"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" as they say. In the end of the day, unless the character is hideously deformed or something of the sort the descriptions of "ugly" or "beautiful" are rather open for interpretation, and thus don't really say much about the character. If anything, I often take those words appearing in a description as a red flag, since that is the player trying to force behavior from others towards their character. Describing your character as beautiful comes off as saying that if my character doesn't find your character beautiful then something is wrong in my character's perception.

Outside of description though, I don't particularly care whether characters are beautiful or ugly. Maybe it' more significant for people who use photos as faceclaims, but me who uses mostly anime faceclaims and the occasional realistic art faceclaim if I'm playing something like a creature that I wouldn't be able to find good anime images for, matters like these seem trivial to the point of never being brought up. Same for something like ethnicity, unless the country of origin is somehow relevant most of the time it's a matter that you might as well throw a dice for.

As for images I use, well I do tend to use pictures I find 'cute' or 'cool' or 'bizarre', depending on the kind of character I'm aiming to make. My reasons for not going out of my way to pick anything more conventional or ugly is part what I said in the previous paragraph and part the fact that I pick images based on what I like to look at. If I'm going to create a character sheet and go back to it often, or re-use the image in posts or anything of the sort, I might as well pick something I actually will be happy to see.

To be brief, while I do see many stock characters, more so with the way they are presented in art, I generally can only roll my eyes at it. They are archetypes and tropes for a reason, as unsuccessful as that may be. For my own characters, they all follow a central theme in many shades yet the largest issue is that they cannot be worked well into most settings or situations - their novelty or uniqueness would detract from the overall theme and setting or at the very least be worlds distracting. Because I am none fond of being that sort of player, I tend not to apply in the first place as a result. But when and where I do play purely outside my realm of comfort, I always envision those characters as average. Not ugly or repulsive, yet not attractive, at perhaps their best admirable in some caliber and capacity that way but certainly not because of appearance.

Yet while I do see a fair number of characters who are stock and bog standard in being individuals, as the "young but troubled master of the sword who is on an adventure" or the "mysterious creepy introvert" or "wacky, zany, 'funny' one", those tend not to last long or they tend to evolve with time. Not always, but it at least gains some ground as the plot goes forward. Likewise, characters with the dark, mysterious, unknowable and terrible past - the aforementioned likely orphan of some variety - contrarily do not because they lack interface with the rest. That leads me to believe there is more to do with how well they fit in, both with the character and writer, than what trope - irksome it might even be - they are. But I cannot say I definitively know that for certain, rather just solely from experience and observation that this outcome is more true than it is not.

@Odin I just think a pretty faceclaim can be used to say more about the human condition than, "Me like [insert character of the preferred sex], me want to make the fuck. But what if this person doesn't like me back uguu? Gosh, I'm just so unsure and tortured."

First of all, why are the stories actually worth telling through pretty faceclaims so seldom told? You ain't never seen a character who looks like this feeling unsure of whether his friends like him for who he truly is versus just latching themselves to him hoping the Halo Effect will doll them up a little. Being used for his status and charm. You ain't never seen him throw a punch when someone says to him, "What are you so sad about? If I looked as good as you I'd be getting laid every day." You ain't never seen him feel alienated and alone, because nobody takes his pain seriously, and conflates easy sex with an abundance of love and affection, and how could someone like him possibly be unhappy? You ain't never seen him suffer over everyone assuming that he's always going to be okay and never going to need help, because pretty people are always assumed to have their shit together. Hell, how about everyone assuming he's just naturally talented and graceful and a genius, without appreciating the blood, sweat, and tears that the character poured into his craft of choice?

I mean, maybe you have seen these. But I'd wager that's because roleplayers are pretending their gorgeous centerfold characters are normal people, walking around in a world where being Chris Hemsworth is the baseline human experience. They aren't and it isn't. They see the world differently from the people walking around having to actually earn trust before it's given, and whose chances at rejection, both in dating and in the ambiguous "real world," are significantly higher.

