{"id":1483,"date":"2010-02-25T12:25:08","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T18:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=1483"},"modified":"2010-02-25T12:25:08","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T18:25:08","slug":"when-personalities-are-hard-to-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/when-personalities-are-hard-to-find\/","title":{"rendered":"The Characterisation Puzzle: When personalities are hard to find"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series The Characterisation Puzzle<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"944284_42891822s\"
\nDeveloping a characterisation is like a jigsaw puzzle. You solve the bit around the edges first – the most obvious characteristics – and then try and fill in the middle a bit at a time until the whole picture presents itself.<\/p>\n

There is usually one critical “piece” of the puzzle, which – when ‘solved’ – connects several more, like dominos falling one after another. In most cases, that critical piece will be a question of motivation – why does the character want what they want? Why are they going to act the way they are?<\/p>\n

Psychology – especially in the form of
\nThe Writer’s Guide to Character Traits<\/a> by Dr Linda N Edelstein – can \"Writer'sGuideToCharacterTraits\"<\/a> help (if you want to consider purchasing a copy, just click on the cover thumbnail). The guy I co-GM the Adventurer’s Club campaign with and I were so impressed by this volume that we gave all our players copies as extra christmas presents.<\/p>\n

But sometimes it’s not enough, or you have absolutely no idea of the shape of that critical first piece. When that’s the case, there are a number of techniques that can be applied. Anything from random lists of personality traits to the visual appearance of the character to the character’s name can get you started.<\/p>\n

And sometimes they can’t. There will be times when you have no idea what you want, when those random lists just seem uninspired or nothing on them seems to fit.<\/p>\n

That usually means that your subconscious knows what it wants – you just have to find some way to reach through the fog of uncertainty to extract that critical piece.<\/p>\n

There will also be occasions when the critical chain you are following runs dry before enough of the puzzle is complete.<\/p>\n

When that’s the case, I have two techniques that I use. One is something I was taught in Graphic Design, as The Thumbnail Method; the other is to work from the known and apply The Inversion Principle, which I also occasonally refer to as “The Perversion Principle”. But I’ve just thought of a third one, which I’ll call the Window Shopping technique. This series of posts will detail all three techniques.<\/p>\n

It’s also worth noting that these techniques work equally for NPCs and PCs, GMs and Players.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series The Characterisation Puzzle<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>

Developing a characterisation is like a jigsaw puzzle. You solve the bit around the edges first – the most obvious characteristics – and then try and fill in the middle a bit at a time until the whole picture presents itself. There is usually one critical “piece” of the puzzle, which – when ‘solved’ – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[70,74,89,12,91],"tags":[100,101,111,172],"series":[189],"class_list":["post-1483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gm-ing","category-mike","category-npcs-etc","category-pcs","category-plans-and-prep","tag-adventure-prep","tag-advice","tag-encounter-design","tag-npcs","series-the-characterisation-puzzle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-nV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1483"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1496,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions\/1496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}