How to assemble a character history for your roleplaying character

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

2-04-2012 @ 7:52PM

LynMars said...

Yes, this. Short and the major, important, commonly found bits are what should be in the history. I have a quick short summary in my background parts--and then a tinyurl.com link, or a neat little url, to a place where you can find stories and more background detail. Shadow Council has rp-haven.com for people to post stories and backgrounds on, a lot of servers have wikis, there are usually RP character threads on the official forums for each server, and guild websites are also handy places. Places like LiveJournal or other personal blogging sites and DeviantArt are handy places to toss up long, detailed character backgrounds that expand on the short preview in the RSP.

And, of course, RP itself. ;)

2-04-2012 @ 8:13PM

LynMars said...

One more thing: Don't freaking copy someone's background info from one of those sources, change the names, and then try to pass off that RSP as your own character, backstory, and written work in general.

Had someone walk into my guild's IC meeting a couple weeks ago wanting to join. I opened the MRP, read the backstory tab, and realized it was my own words. Not just a similar concept to my Outland-born Human paladin with mother issues, but literally took the first 2 paragraphs of my backstory; they only changed character names. When confronted, they claimed it was their significant other who had leveled the character and filled in the RSP for them--and got the story idea from Skyrim, to boot. This person had already caused other trouble for another guild, so we didn't believe them.

They didn't seem to understand, either, how serious such things like TOS breaking and plagiarism could be--I flat told the player at one point that they were lucky this was just hobby writing, and not something I make money or academic rep from.

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