I'm not saying pretty people don't have problems too. Of course they do. But it's a different set of problems, some of which ugly fuckers like me will never experience. And you're never going to be exploring them in your RP either if you're presenting these ridiculously pretty people as average and normal and interacting with the world the same way everyone else does. The prettiness should be an active choice made during character creation and it should carry consequences all through the character's life: yes, the world treats pretty people better than ugly people. It just does. Being attractive opens more doors of opportunity. It makes people instinctively find you more trustworthy. You can get away with a lot more awkward or antisocial behaviors without immediately receiving a nasty label: for example, you know, two guys at work like to mutter to themselves at work and don't really socialize with their teams. The ugly one is "creepy" but the cute one is "mysterious." Pretty people receive a lot more benefit of the doubt from those who haven't met them, and they tend to have more optimistic outlooks in life because they've been used to getting their way more often from others.

It's not that RPing as pretty people is inherently unrealistic, lazy, or inferior. It's that the prettiness is almost never used to actually tell, or deepen, the character's story. It doesn't inform their outlook on the world at all. It's just, "he's like me but better."

That's a lot of wasted potential, in my opinion.

@pugbutter

I'd also like to add an addendum for non-RL fcs, in that people like to draw attractive people more than unattractive people. As such, there are less options for what fits.

@stone You're right, and it's pain

I started Pinterest boards specifically to archive ugly, strange, and interesting faceclaims for the genres I like because seeing them in the wild is so rare.

To answer the thread title, I’ve been rather pleased with the amount of diversity I’ve seen in my own roleplays, and some of the ones I have joined. The trick is for the GM to create an environment that encourages diversity, but it also falls to the players to give their creations interesting quirks. It’s the smallest details that really make a character for me. Every medieval anime RP needs a dark swordsman with a big sword, but the difference between an interesting character and a boring one all depend on the finer details. A ruthless killer that loves animals, A nurse with a fiery temper, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a compelling character.

Not all diversity is created equally. Racial diversity is fine in a slice of life RP that takes place in an American school, but if you’re joining an RP about vikings, your African American character is not going to be a welcome addition to that. Same with Ethnic diversity. It’s fine to want to be a “speshal snohflayke,” but you have to avoid taking a huge shit on everything the GM has set up. Just because it has never been seen before doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because it’s a tried and true stereotype doesn’t mean it’s not good.

Running the risk of sounding somewhat egotistical, I once decided to join an RP that was all about killing macabre things in ye olde Europe. After looking at all the character sheets, I set out to make a character. She was an Irish baker who was part of the town militia, and did well enough to get one of her noble friends to make her some armor to wear on her outings. She doesn’t sound too remarkable, yet she was the only female player character in the RP, one of the only human player characters, the only one who’s main profession wasn’t related to killing things, the only character without any magical gear, the only character who wore armor, etc. I think you get the point. By being a relatively normal person, she stood out a lot more than the other characters.

On the topic of “ugly character = better character” I gotta say EHHHHHHHHHHHHH but then again I also see where people are going with it. I was in an RP where someone actually mentioned several times about how remarkably attractive their character was, and she liked and wanted to hump everyone she came in contact with. Thing is, she was also sexually abused by her father. You’d think that would give her a twisted outlook on her beauty, where everyone who wanted to pursue her friendship was “like him” and just wanted to use her because she was pretty. I guess the dad thing was just to make her pitiable. Regardless, I’ve never experienced anything like an entire RP having two-dimensional characters because they were all pretty. I chalk that up to players who care more about wish fulfillment than telling a story. I think roleplayers have a tendency to gravitate towards certain roles that interest them. As they get better, they take one of two paths. Some try to acquire new experiences by signing up for roles they’ve never taken before. Others double down and refine what they want to play, sometimes because roleplaying is more about wish fulfillment to them. Unfortunate, but not every player is interested in making a unique character.

