This may come as a surprise to many of you, but creating a character for a roleplay (be that text-based, tabletop, LARP, or anything else) requires a different set of rules than other characters. The reason for this is that you have an obligation to make your character a cohesive part of a collaborative story, and if you don’t keep that in mind, you can end up with a character that stalls the plot, creates unnecessary conflict, or even upsets your roleplay partners (perhaps to the degree that they stop playing). 

Of course, you will also need to make sure you have the foundations of a character—backstory, appearance, personality, etc. Be sure to check out How to Make Characters Interesting, Complex, and Unique if you aren’t sure how to get started.

 Aside from that, however, you also need to keep these other points in mind. 

Give Them a Balance of Positive and Negative Traits

Okay, I know I just said that you need to use different rules for creating RP characters, and this is the quintessential rule of writing any character. Bear with me. 

You should give all of your characters flaws. I have another article that talks about why, so I won’t get into it here. (How to Create Complex Flaws for Characters.) However, when creating a character for a roleplay, it’s really important to make sure your character has a balance of good and bad behaviors. 

Positive traits give your RP partner’s character opportunities to connect with your character, which is often necessary to further the plot. It can also lead to important relationship developments, interesting conversations, and more. 

Negative traits create necessary conflict and interest, while also providing opportunities for the character’s personal growth and development. Often, negative traits or mindsets can be the driving force behind a plot, such as a desire for revenge, fleeing from one’s past, or the pursuit of wealth. 

Make Them Possible to Get Along With

This should go without saying, but I have been part of many roleplays where the other person’s character was impossible to get along with, and I had to warp my character’s personality substantially in order to accommodate them. Making your character possible to get along with in some way is absolutely instrumental, and it should be at the front of your mind the entire time you are designing your character. 

Even if your character is supposed to be the cold, calculating asshole archetype, you need to have some sort of obvious way of allowing other characters to interact with them—otherwise, it will be hard to justify having the other characters stick around. Give them a clear soft spot for something, an indication of where their negativity stems from, a common goal with other characters, or some other sense of being a decent (or at least okay) person to be around. If your partner’s character just can’t get along with your character no matter what they try, that isn’t going to be any fun, and having fun is the whole point. 

Give Them a Goal that Aligns with the Main Plot

Even if your character is hard to get along with, they should have a goal that aligns with the goals of the other character (or characters). Even if that goal is simply “escape alive” or “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Keeping the main plot in mind can make it easier to craft common goals for different characters in a roleplay. If you have a structured plot laid out already, like the characters rising up against a dystopian regime, then you can build your character around their motivations to rebel. If everyone abides by this, then all the characters will be more inclined to work together, even if they don’t like each other (yet). 

However, characters can have different goals that lead them to the same place. Three different characters can all arrive at a historical site for different reasons—one wants to rob the place, another wants to gain insight into their family’s past, and another simply visits as a tourist. Even though they arrive with different objectives, they could all end up getting dragged into the same shenanigans. 

Give Them Secrets

Secrets are so often tragically overlooked in roleplays. Giving other players the opportunity to discover things along the way, instead of telling them everything upfront, can help keep everyone intrigued and inspired to continue the story. 

Having your character keep secrets from other characters is also more realistic. Most people don’t spill their deepest regrets or traumas to strangers they just met, nor do people generally share their hopes and aspirations with people they have to work begrudgingly alongside. 

If the character is keeping something secret, and it is not essential for your RP partners to know right away, then you should keep it a secret from them until you can reveal it in a more meaningful way. 

Don’t Make Them Overpowered

One of the main things that makes roleplay fun is the problem-solving aspect of it. Characters will often have to figure out how to survive a fight, investigate something, or escape various different situations—and you, as the writer, have to determine what reaction would most accurately reflect what your character would do, even if that isn’t the obvious best choice. The characters’ varied limitations and capabilities often result in unique solutions (or additional problems) that can highlight a lot of things about the characters as individuals, their relationship to one another, and what matters to each of them. 

