Membership Do you rp as someone like yourself or the opposite?

[Jacob 58]

My characters always have elements of my offline personality.  They tend to be prepubescent or adolescent males, based on concepts I mull over.  Departing from the Oliver Twist (the titular boy) framework has never proven successful.  It might make me seem limited, but I'm comfortable with my half-planned boundaries.

[Eva 0]

I tend to play characters that have some small thing in common with myself, to give it sound grounding and a frame of reference, but I find myself and my life to be pretty boring so I definitely wouldn't want to play someone too much like myself.

[Seahorse 79]

I would say that every character I make has 1-3 of my traits in them. Sometimes this is purposeful, at other times, it's by circumstance. Differences occur in their types of interests, and experiences that formulate how they respond to social situations, think, and go about their days.  
 

It is common for me to play characters who are good at multiple subjects. Polymaths and polyglots are wonderful in period settings!  However, I try to vary up up talents in languages or provide limitations in quirks, things they haven't started to learn or can't seem to grasp. Other characters aren't as enriched in multiple subjects but good with life skills, and frustrated by a lack of education. Educational themes and social mobility is something I notice follow around my characters. I like them to notice their surroundings, and either accept them, or work to change them. 

Differences can be made successful by embracing environmental tid-bits. Is prejudice built in? Social issues based in classes?  Did a person get a scar in some experience that makes them move different thus think around it?  I've recently started playing a character who has far more prejudice than I do, and find this makes her very different. 

[xexes 108]

Sometimes I roleplay as a different player. Sorry that I jogged your horror-memories but not like that.

 

You see, it's enabling to start fresh on a new site and be someone else. Whatever problems you had were gone. Social anxiety? Gone. Crippling abandonment fears? They are gone. Replying to all the plotters, overwhelming yourself, and flaking out? Nope, you're a different person and this awesome-you don't do that shit. You realize that you are perfectly capable of being this different person, fixing those things and for-real living the life of awesome-you.

 

Am I saying you should pretend to be a different person so everyone will forgive you of the trouble you caused? No, no no. Am I saying that you can roleplay being a different person (eg, fake it till you make it) and actually change your life? Absolutely.

Edited April 18, 2017 by xexes

[flawnt 0]

I'd like to sort of just reflect the general sentiment of this thread:
Of course, every character I create has some element of myself in them. Some trait in my personality I find positive or negative. The fun of a character is sort of taking that type of trait and mixing it with other sorts of traits, family situations, relationship situations, professional situations that I would never encounter with my personality. What happens if someone shy like me is thrust into this situation? Or what if I had a very different sort of cultural background, economic background, racial background?

 

Obviously, characters are not all just distorted reflections of yourself, that's too simplistic and ignores the fun of imagination and fantasy. But we all sort of write what we know or research to feel confident to fulfill a character, yea?

[substratus 0]

 

On 4/5/2017 at 9:32 PM, Uaithne said:

I intentionally give my characters a few of the same traits as me because it helps me relate to them and therefore keeps my interest in them longer.  The characters that have none of the same traits don't last as long. 

 

I think you nailed it right there. Injecting certain parts or traits that you have could make us better relate to the character we're writing. My stronger personality traits always shine through in my characters and if I force myself to change it, the character just doesn't click with me. It's almost always the sense of humor and sarcasm that come out in my characters, but otherwise they veer way off course from who I am.

[Spiritwolf99 2]

I just kind of write characters with some sort of trait that is the same as me but diverges from there. Like, for example, I do not enjoy writing villains who do not at least delusionally believe that they're the good guy. I can't fathom going into a mindset that would make you super happy to be the irredeemable bad guy. I do public service IRL and like to think that I'm the 'good guy' and 'doing the right thing' even if I'm doing it extremely inefficiently and/or poorly.

 

So my villains will do some godawful things, they will screw over other characters without a second thought and sometimes even betray people at the drop of a hat. But they WILL have legitimate grievances against whoever they are a villain against. Maybe their people were systematically oppressed, maybe their family was murdered, maybe the government did some horrible things to their family or something. The retribution and the method of 'revenge' will obviously be out of line and 'evil', but the underlying causes will always be at least mostly legitimate. That sense of RIGHTEOUSNESS I guess lets me key into that fervor and makes it really easy for me to play that role.