@pugbutter I feel this post so much. I've literally never seen someone take a character faceclaim that wasn't conventionally very attractive, the rare few exceptions being people being intentionally ugly for edgy purposes like some big murderhobo or witch or homeless person or village elder or some bullshit. The fact I'm expected to imagine somebody in the medieval world or in the middle of a 21st century battlefield with perfect facial symmetry makeup hair dye lighting and a little bit of digital retouching just annoys me. It's honestly why I rarely get pictures for my characters because that basically always shoehorns me into making a model for my dude.

The fact I'm expected to imagine somebody in the medieval world or in the middle of a 21st century battlefield with perfect facial symmetry makeup hair dye lighting and a little bit of digital retouching just annoys me.

Modern beauty standards being shoehorned into pseudo-historical settings is a whole other annoyance worth its own post, so thanks for bringing it up. Though @stone raises a good point in that not enough people are creating faceclaims worth using, and you often gotta scour, like, Ilya Repin paintings to find any portraits worth the while.

@pugbutter Yeah I find a good place to get character art is from LARPs/reenactment/amateur cosplay or even middle popularity musicians dressing up for what they do (i.e. the band dArtagnan). You get real people often dressed up for what you want of them, but they're not models or some shit. Art is generally supposed to be pretty but you know most of the time it's not representative of what people actually look like so any vaguely realistic RP will have trouble making use of art when you're trying to imagine a scene in your head anyway.

So bit of a weird one, but does it bother anyone else how many people make their characters taller on average in RPs? Especially true of historical/low fantasy RPs. Its the middle ages and no one's getting proper nutrition and we've got a band of 10 6ft+ people wandering around the countryside.

---

In regards to my own diversity in roleplaying, I like to think I'm not too bad, I am however sometime of a sucker for a tragic backstory, but generally stay away from having my characters be orphans these days.

I definitely fall into using tropes and archetype, but normally that's a starting point for the C.S. and when I think about the character a bit more, I like to plan how they will journey away from that archetype over the course of the RP. Normally I like to think of this in some kind of emotional journey spurred by their bonds with the other characters, but sometimes its more of an existential one. I like characters who are living without purpose or meaning to find one, or characters driven by particular goals to become disillusioned to them and abandon them. Unfortunately, roleplays rarely last long enough for these changes to happen fully.

There are really only two examples I can think of where I have done this to my satisfaction. One was where an angry, but dutiful and honour bound individual was continuously vacillating between his duty, his anger, and his growing bond with the party. Unfortunately his life was slowly also being consumed by a degenerative disease that left its sufferers feral empty shells of themselves (this was a GM plot device, not my own). It got the point where after years of playing him, my character broke, tried to kill the fellows he had cared for, and was killed in turn by the party leader, which forced an arc of change and growth on them.

The other was a 1x1 I did about a embittered and cynical assassin who ends up falling in love with one of his targets and through this starts to see the good in the world again. He ends up becoming a better, more caring person, but he never loses that ruthlessness and darkness at his core. He pursues better ends for the world at large, but also his own power, becoming something of a spymaster and power behind the throne. He is never fully redeemed, but neither he is completely lost.

I like to think I'm not bad when it comes to diversity in ethnic, sexual, and disability. I don't often do modern day/real world RPs, but when it comes to fantasy I've had plenty of characters who would be considered Black, Middle Eastern, or South Asian if they existed in our world. I like to put in a lot of character with different sexual orientations, frequently including gay subplots. Right now I'm playing an asexual and a character who's either going to be bisexual or lesbian. My favourite gay character was a homosexual, cross dressing Dwarf from a conservative and isolated Dwarven city state, who through nepotism had secured a place as an ambassador away from his own people in a much more cosmopolitan society. I once played a character who was mute as a challenge to myself, as well as a character missing a leg, and various others missing one eye, fingers etc.

