Character Templates

[nepbnhurj]

For talking about character templates in tabletop / PbP games

[nepbnhurj]

Character sheets with personality sections bug me. It feels like a lot of the time hosts are trying to get players to make Wikimedia sections for their characters, except even that doesn't make very much sense the way they go about doing it. This issue is seemingly most common with roleplays that advertise themselves as "literate" or "high quality," since they encourage their players to write more out of necessity. Below is a collected example of what I'm talking about, taken directly from a publicly advertised community and off of Google Docs. It has some nonsense, so read if you dare!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kg3 ... sp=sharing
See here that the personality section, outlined in length by the placeholder text, is by itself longer than the backstory and character ability sections combined. This is funny because it was taken from a roleplay where player characters were superheroes and supervillains; the crucial element of any character's importance to the plot was their special ability.

Compare this to a character sheet made by the mangaka Hirohiko Araki for one of his characters:


Whereas a successful writer like Araki uses bullet points to communicate fluid ideas, the effect of the roleplay character template is to restrict the character as much as possible by defining as much as possible. A roleplay owner would instead have you write about a stringent fear of lizards, or else. If you don't play by the rules, then you and your character simply aren't allowed to participate. By forcing the player to write more, it can actually make the player write less!

The personality section is the largest part of this tactic, since it in particular is something that would naturally present itself as the character is used anyways. The section is essentially a way for hosts to bully their members into writing something they may or may not want to continue using in the future, all for the sake of making the roleplay appear to be higher quality than it actually is.