However, there exists a problem in the roleplaying community known as “god modding,” in which one player tries to exert complete control over a scene by allowing their character to act without logical limitations or boundaries—essentially operating with “godlike” powers. Naturally, it’s no fun for other players if your character solves all problems with their mega super-powered black magic. Be courteous, and apply limits to what your character is capable of. 

Communicate With Your Roleplay Partner(s)

No matter what, the most important part of creating a character for a roleplay is communicating with your RP partner/s. You may set certain rules and expectations, communicate about triggering topics, or even share ideas. You could also use this opportunity to establish existing relationships or converse about what the characters already know about one another.

You absolutely never want to give characters backstory that contains triggering topics for your partner. You should also never give your character magical abilities without that being discussed beforehand. You should never make your character a species that hasn’t been confirmed to even exist in the context in which the story takes place. 

With all that said, as long as you and your partner/s agree on what should and shouldn’t be included in the story, nothing is off the table. If you want to have alien superhero characters that hate each other, and you both understand what that entails, then absolutely go for it. 

So, you’ve been hitting it off with a new potential roleplay partner, when one of you drops the dreaded question: “who is going to write the starter?”

Writing a roleplay starter is not unlike writing the first page of a story. It needs to be interesting, concise, and cover a lot of introductory material in a short amount of time. There’s a lot riding on that first message in a roleplay too, since you know the other person is going to judge your writing style, your characters, and your storytelling ability. So… it’s not surprising that many people shy away from the responsibility. 

However, writing the starter is a privilege. When you get to start the entire story, you get to be in charge of the setting, the situation, and the fated meeting between the characters. And honestly, it’s not as difficult as people make it out to seem. Once you understand the formula, you’ll want to take charge and write the starters for every roleplay you’re a part of. 

The Basics of a Roleplay Starter

A “starter” is the first message in a roleplay thread; it is the start of the story. When you write a lazy starter, there’s not a lot of incentive for the other person to respond. No one wants to do all the work in a roleplay, so you need to make sure you are providing a starter that they will be excited to respond to and build off of.  

In order for a starter to be effective, it needs to do three basic things:

1. Set the scene
2. Introduce your characters
3. And create an opportunity for the other person to respond

I’ll break down each point in more detail in the sections below. 

Set the Scene

The very first thing your starter should do is establish the setting in which the characters are going to encounter each other. Do they meet in a bar? Are they on the same plane? Are they both wandering through the same cursed forest? No matter what you choose, you need to make sure you are describing the scene well so the other player knows how to navigate it with their own character. 

In many cases, the initial setting is discussed before the actual start of the roleplay. However, even if you know in advance that the characters will be meeting in a coffee shop, you still get to name the coffee shop, describe the atmosphere, and establish the basic layout of the building. Don’t get too hung up on the details, however. You aren’t writing a novel after all, and you don’t want your starter to end up being several thousand words. 

There is a notable exception to this rule. If you are writing a fandom roleplay, and the characters will be meeting in a location that appears in the original story (the “canon”), then you simply have to state the location and where your character is within it.

Introduce Your Characters

The next most important thing that a starter must do is introduce the character (or characters) you intend to play. 

In almost all cases, roleplayers exchange character bios before the start of the roleplay. This is an important step that allows you and your roleplay partner to determine the potential chemistry between the characters. The last thing you want is to realize the characters don’t have a good dynamic after the story gets rolling. 

If you aren’t sure what should be included in a character bio, I have another article on the topic that may help you out: How to Write a Character Bio (With Examples!). 

You should still include a brief character bio even if you intend to play a canon character from a fandom. Use their bio as a way of introducing quirks and behaviors that you think apply to the character, and share any headcanons that you may have for them. If the character deviates at all from how they are depicted in the source material, then you need to point that out as well. 

Since the other player already knows your character’s basic information from their bio, you don’t need to give a complete physical description of them when you introduce them in the starter. You can mention a few of their physical traits, but for the most part, your introduction should focus on how the character behaves. 

