How I do caracters · 1:00am Sep 20th, 2021
Since this might be of use to someone, since people often like my characters... I actually randomly roll their general traits. Here's the tables I made for that. First up, biological sex.
+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | d1000 | Sex Name |Appearance | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 1-482 | Male |Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 483-981 | Female |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 982 | Late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (nonclassical forms) |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 983 | Hypospadias | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 984 | Klinefelter syndrome | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 985 | 47, XXX genotype |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 986 | Turner syndrome |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 987 | MRKH Syndrome |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 988 | Vaginal atresia/agenesis |Female | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 989 | Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (classical forms) | N/A | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 990 | 45,X/46,XY chromosomal mosaicism | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 991 | XYY genotype | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 992 | XXYY genotype | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 993 | XX genotype (male) | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 994 | Ovotesticular disorder of sex development | None | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 995 | 46, XY Complete gonadal dysgenesis | Pheno fem | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 996 | Androgen insensitivity syndrome | Gen male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 997 | 5-alpha-reductase deficiency | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 998 | Mixed gonadal dysgenesis | None | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 999 | Anorchia | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+ | 1000 | Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome | Male | +---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+
"Wait why do you have more sexs than male and female?" Because there are more than those two. No I'm not talking about genders. I'm including intersex conditions on this table because they exist and biology isn't prefect. It does make mistakes, all the time. (Not saying that to be rude to intersex people. I'm talking strictly in terms of biological processes relating to reproduction of animal life.)
"Okay but what's appearance mean?" It means what that person will appear to be at a glance. This is about, you know, actual biology. Not how somone feels or acts. This is nuts, bolts, flesh, bone. It's important as the starting step for my process. "Alright but what the fuck does Genetic Male, Pheno fem (pheotypical female), and N/A mean?" A genetic male has the chromosomes of a man, but the external genitals are incompletely formed, ambiguous, or clearly female, IE, looks like a girl in all ways that matter, but the bits on the inside are male, actually. A pheotypical female appears female outwardly but has what I shit you not are called "Steak gonads" which means their ovaries just don't fucking work, also they wont undergo puberty without surgical removal of those malformed bits combined with hormone therapy. N/A means N/A, not applicable. Those particular intersex folk don't experience puberty at all and thus never develop any sex characteristics at all.
Now gender identity.
+---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | d1000 | Identity Name | Meaning | +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | 1-980 | Cisgender | Self identity matches sex organs. | +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | 980-995 | Transgender | Self identity is opposite sex organs. | +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | 996-997 | Agender | Doesn't use sex as part of their identity.| +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | 998-999 | Androgyne | Blends masculine and feminine traits. | +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+ | 1000 | Gender Fluid | Cycles between masculine and feminine. | +---------+--------------+-------------------------------------------+
"Wait but there are more Gender Identities than those!" Not really. Matches sex organs, does not match sex organs, uses traits from both, doesn't give a fuck, cycles between self expression states. That covers everything. If you want to be more specific, pick something within the category you rolled.
On to sexual orientation. Two tables this time.
+----------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | d1000 | Sexual Prefrence | Meaning | +----------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | 1-955 | Hettrosexual | Exclusivly attracted to the oppsite biological sex. | +----------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+ | 956-1000 | Go to other table. | Roll on the subsequent table. | +----------+--------------------+-----------------------------------------------------+
+----+------------------------------------------------+ | d6 | Orientation | +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 1 | Straight but with basically just one exception.| +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 2 | Bisexual, but super prefers the opposite sex. | +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 3 | Pansexual IE doesn't care about bio sex. | +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 4 | Bisexual, but super prefers their own sex. | +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 5 | Gay but with basically just one exception. | +----+------------------------------------------------+ | 6 | Super gay. | +----+------------------------------------------------+
"Wait what, that's like 4.5% for LGBT people! THERE ARE MORE THAN THAT!" Actually no. Not according to surveys, polls, and the work of Demographers. Ya know, the guys who's job it is to work out these things. In the US at least, it's 4.5%. Adjust the percentage as you see fit. Also fun fact, yes I have almost no strait characters and I use this table method. My dice are blursed.
