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[Myrhial Arkenath]

I must be using the wrong keywords, since I can't actually find anything decent on google. What I am looking for is guides or other resources to help me with creating descriptions, personality traits and and backstories for roleplaying characters. I feel that too often my characters are very mainstream or carry a lot of my personal traits since I've not really worked them out and I'd like to be a tad more creative. Also with roleplaying in various other games I'm thinking of setting up cheat-sheets for each character. Does anyone have any to share, or other advice?

[Casiella]

Ash's Guide is my favorite, by far.

[Myrhial Arkenath]

Excellent, that just covers about everything <3

[Lillith Blackheart]

Ash's guide hurts me deep inside.

Deep.

Deep inside.

It hurts me further that it is so heavily referenced.

That said, overall Ash's guide is not bad, because it puts one on a train of thought, the problem is that Ash's guide causes one to tend to overdo it. Which I will kinda get to later.

It's pretty simple, imo. Ask yourself the following questions, both of which are pretty basic, and neither need incredible detail:

Where did my character come from? (Homeworld, upbringing, etc)

What is my character's motivation? (What does he/she want to do, and what drove them to this)

Be as open as possible while still answering the questions. This is very important. I strongly stress against overly detailed backgrounds, because when that happens you fall into a trap, specifically your character won't develop much. There is no leeway. (<-- the aforementioned problem with following Ash's guide, imo)

The other thing that this helps is you can write other people into gaps in your background, and if a certain character isn't interesting enough, you can adjust them on the fly because you have a large, blank slate to fill in later.

Round them out, too. If it's a good guy, give them negative qualities, if it's a bad guy, give them some heavily humanizing qualities. Three dimensional 4tw.

[Casiella]

I think of Ash's guide (and other articles or guides) as frameworks, not specification templates. That is, they work best when they get you thinking about the character and perhaps how you will play him. You might leave many of the blanks unfilled until you play the characters; others, you may never fill. In general, I do prefer to discover rather than design a character, at least one I intend to keep for any length of time.

I expect Myrhial has enough experience and intelligence to know how to use those sorts of guides, particularly for characters she already plays and just wants to expand.

[Lillith Blackheart]

Intelligent people are not somehow immune to falling into traps when following guides that are poorly built. . .

[Myrhial Arkenath]

Hrm, the way I see it, if your character is very set in stone about something (like a faction loyalty) then there is more room for change, or at least a more distinct change than when your character doesn't really care about that same thing.

It is however a fair warning that you can get yourself stuck by overly detailing, but the way I see it that is more of a problem when you won't allow for change. At the very least your character should be evaluating what is happening and forming an opinion on it. Also change is not always one extreme to another, it can be very subtle, or it can even go the other way, that a current trait is actually strengthened (like a fiercer hate for an enemy after a series of attacks).

On the other hand, blanks do add to realism. A character might be unsure about where they stand, or simply do not care, and if no experience ever triggers it, that blank will remain. The guide does stress that not everything should be filled in btw

[Myrhial Arkenath]

Hrm, core traits are so black and white, my character has a lot of grey actually, and on top of that it really depends on who you are how she's going to treat you. The fact she honors ransoms and sticks to deals can be seen as conscientious, but she is an outlaw. Maybe another framework would suit me better.

[Lillith Blackheart]

The guide does stress that you don't need to do it all, but candy bins stress that you can take one, and that doesn't stop people from having a handful.

And yeah, very black and white. That's problem 2.

[Nascent]

Hrm, core traits are so black and white, my character has a lot of grey actually, and on top of that it really depends on who you are how she's going to treat you. The fact she honors ransoms and sticks to deals can be seen as conscientious, but she is an outlaw. Maybe another framework would suit me better.

Solution:  Write in your own traits.

I used it when fleshing out a character for another game and was particularly bothered by the polarity of "Integrity," since I wanted him to be generally ethical but willing to bend his principles if he thought it was sufficiently important.  So I defined his integrity as "malleable."

[Matariki Rain]

I'm guessing you're wanting something more structured, and structure is something Ash's list does offer, but I've quite liked the freeform chargen of games like Heroquest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroQuest_%28role-playing_game%29#Character_creation

Take the prose method, for instance: you have 100 words to describe the essence of your character. You're encouraged to throw in a few ambiguous 'hooks' about things you don't yet know yourself, so you can discover/develop those in play.

I'm also finding that sketching out the character's timeline helps: which years were they where, with whom, doing what? Are those people still around?

Then... what's their idea of a good evening? Preferred foods? Clothing? What sorts of politics do they care about? Do they talk to their crews? Who are their friends, and why? What sorts of presents do they give? Do they like flying close in and personal, or from a range where they can observe events and pick their actions? Why do they fly the ships they fly? How did they come to be in the pod?