Post by Morreion on Jun 24, 2011 16:00:57 GMT -5
Storyboard: The stock (Massively)
Stock characters are something that I think pretty much every roleplayer has. Maybe you have a core cast that shows up over and over; maybe you just have a couple of individuals who crop up repeatedly. But the ones who stick in your memory tend to stick well past a given game. You know the ones, and frequently you'll give them different names but still use the same personality. In my own experience, it doesn't matter if I stop calling her Truce -- if she's still a shy and failed pacifist with isolation issues, she's still Truce. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a stock character.
Eliot Lefebvre discusses his stock RP characters here, and concludes that while it is understandable to have them, they are limiting rather than liberating in the long run. I can see his point, but I tend to gravitate towards my happy-go-lucky, takes-himself-seriously-though-no-one-else-does, foolish-in-a-humorous-way character (Kirth and Caddan- both Highlanders in DAoC, Morreion of Horizons, and Reynald of WoW all follow this template). I've had minor characters with different personalities, but I come back to this main one because it works well with the others I RP him with. He gets the ball rolling for fun times
I see him more as a facilitator of dialogue than a rut, a comfortable old loafer!
Stock characters are something that I think pretty much every roleplayer has. Maybe you have a core cast that shows up over and over; maybe you just have a couple of individuals who crop up repeatedly. But the ones who stick in your memory tend to stick well past a given game. You know the ones, and frequently you'll give them different names but still use the same personality. In my own experience, it doesn't matter if I stop calling her Truce -- if she's still a shy and failed pacifist with isolation issues, she's still Truce. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a stock character.
Eliot Lefebvre discusses his stock RP characters here, and concludes that while it is understandable to have them, they are limiting rather than liberating in the long run. I can see his point, but I tend to gravitate towards my happy-go-lucky, takes-himself-seriously-though-no-one-else-does, foolish-in-a-humorous-way character (Kirth and Caddan- both Highlanders in DAoC, Morreion of Horizons, and Reynald of WoW all follow this template). I've had minor characters with different personalities, but I come back to this main one because it works well with the others I RP him with. He gets the ball rolling for fun times
I see him more as a facilitator of dialogue than a rut, a comfortable old loafer!