[firefly 36]

I’ve never intentionally set out to write a character that is like myself, but now I’m kind of curious as to how a character like that would turn out. I might do that as a personal writing exercise. I don’t think I have much in common with most of my characters currently. I've had one in the past that was probably the closest a character has ever been to my personality, and he was only fun to play in small doses. Sometimes I will give characters certain preferences like same favorite color as myself, though, so that it’s easy to remember.

[Raven 18]

All.

 

There's definitely a theme of people having a few traits they can relate to in their characters, and in this I think I'm a bit different, but not because I don't do this. Rather, I find traits I relate to in just about every single person I meet. I'm very empathetic and relate to people very easily. Thus, I relate to my characters very easily as well. However, my characters are really from all different walks of life. They have different thought processes and different lives, different habits, different quirks.

 

For instance, I have my character Francis Foster. He seems your typical roguish asshole who enjoys having sex, cars, and getting in fights. He was raised by a delusional father to hunt vampires, and after a lot of bad things in his life, he struggles with commitment. Not just to love interests, though, but also to friends. He has no family left, really. He purposefully sabotages relationships when he starts to feel attached. I relate to his sense of being on the outside, of being the "only one" who understands the logical course of action rather than the emotional one.

 

My character Astrid Irvine. She's thirteen years old and desperately wants to be loved, but her parents are often not there for her. To this end, she is a bully and simultaneously also gives in to a lot of peer pressure. She strives to be perfect in everything she does. I relate to her need to belong, and her desire to make others happy.

 

Finally, Greyson Burke is a vampire who has devoted his immortal life to wooing a woman who has no interest in him - to the point that he fully believes they are engaged. In simple terms, he is a stalker. I relate to his desire to be close to someone, and to try to relate to those he perceives to be like him. I relate to his patience.

[Honorem 219]

Some characters are regular people who I have more in common with. But more often than not they're larger than life figures going on dragon slaying adventures and what not, I wouldn't consider them even remotely close to me. Because if I had to go slay a dragon I'd just refuse and cry in a corner.

[KAIJU 0]

I normally play people LIKE me [Aerith, Mercy, Newt Giezler, Alice] but lately I've switched to the other side. Characters like Hanzo Shimada and Doomfist.

 

It's weirdddd. Has anyone else done a 180 like that before?

[FriedKilamari 46]

All of my characters have bits and pieces of my personality. It's always nice to give them some of my passions or fears. The little grain of familiarity is just such a good starting point for me? I can also use aspects of myself to create a foil character. It's interesting to see how characters with traits close to my own will develop and change.

 

And similarly to @Raven I can often empathize with my characters, even if I share nothing in common with them. Hell, I can empathize with other people's characters.

[katherineespair 36]

I think the best beginner character is a character similar to the rper. Someone they can relate to and understand.

 

I am sure i'm not the only one who ends up doing heaps of research to play a new character, figuring out how a job works or a hobby or how victims of a certain disease cope.  I personally love experimenting with as many different walks of life as I can.  Learning from other people's experiences and putting that into the characters we create.   Right now I don't really have anyone quite like me. Tiny shreds of myself can be found places, but for the most part i'm not roleplaying anyone that has large quantities of me in them.

[Seravian 50]

Guilty!

 

A good majority of my characters are either a little like me or people I wish I was, even a little bit. It's just something that's comfortable, I guess.

[Huskerdust 625]

I tend to like playing loud, annoying characters who befriend everything that moves. I am cripplingly shy IRL. I like playing confident characters and leader types because I can exert some sort of control over plots. When I play passive characters, it's harder for me to move things. (I can still do it of course but only with writers I trust.) Although I actually PREFER my quiet, weird characters to the louder ones, I feel like the louder, leader ones are the ones people naturally gravitate toward and want to play with. They are more action oriented and get plots going. The quiet, weird ones tend to be more introspective. I also have to be in a certain mood for them.

 

Either way, I like to play characters that either suit me--the kind I really enjoy in the media I consume--or characters that have traits I admire in other people, traits that I wish I had. 

 

And sometimes I just want to play an asshole. Haha!