Making a Sign-Up

Every roleplay starts with the sign-up. Here we start creating our characters, and making a starting point for our adventures. When writing a SU, where do you focus on? What parts do you not enjoy writing, which parts do you love to write? Are there parts of the SU you'd like to see disappear, re-appear or be added?

I hate doing personality. Really, half the time I don't even know how my characters are going to act until we get into the setting. So personality is almost always the last thing I work on. I really enjoy doing appearances, skills/abilities and sometimes I enjoy doing history. Sometimes the history of the character can be fun to play around with, but again I like to reveal as little as possible in my sign up and then save all the good stuff for later because half the time I don't know what I want to do until I'm in the thick of it. I'm terrible to write with. I hate planning things out.

Sonata said:

I hate doing personality. Really, half the time I don't even know how my characters are going to act until we get into the setting. So personality is almost always the last thing I work on.

Click to expand...

なぎ said:

but then strangely enough i often have trouble writing up a character's personality in detail, haha. i do always have a general archetype in mind that i want to go for i suppose, but to really describe them in-depth is somehow difficult to me - mostly because i tend to kind of work out their personality more through actually using the character in the RP, i think.

Click to expand...

Wow, I am completely the opposite. I always work on the personality first and I use everything else to either accentuate or help justify my character's personality. I know some people find making a detailed personality restrictive, but I don't feel that way at all. I always leave room for my characters to grow or change away from the base SU sheet, but having a solid foundation for what my character is like at the start of an RP gives me a feeling of stability.

Personally I hate the appearance section. I just don't really have a brain for clothes or anything, so my characters end up in really similar outfits. I know recently there's been more acceptance of the use of pictures instead, but I find that really restrictive. One of the reasons I actually stayed away from RPing in places other than PC was that I could never find suitable pictures. I'm adapting, but I still find this section the trickiest.

I feel so old all of a sudden. xD

I like writing SUs :3 Or rather, I love imagining characters. But I don't like the actual writing of the SU haha, I take that back. I find it really helps to think about the personality section in terms of goods and bads so nowadays when I create RPs I even put up "Strengths" and "Weaknesses" instead of "Personality" and explain that it's mostly personality I'm after there. And skills and talents, if applicable. I also put up "Interests" and sometimes "Interests & Goals" as a third part of a Personality substitute. When I write SUs for RPs that don't offer this division though, I still think about it like this when I fill in that section.

History is the worst though. What do we really need to know about a character's history when we start playing? Every part of their childhood? All characters haven't had major relevant events happening to them yet. I prefer to bring up family here, and only a few things that might be good for the GM to know. More, can really be found out by the other players (and invented by the player!) over the course of the RP.

Appearance is a pain haha. I like using pictures nowadays but I used to hate it. I'm partial to photographs rather than anime pictures, but that really depends a lot on what kind of RP it is.

I don't really dislike writing any part of an SU. What I hate is having to write personality alongside a strengths/weaknesses section.

Even though I have been told that I make interesting characters, onevof the absolute worst part of an SU I hate writing is the personality section. I'm much better at writing strengths/weaknesses listed, rather than a paragraph.

My favorite part of writing an SU though is the backstory/history section. I absolutely love making a background for my characters. In Gunpowder, instead of a personality section, I added in a History section, because I felt that detailing Sophia's past actions would be better representative of her personality (plus I couldn't write 'she's a bitch with anger management issues smh')

Foxrally said:

Even though I have been told that I make interesting characters, onevof the absolute worst part of an SU I hate writing is the personality section. I'm much better at writing strengths/weaknesses listed, rather than a paragraph.

My favorite part of writing an SU though is the backstory/history section. I absolutely love making a background for my characters. In Gunpowder, instead of a personality section, I added in a History section, because I felt that detailing Sophia's past actions would be better representative of her personality (plus I couldn't write 'she's a bitch with anger management issues smh')

Click to expand...

A few of you combined the personality section with their backstory with amazing results actually. It makes me think that having SUs written like that could be a really effective way to go about it whilst making things easier on those who dislike either the history or personality parts - which are probably the two most hated aspects of SU writing.

~_~
Appearance bugs me so much. Especially when I cant find the right image

Foxrally said:

Even though I have been told that I make interesting characters, onevof the absolute worst part of an SU I hate writing is the personality section. I'm much better at writing strengths/weaknesses listed, rather than a paragraph.

My favorite part of writing an SU though is the backstory/history section. I absolutely love making a background for my characters. In Gunpowder, instead of a personality section, I added in a History section, because I felt that detailing Sophia's past actions would be better representative of her personality (plus I couldn't write 'she's a bitch with anger management issues smh')

Click to expand...

I actually switched it around, haha. I only gave Emmett a personality, and he doesn't really have a backstory. I try to give hints in the posts themselves, but his backstory really isn't relevant to him.

SYDAXARO220 said:

~_~
Appearance bugs me so much. Especially when I cant find the right image

Click to expand...

Haha I feel you. I suck at detailing appearances so more often than not I base the appearance on an image and simply describe the picture.