@TheEdVerse Any insight into your process when trying to really figure out a character? I'm creating an OC for tiktok in the hope to spread the positive vibes and creativity of #fantasy and #TTRPGs. Given you've brought that to my life, I would be honored to get your input.
— 12SidedGuy (@12SidedGuy) November 28, 2021
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Well, “really figure out” implies that the character is being created for a novel, or as a “fixture” NPC who’s hopefully going to be around for a while. So I move past the basics of appearance, game stats, and plot function of the character (he’s the guard who guards the… 2)
…door to keep the world away from the empress, or she's the empress who has the power of life or death over the main characters) to two things: the superficial that I need to describe the character personally in the narrative [how they talk, their usual mood, their…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…surface attitudes, etc.], and the deeper: what are their aims in life? Immediate (in this scene) and before they die of hopefully old age? THAT is the key. Then I look at the setting/situation, and pivot back to the character, and ask myself: and if they’re alive ten… 4)
…years from now, where do I think they'll be in life (what will they have achieved?). The same as "now," because they're a dreamer or drifter, waiting for the world to do things for them, or will they have striven to accomplish certain things? And if the latter, how likely..— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…is it that they’ll have achieved anything, or what they were trying to achieve? Will they have changed much, as a person?
I think the key as a creator is to treat all NPCs (main and supporting cast) with the same care, and not lesser than any PCs involved in a project. 6)
The CHARACTERS don't personally think they're less important than yon scullery boy the author has decided is the main character who's going to wind up the hero by end of book. Less powerful, or skilled, or lucky/favoured by the gods, MAYBE.
So when writing/designing, I give…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…them all the same attention.
Over 50 years ago, I happened to see a few moments of a director “blocking” an action scene of a play on a thrust (audience on three sides) stage. Put very crudely, blocking is moving and positioning actor’s bodies on stage. Actors and the… 8)
…lighting director were arguing with the director that this character and that one were more important in the play then the others, and so should be here and here (at the front, and in the center, where the audience could see them better and longer). And the director…— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…disagreed, saying WE knew which characters were going to emerge as important in this story (it was a play by Shakespeare, not a new or obscure one), but at this point in the unfolding story, the characters onstage (members of a royal court) didn’t. So they shouldn’t ACT… 10)
…as if they did. Inevitably, some characters are going to wind up being spear-carriers, glimpsed for a moment or killed/chased away/otherwise "dealt with" right after we first meet them. But if you consider what they're thinking about, hoping for, and working towards just..— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…as attentively as you consider those things for the main characters, the scene will play/write/design better, because no one's mere "stage dressing," and in situations where "going off script" is likely or the norm, as in RPGs with live players running their characters, ..— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…this is almost the only successful way to handle supporting NPCs; when the PCs do something unexpected, you know how to have the NPCs react because you understand their aims, mood, attentions, and conditions at the time. (You may have to modify those things for plot… 13)
…purposes, but that will lead you back through seeing the entire NPC differently.)
I've been doing this for almost 57 years now, for literally hundreds of projects, so a lot of this is almost instinctive for me now (I don't cold-bloodedly have to plan it all out for every..— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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…NPC), but that’s not because I’m not doing it, it’s because I do it automatically now, and so can ‘shorthand’ it in my head and when discussing it with colleagues working on the same project.
Hope some of this blather will help. :} 15)
One of the most positive outcomes of thinking creatively this way is that you are constantly "putting yourself in the other person's shoes," so you constantly think of the wants, needs, and views of other folks, and how events will affect them…not just you and yours.— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021
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If you’re making decisions in real life/society (as a politician, or someone allocating medical resources, or an educator, for example), thinking of everyone, and never giving in to the simpler narrow-focus-on-me-or-a-few-main-characters, or falling into “us versus them”… 17)
…thinking, makes for decisions better for more people. One author whose fiction work clearly (because he as narrator talks to the reader directly) shows this is the late, great Terry Pratchett. Who I will miss for the rest of my life.— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) November 28, 2021