From The Ground Up (FTGU) is a series of posts based around character creation and roleplay, building from the ground up, obviously. In this post we’re going to talk about your characters story and their development and how to do that. But if you have missed any parts this far you can catch up with them here: 

From The Ground Up Index

What is the difference between Book Characters and Roleplay Characters? Aaron and I were talking about this over a year ago now, in the car and the conversation started when we were discussing a character that belonged to a mutual friend of ours and we could not understand why the player seemed to struggle so much with RP, as the character itself was excellent, it was literature quality stuff, but the player was always struggling and frustrated. We came to the realisation that excellent characters and awesome stories do not always work in MMO’s. Similarly MMO characters might not work in books, for reasons I will go into below, and even many great role-players out there fall down when it comes to this grey area and ergo limit their potential because it seems logical when creating a character to create one that would work well as a novel main character or a movie main character, that is what we are used to after all. And it is easily done, as from the outside and onset role-playing in MMO’s looks and feels a lot like writing generically and on top of that most of our inspirations come from books and films and characters that work in those, so those are the traits and concepts we automatically adopt without often thinking of how they need to be adapted to work in the MMO environment.

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