Character Focus: Talents and Inabilities!

[Diana]

To have a well rounded character there are things your character can do and can't do. And I'm not talking about fighting skills or physical strengths! This topic is all about those everyday life things. Stuff that comes up whether it is a simple fluff scene or even an important moment.

For example:
A character so bad at cooking they could burn a bowl of cereal.
A character's strange talent for always knowing what perfume someone is wearing, just by smell.
A character that can juggle cats!
A character that can't whistle.

They can be little or big, but the fun part is finding ways to use these little traits in roleplay! Your bad cook being forced to make dinner. Your perfume sniffer recognizing a baddie by their smell. Your cat juggler saving an old lady by juggling cats. Your non-whistler stuck in a quiet situation where they can't catch someone's attention!


Tell us about your characters talents and inabilities, and how you can (or have) display them in roleplay situations!

 

[Karsikan the Berzerker]

Character inabilities, as the saying goes we like someone for their positive abilities but love them for their flaws.

I'll demo Maggie's favorite character of mine Serias.

Using the character's flaws is the easiest way I've found to keep a playing a character, basically using what he can do to mitigate what he can't. Using a system I don't just take flaws (like in masquerade for example) to get extra build points, there has to be a reason for it. In Serias's case his strengths came about as a result of his flaws, (sort of like Stephen Hawking in a sense) which in his case was spending twenty years in a single non stop frenzy, after the murder if his sire and lover. Drive, focus, willpower, intellect, endurance...all stemmed from his rage and desire to hunt down those who killed the woman he loved.