To go back to the coffee shop example: Is your character sitting quietly by themself with a bagel and a coffee? Are they engaged in a debate with other coffee shop goers? Are they arguing with the cashier about their credit card being declined? Use their introduction as an opportunity to show how the traits you described in their character bio manifest in their behavior. By focusing on what your character is doing instead of what they look like, you are also giving your roleplay partner an opportunity to respond to the situation. 

Create an Opportunity for the Other Player to Respond

It is important to keep in mind that the starter you are writing is meant to be open-ended. You want to encourage your roleplay partner to engage with what is going on in the scene. As I mentioned above, having your character doing something is a great start. If your character is making a scene as opposed to just sitting around quietly, then that increases the chances of someone realistically interacting with them. 

Have your character ask for help, strike up a conversation, get in trouble, or otherwise engage with their environment in some way. This allows the other player’s character to assist, answer, challenge, or otherwise react to your character. 

Some people are okay with you bringing their character into the scene yourself, by having them enter right on cue, come from the right direction, or just be around for your character to trip and run into. If you’re comfortable with doing so, you can take temporary control of the other player’s character just long enough to place them in the scene. This lets the other player know exactly how their character is involved, so they know how to react more instinctively. It is important to remember, however, that not everyone is okay with this. You need to ask for permission before you do anything like this with the other player’s character. Never make assumptions about what your roleplay partner does and does not allow. 

This rule sort of applies all the time. Roleplays are dependent on interactions, so every reply should contain some action, detail, dialogue, or information that provides the other person with something to respond to. If you don’t provide these opportunities, it will be harder for your partner to build on the story, and the roleplay will lose momentum. 

Tips for Writing a Good Roleplay Starter

Those three points listed above are the most important aspects of a starter, but there are a few other things you can keep in mind to make your roleplay starters the best they can be. Here are some general tips for writing a good roleplay starter:

• Don’t make it too short. The starter is likely going to be the longest message in a roleplay thread, with a few exceptions. There’s good reason for that, too—the starter has to provide a lot of introductory information and kickstart the story as a whole. To do it justice, it has to be longer than just a few lines, even if the subsequent replies end up being pretty short on average. 
• Don’t get lost in the details. This point is the antithesis to the point above. Although it is important to provide a good description of the setting and what is going on around the characters, you need to make sure you aren’t wasting time by focusing too much on the color of the countertops or the pictures on the wall. If you get too caught up in the details, your starter will end up being too long, and a bit of a drag to read. 
• Make it make sense. Not only should your starter be coherent, but it needs to make logical sense. Your characters need to behave in ways that are realistic, and if they don’t, you need to have a good reason to justify why. If things unfold in a way that doesn’t make any sense, your roleplay partner might not know how to respond. 
• Don’t force your roleplay partner’s character to act out-of-character. You should never, under any circumstances, take control of your partner’s character without their permission to have their character say something or react the way you want them to. This is extremely frustrating for your partner, and since you don’t know their character as well as they do, you risk forcing the character to behave in a way that is inconsistent with their personality. 
• Remember that YOU are starting the scene. When you are writing the starter, you are responsible for setting the scene and kicking off the introduction between the characters. Don’t simply place your character and then force the other person to initiate everything. You have to be the one to set everything up. 
• Don’t be too worried about impressing the other person. Roleplays are supposed to be fun. You aren’t writing a story to get it published, and you don’t have to write like a professional to have a good time. Besides, if you write a really dazzling starter, your partner will expect you to continue to write like that, so it’s better to write how you are comfortable writing from the beginning. Sure, some people can be stuck-up about grammar, but if your partner stresses you out and makes you feel like you have to write perfectly, maybe you should look for a new roleplay partner that you’ll be more comfortable with. 
• Get to know your roleplay partner! Out-of-character (OOC) conversations with your roleplay partner are essential for creating a long-term story together. You don’t have to be the best of friends, but if you want to continue roleplaying with them, you should make the effort to get to know them personally. Getting to know them will also make it easier for you to craft plot arcs that will interest them, which will keep them engaged with the story. 

