, and the fast promotion schedule in some fleets means there are a lot of really really young brass running around. I try to stretch out in my NPCs, and I've got a few that have been around long enough that they've aged outside of that range, and when creating a new character for a role that would normally be held by someone older, I aim for an age that's appropriate. I haven't really played kids, though I've done some background writing for characters when they were younger... and one of my characters has a son who's not quite two yet, so I get to write for him when he's with his father during off-duty times.

 

My widest range seems to be sexuality. I've got heterosexuals, omnisexuals, an asexual, with various levels of sex drive across the board. I also dabble in various kinks among my characters — some are painfully vanilla, others have particular preferences... and well, this isn't a mature area, so we'll just leave it at that.

Edited January 18, 2017 by Death Kitten
typos >.<

[Elena 546]

I write more males than females, and more Catholic people of Latin-based descent. (I don't say Latino, which means now only Latino- American, when Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese are also of Latin-based origins). The ages vary, the skin colour varies, and when I said "more" doesn't mean "only". I have people of various religions, from voudou and santeria to Anglican, Jewish or Muslim. I have Scottish, Irish, Malgashy, Turkish and other ethnicity people.

 

Most of them, however, are underdogs and mixtures - either the product of two cultures and in peace with it, or born in a religion and at maturity confronted with another and trying to make peace with it too (e.g. a shrewd English merchant who was raised Catholic, but got Anglican at maturity because Catholics were persecuted, Catholic = Jacobite and it wouldn't have allowed him to succeed in life; a Jewish or Muslim who is now living in 1720s West Indies, having to hide his faith and pretend to conform; a Mexican Catholic who is familiar with the fact that the Criollos and Chinos on the plantations have kept a part of their traditions, incorporating them into their way of Catholic faith, and so on.)

 

I write a purple dragoness too. The playby is the one from Shrek.

[Verridith 66]

Diversity is huge on my board - and even among my rather lengthy list of characters, I embrace it completely. xD I have species all across the board, with a massive array of traits, personalities, genders and abilities. Dragons, humans, elves, gryphons, demons, hybrids, a multitude of custom species, and SO many more.

 

I have a sweetheart (sometimes depressive alcoholic) wolf-affinity xeriin (basically, human with animal features) who is soul-bonded to a dragon golem. A part-human child who is scared of almost everything, but wants to someday be a bard or performer and tell stories/sing in front of huge crowds. A gryphon who looks terrifying and shares a soul with a demon, but would do anything to protect a child or innocent - including horrible, horrific, soul-shattering things to those who harm or threaten said child. A shadowbeast shapeshifter who spends 90% of his time as a human with a pet digimon-like creature and likes to spend time trying to talk to his son who hates him, or sit on mountaintops and watch the world go by in peace. A dragon who is as evil as they come, and a demon who should be evil because he's the Lord of goddamn Hell but who decided he was gonna be a really cute daddy instead.

 

I could keep going on, but. xD I love finding new avenues to explore, new types of characters, bring in what I haven't done before or haven't thought of yet. I do have my favorites, however - young adult/middle adult males of humanoid races who share attachments to other characters (or anything I can destroy or hurt LOL) are my favorite things. Two of my most prolific characters are elves, one the equivalent of mid twenties and the other is late teens/early twenties, Caele and Arnus. Both started off as rather average, but I've spent YEARS writing them, and they have an incredible amount of history behind them now. Just as an example, both started off as children! And now Caele is about to become a father and I'm having a difficult time picturing lil Arnie as an adult. Haha! And these are elves, which means they age rather slow.

 

I have a few new concepts I want to try out someday with characters, and probably will keep getting and making new concepts, because making characters is what I do best. First and foremost is a War-Kingdom demon pirate who's mute and utilizes blood magic. Has a huge ship that sails through the scarlet seas of his home Realm. He's been floating around in my head for months now, and I can't wait to put him into play!

 

TL;DR I should not be allowed the freedom I am allowed because I love diverse characters and I have too many already. Lmao!

