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hybbat · 5 years

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Okay, I know this may come off weird. I do not play DnD or anything like it, but I saw some of your characters and I fell in love with them. If you do not mind answering me, I enjoy writing, and I am curious as to how you design your characters.

Not at all, besides D&D I also write in my spare time as well and make comics. I find they all have slightly different processes at least for me.

Since digital art is my main medium of expression, I tend to first draw characters before anything. Characters like Mikeitaa my druid tiefling I went into a blank page and just drew out and pieced it together along the way.

Others are inspired by things that make me excited; the most blatant is my aasimar barbarian, Ashar, who I drew after the KDA music video was dropped.

Its usually less blatant than that though, such as a general aesthetic, a colour palette, a design concept, sometimes its as little as a line I drew that just catches my attention. The important part is that inspiration.

I find this process is quite successful for me when creating PCs that I like enough to play. I usually develope their personality and character along the way while drawing, filling in the blanks here and there once I'm done to flesh them out. A good example of this I think is Reqei

His inspiration was his style of horns, specifically the thought of "what if their "eyebrows" were just hair tufts sticking out from the bottom of their horns?" I ended up drawing a tilted and kind of sad face and as the rest came out I developed the idea of this emotionally numb slave soldier. Talking to my DM about his setting placed him as a slave of the dwarves, his nicer attire and weapon due to being sold as a personal guard after not dying, and informed many other aspects of his psychology and personality. I filled in smaller things with the details that caught my attention and some creative thinking: he wouldn't use a gun and the starting gear doesn't allow for it but his master would certainly have his life threatened with one, so its a broken gun that serves as a memory. His claws don't quite match his colour palette though it compliments his gear's metal buttons and halberd.

Reqei is already someone who goes into instinctual survival mode and would use anything as a weapon, what if he saved his master clawing someone's face off with a cheap metal prosthetic claw and he had all of them replaced for his sake so Reqei had more weapons? Of course dueing this all the characters related to Reqei are also being fleshed out, such as his master and his master's wife.

I think the most important thing is that these things are not irrelevant. They inform/shape not only his character but the characters involved with him. I always ask "what does this tell me about the character?" Especially durring this process of fleshing out the little things. With this even simple characters become interesting and without it big characters might wring hollow, I've had both happen to me.

Its important that you are personaly interested in the character regardless of the medium, even if its just and npc or side character, something like "I would really like to see more of that character and see their story unfold." Thats how I usually make NPCs for my players, and its easy to control if you know what appeals to certain people and you can make it obvious that certain characters clearly have more going on to draw the eye even while making everyone interesting looking.

Some of that can translate to written and other mediums but I think for more structured storytelling like comics and especially writing you have to take a different approach. I find for comics its important for me to draw characters first still because the characters i come up with in my head I might not be able to draw to my satisfaction, but for writing you can go hogwild with your imagination as long as you can describe it, the character isn't as limited by your personal skill as in visual mediums.

The most important difference between them and D&D though is that you already know the story you're putting them in, they're often developed alongside the story as a part of it, not inserted into it. Because of that you have to think a little more utilitarian. "Does this serve a purpose to the narrative/themes/aesop?" In D&D its part of the DM's job to build a narritive AROUND the PCs and its developing live. In a written story this is usually a bad idea because it ends up with plot holes and such so its important characters be fitted into the story and not just created separately and inserted.

For zombiegirl we wanted to make a gag 4koma so we created characters that could clash and create comedic moments, made their personalities a little ridiculous and over the top, and most importantly created characters who while quirky in their own right, could play straightmen to the comedy. The genre really shaped the characters we made and many of the side characters were made to fill comedic niches that fit the aesthetic and themes.

They're also all visually distinct, with visual media people usually go by the rule of "every character has an identifiable sillouette". In writing I find a decent equivelant to be speech patterns and unique identifiable features that can be refered to quickly. This character has red hair, this character is the shortest, this one has no eyebrows; Something that could easily be used as an identifying nickname in a situation where their name isn't known.

In general I tend to write very eccentric and somewhat extreme characters. The most important thing to me is their point of interest. Something makes me want to play/draw/write more about them, something to explore. I tend to end up with "main character NPCs" because of this, where they're too interesting for their role in the story and never get explored to a satisfactory extent. In D&D thats okay because you never really know who your players will want to talk to and have a story with, but in structured writing it can just leave you unsatisfied if their interestingness isnt properly scaled.

I guess the most important thing is it feels natural. While people say "don't judge a book by its cover" people do express themselves consciously or not. Their appearance should serve a purpose. Whether you should create the appearance first or the personality first depends on what they're being made for. I always remind myself that in the end, characters are tools of their story and vice versa and to varying amounts create them with that in mind.

My last note is that I draw from things that interest me. I like plants and flower language and bugs and animals, nature in general. Sometimes I make characters with similar interests but more often I use that knowledge to create characters; characters themed after animals, motifs, drawing from animal behaviours and exploring them in a more self aware humanoid. I end up with a lot of wild child types and alien psychology because of this.

My most recent example of this is the harvester god who holds fatherhood as the most important relationship and opposes the eat or be eaten matriarchal drow spider goddess, inspired by how male harvestmen protect their eggs from egg eating females. I have to remind myself sometimes that when it comes to inspiration its more important that you like the resulting concept than accuracy to the inspiration unless accuracy is the point.

Some people get caught up trying to make one to one allegories but if you're writing fantasy then I think those are pointless. I like fantasy's ability to explore situations and characters that can't exist in real life, beyond just magical abilities and such. I end up creating very alien characters because of that. I tend to frame characters more biologically than philosophically which informs how they themselves think, which is often very animalistic.

I dont know if any of that satisfies your curiosity I think I got off track a lot, sorry. I hope I answered your question somewhere in there.

#ask #long answer

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