Some Parting Thoughts About Roleplay Starters

Once you have a starter drafted out, take a moment to consider how you would feel about receiving a starter like that. Did you create a vivid description of the scene? Does your introduction do your character justice? How would you respond? What options do you have to react to it? If you can’t anticipate how someone would react in that situation, then you need to rewrite it so your roleplay partner knows what their character should do. 

If you still aren’t confident you can write a good starter, you can always learn from others. When someone sends you a starter, analyze it. Determine the elements that you like about it and the elements that are difficult to navigate, then learn from that. The more starters you read, the better you’ll get at identifying what works and what doesn’t work. Then, when it comes time to write a starter yourself, you’ll know what to include.

Good luck, and have fun roleplayers!

If you’re starting a new roleplay (RP) or Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG), then one of the things you will be expected to provide is a character biography. If you aren’t familiar with writing character bios, then you might be a little stumped on what exactly needs to be included, and what is better left out. 

Although there is no perfect, established way of writing a biography for a character, there are a couple of things you could do to make it more effective and useful to your fellow roleplayers and TTRPG players. But first, you should make sure you understand exactly what a character bio entails before writing your own.

This article is specifically about creating character bios for roleplays, tabletop games, and other collaborative writing settings. If you’re looking for how to create a character for a story, try checking out How to Make Characters Interesting, Complex, and Unique instead.

What is a Character Bio?

A character bio, also known as a character profile or character biography, is a brief overview of your character that you can provide to others prior to the start of a game or roleplay. It gives them an introduction to your character before the narrative actually begins, which makes it easier to create plots and interact between characters. 

Generally, a character bio includes basic information about the character, such as their name, appearance, and behavior, but it can also include topics such as backstory and motivations. Bios can look different depending on what they are being used for, the genre of the story, and the other players’ preferences. 

Why is a Character Bio Important?

Character bios make it much easier for other players or RP partners to get to know your character. By providing information on your character up front, you can allow others to get to know them, build relationships between characters, and come up with ideas for the story based around your character’s information.

In addition to that, having a good character bio can be helpful to reference later, especially if they are part of a long campaign. Bios help keep your characters consistent and true to their original design. Even the best writers forget things about their characters over time, so it’s a good idea to write everything down anyway. When I take notes on my characters, I usually keep the character’s bio at the top of the page and simply add to it as events unfold in the story. 

How Long Should a Character Bio Be?

One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing a character bio is that it should be short. You need to keep it clear, concise, and brief. You aren’t trying to give away your character’s life story, after all. You just want to break the ice and introduce them to the other players and characters. After all, if you gave away all their secrets at the beginning, there wouldn’t be any mysteries to uncover over the course of the story. 

As a general rule, you should try to keep your character bios shorter than a page (which is typically about 300-500 words). If you make it much shorter than that, you likely wouldn’t be doing your character justice. If you wrote much more than that, however, most people probably wouldn’t get around to reading the whole thing. Character bios aren’t exactly known for being riveting literature. 

What to Include in a Character Bio

When you’re writing your character’s bio, you don’t need to create an entire novel about their life and exploits. You only need to include the details that are important for others to know from the beginning. Some things aren’t even important enough to share at all. 

Although some people have preferences about the ways they want character bios to be formatted, this is the generally accepted formula for writing a good character bio.

The Most Basic Character Elements

The first thing you should establish in your character’s bio is the most basic elements of who they are. That includes things like their:

• Name
• Nicknames
• Age
• Sex
• Gender
• Sexuality
• Species (if applicable)

You don’t need to get fancy here. This is the easy part—just give the basic information and move on to the next section.  

The Character’s Physical Description

Next, you’ll want to give a basic description of what the character looks like. For this section, you’ll want to consider their:

• Height
• Body type
• Skin tone
• Hair color
• Physical details
• Clothing style
• Aesthetic

You can cover this information in bullet points, but I find that it is much more effective to write this part in paragraph format. That makes the bio feel more like an introduction to the character, and less like some kind of legal document.

