A large epic novel is most definitely not required for you to start role-playing your character. You can build your character’s personality traits and story as you go along. Start out with simple things. Figure out the likes and dislikes of your character, where they are from, or how they look. These are easy personality traits to explain and to role-play. It also gives others a glimpse of what your character is like.
Examples:
Your character loves to swim but is afraid of fish.
Your character is a country bumpkin and seeing the hustle and bustle of a city like Stormwind puts them in awe of their surroundings.
Your character has an old leg wound and walks with a limp.
You most likely do not want to meet a person and just blurt out your story and/or characteristics to them. Allow them to unfold naturally. It's more fun that way and using this method you may develop new traits your character has.
If you’re not sure what sort of traits or story you want to give your character, start with something familiar. Do you not like to cook in real life? You can role-play your character to not get the cooking profession and refuse to do any cooking. Frightened of insects? You character can do that as well and will have a hard time with regions like Silithus. It should make it pretty simple for you to bring your character’s traits to life when they’re closer to how you personally feel.
You do want to make sure you develop something though. It doesn't have to be elaborate but you'll have more fun role-playing if your character is interesting to you. Likewise, others will find you interesting as well!
1 comment:
I tend to be the kind of roleplayer that enjoys weaving an extensive history, but I always go out of my way to leave parts of the story open to be inclusive. In other words, while I might say that my cantankerous kal'dorei priestess was a former Sister of Elune and outline major activities or events from her past, that isn't going to prevent me from taking another player's input when he also plays a Sister of Elune and start talking about shared experiences. Or with my perky human priestess, who grew up in Elwynn Forest; I ran into a player who roleplayed as growing up in the same area and so we decided that, yes, we both remembered his character as the strange fellow that dated Csilla's sister way back in the day -- even though it wasn't something scripted in her story originally.
The idea of roleplaying is to be inclusive, of course!
Concerning applying personal experiences, I tend to pick a staple personal personality trait that I have and apply it to each of my girls; it helps me roleplay them since I can relate to something about that. In particular, my tauren druid has an intense phobia of water over four inches. As a child, I was in a serious drowning accident that required me to be resuscitated; this left me with -- you guessed it -- an blinding fear of water over four inches (up until the point where I decided to be a sailor and overcome said fear!). This has resulted in a lot of fun roleplaying experiences, and quirks, such as the fact that she has never ever ridden a boat in-game. And there was that one memorable time in Wailing Caverns where a bunch of newly rerolled non-roleplayers on the servers roleplayed getting my character drunk enough to swim through the water towards the portal to the instance.
And I'll get her waterform one day, promise! Lujza's in her 30s and still hasn't pick it up (she chickened out), but I figure I'll make a huge deal of it when she's 70. Maybe she'll fail a second time before getting her goal, but it's fun!
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