r/AskReddit • u/Many_Ad9699 • 22d ago
Can someone please give advice on how to make better characters?
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u/Additional_Generic_ 22d ago
People watch. Go to park or mall and watch people non-creepily. Just take mental notes of odd mannerisms and characters.
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u/Many_Ad9699 22d ago
Thank you so much for the advice,i appreciate it
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u/Additional_Generic_ 22d ago
No prob. I turned my boss into a cartoon that got some love online the other day.
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u/m31td0wn 22d ago
Get a White Wolf RPG book, like Vampire or Werewolf. Doesn't really matter if you're just creating regular people, simply skip the supernatural stuff. Just use the character generation system and write up a character sheet for all your characters. Also pay attention to the Nature and Demeanor, since that's just pure gold. (Nature is who you are when all the walls are down, Demeanor is the version you present to the world. So a showy narcissist that demands attention might have a Demeanor of Bravo, but a Nature of Child.)
It's a fairly true to life system that separates out your attributes like strength, intelligence, appearance, etc. from your abilities. Things like athletics, drive, subterfuge, intimidation, medicine, politics, science, and so on. Then you can combine an Attribute and an Ability to determine how good you are at something, and how you might accomplish it. For instance Charisma + Persuasion would result in a different approach to the same problem than Manipulation + Persuasion. The former, the character uses their personality to buddy-buddy up to the person and make friends. The latter, they are more cunning and deceitful, borderline sleazy. But in both cases, success would get them what they want.
Even if you never play the actual game, using the point system can help you create characters that have well documented strengths and weaknesses. And then as the story progresses, you can assign the characters experience points based on how much you think that character grew, which you can then spend to improve them over time. Allowing them to grow as a character, and for you to keep track of where they truly shine and where they would fall flat.
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u/Nonsenseinabag 22d ago
There's a youtube series called "Character Design Forge" that covers a lot of good ideas. He talks about his own successes and failures and what made the failures good learning lessons.
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u/your_momo-ness 22d ago
Hi! I'm a writer here hoping to finish the first draft of my second book soon! the best advice I can give you is to make them dynamic by giving them contradictions. For example, if a character is strong, give them moments of weakness when they break down.
It also helps a lot to give them something to lose. Give them a reason to go on, and have the conflict threaten to take that away. The main character in my fantasy series wants nothing more than to maintain peace within her kingdoms, and help as many people as she can. She also has family and friends who she doesn't want to lose. The conflict drives her forward, showing more of her character through taking away her ability to do those things.
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u/[deleted] 22d ago
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