Roleplaying Characters; universal character traits?

I've got one character that I have in pretty much all my roleplays. I keep recreating Naomi Shika in all my rps, and she is always a cheery playful character, but she knows when to be serious about something. I generally balance her out with a more serious male character who is slightly tsundere some of the time. Other characters I make after are dependant on the world.

 

Usually one trait a lot of my Roleplaying characters have is that they have gone through some sort of tragic event that impacts them mentally. For example, one character I made up went through an intense blizzard as a child, resulting in him/her having a weakness or fear of ice. Generally, I make my RP characters fresh for each new RP as the scenario is never really the same. Unless the RP is under the same kind of Genre (Like for exmaple, there are two different Avatar The Last Airbender Roleplays at different times) I would use the same character, but that is pretty rare unless I absolutely love RP'ing as them.

 

I generally like to make up new characters that usually are all very different. I like to rp lots of different personalities. It's pretty fun and helps improve my skills at writing believable characters of all kinds.

I have noticed that there is generally a common theme among many of my characters, though. Most of them have an odd sense of morality. A lot of times it's because they have suffered a string of traumatic experiences or that they've just grown up in a way that what they believe is right doesn't exactly align with the current paradigm. I like writing characters that aren't exactly evil, but have skewed moralities. It makes then unique to write, pretty fun to see develop, and a great platform to bounce interesting character interactions off of.

 

In general, any characters in writing or role-playing that i am attached to don't seem to share a trait (except having some moral decency). However, they share a source. My OC's usually have at least a pinch of my personality in them. Whetherit be my temper, sarcasm, or the modesty i try to keep. One of my pet peeves is when i repeatedly see the same character in unrelated things. I think "Hmm, these must be parrelel universes. (To use Pokémon) There is a John the Swoobat who is obssessed with Sarah the Zubat and they have a phoebia of bugs in this. This is a world without humans. In the world with humans & Pokémon, there is a John the Swoobat who is obssessed with Sarah the Zubat and they have a phoebia of bugs in this one too." You can probably see why I'm irritated by that type of thing.

 

My characters tend to be somewhat snarky, as if I'm trying to release the snark I keep bottled up in real life. I love writing then when they're in Snark-to-Snark Combat, especially when other writers control the other characters. XD

Usually my basic templates for characters start off as characters that don't socialize well and keep to themselves. I've been trying to work on cutting this down.

 

I love playing minstrels, storytellers, and performers in general, so my characters tend to know how to play at least one instrument

 

For me, I prefer having a wide variety of different characters, which makes it more fun when developing them I think, and having them interact. Some of my characters' personalities would clash violently and they wouldn't get along with each other at all, while others could be the best of friends and have zero issues, even some would be indifferent.

I also like coming up with complex personalities and backstories that eventually help shape the character into what they'll eventually become. If I'm RPing with that/those characters though, sometimes they're path will go in a completely separate direction, which is also a lot of fun since then you have to rethink how they'll react to different situations and people.

I tend to be pretty mean to some of mine though haha. They'd either have horrible backstories, or not be treated nicely throughout a lot of their early life. But I have plenty of happy characters too, so in the end they tend to balance out.

 

I normally have the same idea for every character I create, they all have some sort of tragic event happen to them in their past.

 

I mostly try to make characters that have a bad boy type of feel to them. It's the opposite of me so I can understand it a lot better. I will sometimes try to make a character that is either an enemy of my character or one that has a crush on the character :p I have yet to make more characters to reflect on my personality itself, but that's for another day/RP.

 

I usually shove my characters to different worlds. I do this so they can learn how each world is different from the rest. ^^;

 

For the most part, when there are Pokémon in the roleplay, I take my OC, Damien the Absol, and put him in multiple roleplays.

As for people, I make a new name and appearance, but they always share the same personality: Shy, Socially-Awkward, and Quiet. This is only for when I only have one human in a roleplay. If I have more than one person, I make different personalities and such.

 

For my characters, they tend to have a strong believe in peace. And well, I try to make them look intellectual hehe

 

I try to diversify my characters as I go along. However, most of them have something in common, which is a sense of low self esteem. I try to tone it down with characters having a tragic back story though. It might get redundant. Either way, most of my characters are not the talkative type, but that does not mean they are antisocial.

I try to create new characters, but shoving them in different worlds are quite fun, I guess. It gives them a new side of their personality (depends on the RP)

 

With my tendencies, I usually include a tiny bit of me in my characters whenever I roleplay (though I try to relax and lean on instinct and thinking as the character, some aspects still has my thought in it). Though, this tends to either be stubbornness/adamant or a mind to do what they think is right mostly/only. Even so, I try to make them all variable and different (though I'm pretty afraid that they're carbon copies in disguise).​

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With that, there are very few examples of me copy-pasting my character and only modifying them to fit the universe. Well, my first OC Mango Dolphin is the most popular of mine to be subject to this. The rest, however, are created on the spot or developed for a crazy amount of time + brand spanking new.​

 

Personally, I feel like the strongest rp character trait is imperfection and low self-esteem. It's pretty easy to build upon and really gives a sense of connection between my character and I. I feel like self-esteem is so important in telling a story, and seeing how another character reacts to yours is absolutely amazing. You also see the growth in reaction to theirs as well, so it's awesome.

 

This isn't exactly a personality trait, but tons of my characters(Particularly characters that are based of myself) have some green, purple, and/or black in their appearance. Alot of my characters also have multiple variations of said character made for different genre.

Now regarding personality, most if not all of my rp characters are morally good. They may be jerks, super friendly, etc. but for the most part almost all of them are good guys and would ultimately do the right thing. Occasionally that'll be mixed up and such, for instance I have an android mercenary who has no emotions, and has no morals.

Alot of my scientist characters act relatively naive and are normally pretty polite and mindful of their manners.

And lastly, a vast majority of my characters are female. IDK why I just feel more comfortable playing girls which is weird since I'm a guy XD