Hello, hello my ponies. So, seeing as Obsidian’s already opened the floor for nice little lessons with his thread, I thought I’d have a go at it too. Now, I’ll say now, this is one topic I feel strongly about, and which is both a little polarizing and very easily opinionated. It’s also something that there’s no real formula for. The only thing you can do is practice and educate yourself as to what works and does not work.
But that doesn’t mean some advice can’t help.

So, why do I obsess over making characters interesting?
Well, because if you’re gonna work your butt off writing, I think you’d want your readers to care about what you’re writing. But the thing is...they’ll only care about the story if they care about who is in the story. Now you can somewhat get away with a bit more vagueness, such as in second-person stories, but even when that’s done, they have to do something to make you care about the other characters, as well as actually care about the main character. This doesn’t even just apply purely to story writing. I’ve found, as a GM and as a player myself in RPs, that if I don’t really care about the characters or world I’m interacting with, it’s not nearly as fun.

Now, I’m going to say something right now. Caring about a character does not mean you have to like the character. This is especially important for antagonists, as I will discuss later. But a simple, important adage here is “You have to love someone to truly hate them.” If you didn’t care about them, you couldn’t really dislike them specifically.

One of the most important parts in making the reader care is in making your character stand out. I know a lot of people know this...but a lot of them take it too far. And I’ll admit I sometimes overstep it as well. They try to be so different that they stop being normal. And the moment they stop being at all normal, is the moment that your reader can no longer truly connect with them, and understand them.
The kind of different you need is simply something to separate them from the endless crowds of others, whether that be their history, their personality, some minor aspect of their appearance (eyes, hair color, hair design), their abilities, or even their job. Simply something that you can note upon every now and again, and/or that effects their actions and beliefs. They should be unique from everyone else, yes, but what really drives them apart should not dominate everything about them. They should still have enough normalcy somewhere on their person to be understandable to a normal person.

Now, how about conflict though? Why’s that important?
Because without conflict, you do not have a story. I will say that straight up and I will lambast you if you even try to argue against that. I can prove you wrong in every way. Because the simple fact is, if there’s no conflict, you’re just describing. There’s nothing to drive forward anything resembling a plot.
But the better question is, what is conflict? And I’ll admit, that’s a lot harder for any one person to tell you what all the kinds of conflict are. But I have the answer. Conflict is the status of something being wrong. There’s an issue or problem somewhere; something is in someone’s way. And the plot is how that someone tries to deal with that something.
But some people fail to grasp something far more important about conflict. It needs to have meaning. And by that, I mean it should be relevant to all the characters involved. Sending a bunch of space aliens after the Ghostbusters might seem like a novel idea at first, but it’s completely irrelevant to what the Ghostbusters are and what they do. It doesn’t make sense for the Ghostbusters to go around hunting aliens. That’s what I mean by relevant. The conflict should mold to the characters and should be something that actually works against what the protagonist(s) desire or want.

Another aspect of producing meaningful conflict is challenge, and resolution. The former is easy to produce in great quantity, but the latter is an art that I doubt anyone has ever mastered. Some people will make a conflict simply too easy to fix, and that’s okay for minor conflicts in a story. Some things just don’t deserve to last more than a chapter or so of a book, and should be resolved quickly and efficiently. Such as a minor spat between lovers, backdropped against a much larger story, at least.

But others will create conflicts that are literally impossible for the protagonist(s) to deal with by any stretch of the imagination, even with plenty of character development. And while that’s bad enough in stories (as it consistently forces the need for a deus ex machina), in roleplays, I will tell you, as a player, it’s simply abhorrent. These kinds of conflicts do. Not. Work. Because it’s not satisfying to see the conflict resolved through deus ex machina, and it’s no fun being a roleplayer and being completely unable to do a thing about the plot while the GM just forcibly railroads you wherever they want to go. And I’m not talking about just a “hard” conflict to deal with. I mean literally something that the characters involved could never deal with by any stretch of the imagination without some gigantic outside force doing it for them.

That’s where it becomes difficult. It’s a dangerous, delicate balance between producing a conflict that is enough to hinder the protagonist(s), but not so much that it just steamrolls them. It’s the middle of the road that’s needed for how hard a major conflict can be, and that’s sometimes a hard line to find. And it’s just the same for resolutions. You want to make them fulfilling to the reader, but deus ex machina always wants to creep in as the way to do it, and it’ll creep in all the time. Because it’s easy to solve problems that way.

There’s not much I can tell you to do except to sit for a moment and think about what you’re doing. Consider everything about the plot, and how it reflects upon the characters. Think about the characters and how they reflect upon the plot. You have to get everything in sync with everything else.
Then you can think about whether or not the characters can deal with the conflict. Brainstorm ideas for how they, by their personalities, would try to deal with the problems in their world. What would they do in this situation and how would they end up resolving the conflict overall? You don’t need a concrete idea when you’re doing this, but just enough of one to understand whether or not its that actions of the characters themselves that deals with the conflict. If some outside force is what deals with the main conflict, you might want to rethink something, either the conflict, the characters, or how they’d deal with it.

I’m open to questions and debate on any point. I’ve been trying to train myself to spot these things, and whilst I can’t claim mastery of it all, I can claim that as an amateur writer and a long-term roleplayer myself, I should at least have an idea of what I’m talking about. I'm here to help out anyone who wants help, after all. And this is just one of those parts of writing that I feel a passion for.

I’ll also take suggestions, if I believe they’re fitting. I’ll add them to the lesson in an appropriate place, just for you lot. Just throw stuff at me if you feel like you’ve got an idea that would work better than what I wrote up there, or that would emphasize something that's already up there.

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I don't really have any questions, but just, thank you. This helps me a lot, and I shall copy and paste onto a folder in my notes where several lessons like this are contained.

Thanks!