Designing characters for roleplays you are never going to play in!

I love making CSes for system-based roleplays.

For example, they list a dozen or so traits, and you pick three. I like to build a variety of characters off these sort of things, and I end up making a lot of semi-complete CSes—I put most of the focus in the system components and the image, while usually leaving the biography either blank or bare-bones.

In fact, it was this very tendency of mine that got me back into roleplaying.

I knew I was too busy to participate in the roleplays all my friends were in but the worlds were just so neat, that I decided to make characters for the hell of it. (I also did/do make vast synopses of all the characters participating in said roleplays, so I could better determine what would be unique. These have now evolved into large GoogleSheets, a link to which can be found in my sig.) After a while, I stopped being busy, and because I already had an experimental sheet ready, I just jumped in. First if was just Legends of Renalta, but more recently, I've ended up joining each roleplay I made a CS for.

So I didn't have the intention of using those CSes, but most I did anyways. Still, I also have some neat back-ups that'll likely never see the light of day.
 
I sort of do this. Whenever I get a really good idea for a character, I make a sheet to gather all my ideas. Usually never for one RP specifically, I tend to wait until there's a good RP for me to use them (I.E, they fit), then I'll adjust em' a bit and use them then.

I see a character sheet that I'll never use as a truly wasted effort.
 
ElBell said:
I do this a lot, to be completely honest. I think as writers, we're all inclined to be creative at even the smallest spark of inspiration, whatever the source. So even if we see a thread we've no interest of joining for whatever reasons, be it time or people or direction of story, something very small may plant a seed in our head the becomes a character. I'm sure we've all even made characters based on ideas we didn't even know had come around. My character Rayna for example, I later concluded, had been inspired by the way a previous RP (I read, but never joined) used rain as a major plot device. I of course didn't have this in my conscious mind at the time, but looking back on her name, her powers, and her appearance, all of them can be attributed in some way to the rain in the RP I had scanned over.
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Funny thing. Though I did end up playing them in the RP that inspired them (though said RP died rather quickly), my characters Thoee and Deen, not to mention the whole Nism species, came about due to an RP opening scene that described an other-world sandstorm so violent, any living thing caught in it would have the flesh stripped from its bones. Which lead to the inspiration: How would you design a critter able to survive such a storm? My alien couple and their species grew from that small acorn. Heh... they not only survived the sandstorm, they moved onward to other worlds and stories everywhere I've RPed.
 
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