If you need some pointers for designing your character, check out Tricks for Describing a Character’s Appearance (With Examples). 

Remember to keep this part brief. Physical appearance is only one small part of a character, and you don’t want to waste too much time and energy describing what they look like—especially since you don’t want their bio to be too long.

The Character’s Personality

Obviously, most of the character’s personality should come out as you are playing them, but it’s still a good idea to give your RP partners or TTRPG players an indication of their personality before the game or RP begins. 

As with the other sections, this part should be kept brief. You just want to cover the most important aspects of their personality. You know, the traits and behaviors that define who they are. That could be anything from “grumpy” or “hot-headed” to “innocent” or “creepy.” Just give a few adjectives to describe them, and describe some of their dominant behaviors. This section shouldn’t be any longer than a few sentences. 

The Character’s Backstory

This section is the tricky part. You want to explain enough of your character’s backstory to explain how they got where they are in the present day, but you don’t want to give away too much and make your character a completely open book. Not only that, you want to make sure the information you are providing is meaningful to the story, and not just useless facts. 

When summarizing the character’s backstory for their bio, you should cut out everything except for the bare bones. The details aren’t important now (and you can reveal more over the course of the story anyway). Instead, draw attention to a few milestones in the character’s life, whether that relates to family, education, tragedy, or something else. 

What happened in their past to turn them into the person they are at the beginning of the story? Focus on those points, and leave out all the rest. 

If your character doesn’t have much of a backstory yet, you might want to check out this article before moving on: How to Create Compelling Character Backstories. 

What Motivates the Character

When you’re creating a bio for a character, you’ll want to consider their motivations and goals. A character without a direction is boring, so make sure you have some idea of what your character wants before the story begins. Do they want to start their own business? Hunt ghosts for a living? Avenge their dead brother? What is going to motivate your character to actually do something? 

This part of the bio is often labeled as “present day,” or it’s lumped in with the backstory section. Regardless of how you choose to format it, the point is worth drawing attention to by itself. This part is particularly important for RPs and TTRPGs because it gives partners and fellow players the context they need to understand how this character operates.

The Character’s Quirks and Flaws

I cannot stress this enough: every character needs to have flaws.

All characters need flaws. No one is perfect, so none of your characters should be either. Even if your character is perfect in one regard, they need to be flawed in some other way. The best sharpshooter in the world might be afraid of snakes. The world’s most mesmerizing dancer might have self-confidence issues. 

Quirks are also important! They operate a lot like flaws, though they don’t interfere with the character’s ability to live their life normally. Having a weird sense of humor or a tendency to fidget isn’t necessarily flawed behavior, but it is worth mentioning in this section as well. 

Flaws and quirks are indispensable when it comes to creating interesting characters. They create conflict, and make characters more realistic and sympathetic. Without those details, your characters just won’t resonate with other players. Or worse—you’ll get accused of creating a Mary Sue. 

If you want more information on creating flaws for characters (and why they’re so important for stories), check out How to Create Complex Flaws for Characters.

Miscellaneous Traits and Abilities

Finally, you’ll probably want to include a miscellaneous category at the end of the bio. Depending on your personal preference and the genre of story you’re creating, this part could also go closer to the top. You could also use a different term, or include this category as part of the character’s basic info.

This is the section in which you include anything important that wasn’t covered in the other sections. This could include things such as the character’s:

• Likes
• Dislikes
• Allergies
• Magical Abilities
• Special Skills 
• Languages known
• Religion
• Occupation

Basically, this section is meant to cover anything else that your RP partners or TTRPG players need to know about your character. 

What NOT to include in a Character Bio

That “miscellaneous” category probably has you scratching your head. If that’s supposed to cover the other important parts of your character, how do you know where to stop? 

