Tournament roleplaying is a different experience entirely from playing in a home campaign. For four hours you share an experience with a group of people, usually strangers, telling a story, and then you just go your separate ways. This means every game you must introduce your character from scratch. After hundreds of introductions, I [...]
One of the quintessential steps for my concept creation came from a fill-in character sheet for Dungeons & Dragons. Stuffed in a corner underneath a large section letting you describe your character’s appearance, there was a small box labeled “Personality” and beneath it in fine text were instructions that read “List 6 words to [...]
I have never loved the perfect hero. The old-school heroes like Superman felt too good to be true. I blame my brothers, of course, for my issues with the pure protagonist. My first RPG character set me on the path for creating a flawed hero, and I have never looked back. During my first [...]
Over years of playing role-playing games, I have interacted with a gamut of players and their characters. It let me see vastly different personalities acted out and character backgrounds I would have never conceived on my own. I also saw repeated characters and trope-ridden backgrounds. At one game another player even had the same [...]
In tournament role-playing games, the vast majority of my experiences were playing with strangers. However, I loved the opportunity to play with friends or family. Collaboratively creating characters with intertwined stories is one of the things I think I miss the most when writing. When writing your own story, you miss out on the [...]
My experience with developing rich, complex backgrounds is due in large part to my brother’s influence. Frank always insisted on developing how your character got to the start of the game. Why are they a warrior or a mage? Who taught them? What else did they learn? Even with my first character, after the [...]
Unlike many writers, I was not a natural reader. Honestly, I only read for school assignments. Perhaps, it was jealousy over the thrall books seemed to have over my brothers, whose attention was supposed to be focused on me. (Yes, I was the youngest and only girl.) I even managed to misplace five copies [...]