[Guest Archaic Cyborg]

I avoid playing younger characters, i.e below 30s, as the plots and interactions between older and more 'experienced' age groups are much more satisfying. I have zero interest and patience for, say, high school scenarios. And it is my bad experience with players who just write party animal drunkards who get away with everything except for when it's convenient. pffft

 

I always have a mix of modern humans, historical, beast/anthro/whatever. Different quirks, habits, goals, personality, though I do often play 'sidekicks'. But that doesn't necessarily mean cowards, weaklings and the like. I don't pay much attention to sexualities, they don't define my characters. Like... hair colour doesn't. It's just THERE, in the background, unless it's for a setting where sexuality can get you hanged.

 

I really don't like playing the same personality/background as several characters; my interest quickly goes out the window. 'been there, done that' to the extreme. If my character voices all start sounding the same, meh. I feel the same way when a film actor or actress essentially plays The Same Character in all their roles.

[Kit the Human 759]

I have ten entire characters.

 

Three of them are straight. The rest bi or gay because that's what I want to write.

 

I have a sausage fest of cis dudes. Six of them.

 

In fact, I have all of the cis characters. I shall make a mental note to fix that.

 

As people, they feel different to me? I've got a some who just want a nice home and a peaceful life. I have another who wants to die as dramatically as possible. I have another who wants to eat his dad and best friend. There's one who wants to expand her empire. Another who wants to utterly destroy his captives.... so they're various degrees of ruthless, violent/peaceful, ambitious/content. They're from different social circles, have different ethnicity's and interact with their gender, sexuality, ambitions, abilities and so on based on those intersections.

 

I do notice some similarities between some of them and try to work against that as much as I can.

[Freya 9]

I try to get some diversity in my cast, but right now most of my characters are white so I should really do something about that. Something I need to get better at really. 

 

I tend to have an equal mix of male and females, though I do lean more heavily towards women than men which is weird since my male characters often ends up being my favorites. I've also got one non-binary character. 

 

When it comes to sexuality I feel I've got a nice diversity, I do tend to lean heavily towards bisexual characters by default, but I do have gay, lesbian and straight characters as well. 

 

Most of my characters are in the age range 20-50 so quite broad xD I do find it fun to sometimes play really old or really young characters as well. I think the average age of my characters is probably around 30-35. It does depends a bit on the site I'm playing on though. Right now I'm itching to make a young teenager actually, that would be fun c: 

 

When it comes to personality I try to play a lot of different kinds, but I admit I do tend to play sweet-hearts. I'm really bad at being evil, which unfortunately translates to being bad at playing evil characters. (I feel irrationally guilty!!! >.<) Like I do have a guy who is a fairly ruthless guy, but even he has a soft spot. I'm just bad at playing evil characters, though I do try. Other than that I think I've got a nice diversity of characters that are calm and collected, or some who are mischievous and delights in chaos, or some who are even cowards who'd do anything to save their own skin, and a woman who is ambitious, bloodthirsty and very protective of those she considers hers. 

[Hysteria 56]

I enjoy writing characters that aren't typically well liked or powerful. Derpy drug addicts with an age range of 19-20's, child stars who get the boot, broken marriages, the bad and good sides of different communities (ex: I once wrote a person who pretended to be homosexual on LGBT focussed site and the plot was incredible!)

 

I dunno. I just hate writing generic and predictable characters. I want a fighter who will run from battle, a mage who could stab someone in the eye if provoked...a dog who for once CAN'T speak english. Though by now, I'm sure everyone has little quirks. I just take it to the extreme...or as extreme as realistically possible.

 

Now, as far as actual ranges: Like Morrigan, it depends on the site.

 

I can write anywhere from 15-40

I tend to go with females but I also enjoy writing males if I have a good idea for them

I love species that aren't normally used, like spirits

I enjoy playing the good cop who doesn't know he's corrupt in the eyes of others

 

All that stuff.

[nianaris 0]

I focus more on personalities than appearance when I create a character. It defines how they will interact with other characters more than the way they look. I've played only like two girls and the rest male, all ranging from 16 to 33(not counting the dragon who's 1300+) years old.

[AmberE 2]

Personally, I don't really worry about diversity when creating a character. They are who they are, and their face is just one they liked. I will admit that I do only play females, and generally white, simply because I'm a white female and understand more about it. I'd hate to make a character just to be 'diverse' and then accidentally offend someone with it, so in this area, I stay in my comfort zone. I do like seeing diversity in general though. I'd hate it if every character was just like mine.