"Okay but... is that just the Kinsey scale with strait taken off? And why a d6 there and not a d1000?" Yeah it is. Say what you will of it it covers all the basic options. As for the d6, well, I can't find accurate data for what percentage of gay people is what. So I made it equal chances there for representation purposes.
Anyway there you go, the core of a character. Say you roll a female, then gender, then super gay. Think about how those elements interact, you have a woman who doesn't care about biological sex when it comes to self identity, but is only attracted to her own sex. Does that mean she only likes people who also don't care about biological sex? Does that mean she only likes other girls? Or maybe she only likes a fictional sex (herm/futa). Or maybe she doesn't feel any attraction of a sexual nature at all. She might not even like being called she if she thinks using your sex as part of your identity is dumb rather than just not a thing she does.
Anyways that should help you get some more interestingly internally developed characters and include options you wouldn't have otherwise. BTW you can do this for every aspect of character creation if you really want. Parental background, school performance, color, morality, philosophical stance, etc. I actually automated about 400 tables to make a program to spit out a big ol seed for me to grow and develop into characters that covers their entire life history from who their parents were, what their parents financial status was like, if they had siblings, school performance, general home life as a kid, best friends, school popularity, the works. Lets me spend my time an attention on filling in the details, connecting the dots and making the character real fleshed out.
Just make your own tables for like, anything else if you want to keep it random. I just use this to make sure that I have a spread of caracters covering more of life than I would be inclined to write.
Hope this was of use to someone.
this is actually quite interesting, and very thorough. wonder if you're going to ever make a public version of that program or process or whatever it'd be classified as.
5584328 I would be fine releasing it, if people want. Howeaver:
Wow Meep, this is exactly the kind of stuff I follow you for! Even though they often don't mach up with my style of story telling, the amount of work you put into these things is awesome!
5584387 If you like the work I put into things... I actually have a program that spits out a conlang (or at least the core of one) so if I ever want to / need too I can create the 400 most basic words and the general grammar rules of a language from scratch at the press of a button. The most practical use of that is making sure that a culture's names for things all sound and look similar to one another. For fanfics I normally use real life languages for that because conlangs are *hard*.
I was also doing a YouTube series on how to do worldbulding involving my methods. But no one seemed to care so I stopped that.
If you want to see a version of my character gen adapted for a tabletop RPG I'm running for some friends, here's a link for you to play with. This is the cleanest version that I am willing to share, but it requires user inputs. Most of my stuff is one click, that's it, done. Feel free to check this out yourself, 5584328
5584389
I didn't even know you had a youtube channel. 👀 Might check it out if I can find it.
5584428 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCur05VtOCW_erk7f1poOxbA
5584552
Ooh, thx!
5584552
I'll gladly pad your subscriber count. And maybe actually watch some stuff
5584585 I don't think I have much of interest on the account. I don't have the... patience to do much with video. When I tried doing a lets play enhanced with VFX and custom modding to tell a story the game never intended it took... way too much time.
But thank you :3
Even with the fact that I have major whatever you called the bias of just knowing the people in your life not people you don't know, I really think that more than 4.5% of people aren't strictly straight
My highschool ex had triple x syndrome. she found out when doing some sort of DNA Testing Lab in college. It makes sense she's fairly tall for her family and pretty weak
5587824 It might be, but do remember people tend to be clustered and this is a nation wide dataset. For example, African Americans make up ~13% of Americans, and yet, there are plenty of places where you can live your entire life in the US without seeing a single black person, or at most just one. Likewise, there are places where basically 100% of people are gay (see that one part of San Francisco), and places where basically no one is.
I tried to go with numbers representative of humanity, rather than a specific city, state, or county. As far as I can see, that's 4.5%. 1 in 20.
That... Is honestly pretty fascinating. Explains quite a bit about some of your character casts too, wow. Your random number generation really is blursed. I've always been fond of using random generation to generate characters, but hadn't considered using the method for actual story purposes. That takes a lot of the creative weight off of the imagination, sparing resources for other processes. I will have to remember that.
Thanks for sharing, quoth the late commenter.
5600752 Yeah, I do have some wierd casts, don't I? XD