Mar
13
We’ve posted an article about character personality traits before, but here’s several tables which focusses on the postive and negative versions of the same trait. Sometimes it’s fun to pair characters up with their opposites, so here’s a list of traits and their opposites. Read More
Mar
12
The biggest cause for arguments in a roleplaying game is that one person tries to be the center of attention, and it pisses everyone else off. Read More
Feb
27
Last month I posted roleplay advice from Kepler Station’s guide to roleplaying. As roleplaying can be a tough hobby to get into, it’s great when games post useful guides. Another piece of advice posted by Kepler station is the chapter about how to get your character noticed. It might be difficult to make your character stand out, so here’s what Kepler Station’s guide says about getting a character noticed:
Feb
25
This article is written by Silent Hunter, & appears in Phoenix Roleplaying‘s Jan 2015 newsletter.
‘Play-bys’, or as they are known on many sites ‘face claims’ are one of the most common practices in RPing; many bigger RP sites keep lists to avoid duplication (we keep an entry on our wiki ourselves). For those of you not aware of the term, this is picking an actor as the ‘face’ of your particular character, hence ‘face claim’. Read More
Feb
22
This was originally posted by Steven Savage on his blog, but has allowed me to republish it here as I think it’s useful for roleplayers! This is part of Steven’s Way With Worlds series of articles. -David
Stories, games, and all fiction is about people, about characters, about what they do and why. They may not be like us, we may not like them, but that’s what’s going on. We’re watching people (even if not human) do stuff to get results, though we may put it in more colorful ways. Read More
Feb
16
This was originally posted by Steven Savage on his blog, but has allowed me to republish it here as I think it’s useful for roleplayers! This is part of Steven’s Way With Worlds series of articles. 
So last time I covered the risk of creating Omnicompetent characters – those good-at-everything characters that are hard to believe. Too often we make our heroes and villains omnicompetent, and it’s a warning worth heeding. The Omnicompetent soon end up Omni-unbelievable, distorting the world and making things just seem wrong.
However, there’s a flipside issue I want to address, that of Incompetent heroes and villains. Though I find the former more common than the latter, it’s still an issue with good worldbuilding. Read More
Feb
7
Dwarfs are known for their colourful use of the common tongue, especially when it comes to insults. Sometimes these are meant in jest, with some dwarfs known to use words as a weapon to rile up and anger their opponent into making a mistake. A few dwarfs have taken to using this as a part of their arsenal in battle, with a few being true masters of the insult, making their opponent slip up and attack them in anger, only to be met with a well-placed axe or hammer to the head. Read More
Jan
19
It’s fun when 2 people get together and write a sequence of action about their characters. It’s even more fun when those characters have completely opposite character traits, maybe they’ll wind each other up? (which is very fun to write!) or maybe they’ll use their separate personality traits and skills to their advantage (good cop bad cop perhaps?). Read More
Jan
3
This was originally posted by Steven Savage on his blog, but has allowed me to republish it here as I think it’s useful for roleplayers! This is part of Steven’s Way With Worlds series of articles.
When we create heroes or villains, indeed main characters, in many cases we’re dealing with highly competent people. Read More
Nov
12
This article was written by Jenn Lyons, and originally published on the blog ‘Rewriting Mary Sues’, I’m republishing it here with permission because I thought it was relevent to roleplayers.
It’s not, however, for the reason that you might think. We’ve all encountered Mary Sue characters — a product of fan fiction (typically an author insert) who can do everything, fix all problems, knows everything and knows exactly how to solve any given mystery. Read More