There are many things that you should never include in a character bio, but there are two distinct reasons why things should be left out: either the point is boring and doesn’t matter, or it is much more fun to reveal that particular piece of information over the course of the story instead. 

Here are some things that should be left out of character bios because they are uninteresting:

• Their Zodiac sign
• Every single detail of their appearance or personality
• Their entire life story
• Their birthday
• Their entire family tree
• Their favorite food/color/etc

Here are the things that should be left out because they would make good plot points later:

• Their secrets
• Their relationships with other characters
• Their strengths and weaknesses
• Their past trauma or struggles

Character Bio Examples

Character bios don’t have to show off your best writing skills. The point isn’t to impress the pants off the other players, and it’s definitely not to prove you’re a better writer than anyone else. You aren’t showing off, you’re just providing a resource on your character that is necessary for the game or RP. 

With that said, here are some examples of character bios to give you a better idea of how to apply all this information. 

Sample Character Bio 1

Name: Rory Bannon

Age: 17

Sex/Gender: Male

Species: Human (Superhero)

Superpower: He can float.

Power Drawbacks: He’s not very good at controlling his ability, and it is dependent on his mood. Sometimes, he will begin to float when he gets excited. 

Appearance: Rory is tall and lanky, and his limbs almost look too long for his body. He has brown hair with a stripe of orange in the front. He has a goofy smile, and he holds a lot of childish optimism in his sunny green eyes. He always wears a suit no matter where he goes, believing that dressing for success is the first step to achieving it. 

Personality: He’s chipper and optimistic, and all his friends agree that he’s a bit of a hopeless romantic. He’s a dreamer, and his head is often stuck in the clouds. 

Backstory: Rory is an only child from a loving home. He decided to attend a school for young heroes to learn how to control his powers, with the full support of his doting parents. 

Goals: He wants to learn how to control his powers and use them to help others.

Quirks: He’s gotten pretty good at floating up—just not at coming back down again. 

Sample Character Bio 2

Name: Alice Howard

Nicknames: Red, Little Red, Pumpkin (by her father)

Age: 16

Sex/Gender: Female

Appearance: Alice is the preppy, pretty girl at school, with a figure that makes boys drool. Her long hair is a gorgeous shade of reddish-brown, and delicate freckles dot her petite, pale features. She is careful to keep her makeup perfect, and she is always pushing the limits of what her school’s dress code allows.

Personality: Despite her looks, Alice is remarkably insecure. She thrives off compliments and bases her entire self-worth on what others think of her. One bad pimple is enough to get her to skip school, and she takes even the smallest insults to heart. Despite how she feels about beauty and her own self-image, she always tries to be uplifting and encouraging to other girls, and would never say anything nasty about the way someone looks. 

Backstory: Alice lives with her grandparents since both of her parents are deployed Marines. Her grandparents are getting quite old, and they often require her help more often than she needs them. She does her best to be responsible, but she often regrets that she can’t get out as much as other girls her age. 

Goals: Alice has a history of bad relationships. All she wants is a good boyfriend and real friends. 

Quirks: She has a tendency to be clingy and physically affectionate with her friends. 

Misc: Alice’s one true love is food, specifically greasy, tex-mex food. 

Sample Character Bio 3

Name: Samson Anders

Nickname: Sams

Age: 29

Sex/Gender: Male

Species: Half-human, half-demon

Height: 6’2”

Hair: Long, Brown

Eye Color: Hazel

Skin Color: Medium-light

Physical Details: He has a large scar over the left side of his neck and collarbone, and multiple smaller scars all over.

Personality: Harsh, cold, and unapproachable. He has a softer side for those he cares about.

Past: He isn’t one to talk about his past. Most of his friends know that he had a rough childhood, but no one knows the details.

Present: He is living with a friend in a one-bedroom apartment, and the duo are professional ghost hunters. 

Goals: Secretly, he hopes to learn more about his demonic side.

Quirks/Flaws: He tends to grow out his facial hair when he is feeling down, simply because he can’t be bothered to shave.