When it comes to the issue of attractiveness, yes I have attractive characters, but I also had plain characters, and I have a few very ugly characters. But my favourite to play it comes to this are attractive characters who have been marred or made uglier. One of my currently characters is a petite and effeminately pretty man, apart from a truly horrible scar he has down one side of his face, like difficult to look at level of scarring. I had a character who never showed his face once over the course of an RP, he wore a veil the entire time.

The only area I consider myself really quite bad at is writing female characters.

I've maybe done like 2 or 3 that I can recall? Out of what must be getting on towards 50, or maybe more characters I've made over 11 years both on here, old guild, and other sites. Its mainly because I don't feel as confident writing in a female voice, but I'm consciously trying to address that this year as a sort of new years resolution. I'm gonna force myself to write with gender parity in my characters for the rest of the year. If I make a male character, the next character I make must be female.

This might seem contrived, but I want to improve in writing and I often like setting challenges for myself when it comes to characters. As someone else already said it, limitations breed creativity.

Its the middle ages and no one's getting proper nutrition and we've got a band of 10 6ft+ people wandering around the countryside.

Sometimes research is important, but sometimes people want to play with tropes and most often things are not, um, non-fiction? Quin has seen more stock fantasy settings than say historical non-fiction. Though if everyone is six foot that is kinda like boring and stuff, isn't it?

@pugbutter Yeah I find a good place to get character art is from LARPs/reenactment/amateur cosplay or even middle popularity musicians dressing up for what they do (i.e. the band dArtagnan). You get real people often dressed up for what you want of them, but they're not models or some shit. Art is generally supposed to be pretty but you know most of the time it's not representative of what people actually look like so any vaguely realistic RP will have trouble making use of art when you're trying to imagine a scene in your head anyway.

I mean I am roleplaying because I like to play out a role I enjoy, and sometimes that means being a pretty guy who can also kill shit really good.

If I wanted to live out a realistic version of medieval life, I'd probably join a reenactment group and not spend my days writing fiction on the internet. If you're just looking for realism why not just... do research and read about the topic.

To each their own but I can 100% understand why people prefer to play pretty people most of the time. Similarly, a lot of movies feature pretty people.

*blind reply to OP*

It's definitely a real phenomenon. There are common tropes that repeat in storytelling and have since mankind began telling stories. Our real lives tend to be bland and disappointing, and stories/fantasies/myths/epics explore all those unfulfilled longings that reside in the deepest and most base places of our humanity. People have always been, and will always be, people. Because of that, we have always and will always see the same character tropes repeated endlessly.

That being said, I am always insanely excited to run into characters who stray outside the more commonly rehashed molds, and I try to make my own characters interesting without falling into those old traps. It's a learning process, and I think most of us cringe if we look back at our old attempts at character building (I know I do). Also, there *are* people who grow up as abused, abandoned orphans, or ethereally beautiful narcissists. Almost every trope you can think of *does* match a real person, somewhere in the world. But when you're in an enclosed universe of roleplay, it's harder to find variety because the world is shrunk to the size of your fellow players.

So I try to measure my character creation based on the universe that I'm playing in, the characters already in play (I may adore the thought of playing a leather-clad female assassin, for example, but if there are already half a dozen of those, I won't make another), what interests me, what I know I'm good at portraying, and then try to think of something interesting to make them feel "real". I have no wish to play overpowered, physically perfect, flawless characters. Right now I have an uneducated cripple, a woman with violent schizophrenia, a libertine with no impulse control, and a few others.

Whenever I happen to find a character who is both well-written and *interesting*, that is like finding a treasure. Granted, everyone will define "interesting" in their own way, but I will take the complex, layered, background character over the powerful, brilliant, gorgeous, charming, spotlight-hound any day.

On the topic of faceclaims, I have a bit of a rule for myself to go by. "Never use the same FC/character twice." It also applies to faceclaims others already were or are using. Bit of a stretch, but hey, it works.

In general, I try to go for any ones that seem to grab my interest, concept-wise and all, so results may vary. I love to try and experiment with stuff when it comes to making character, try and get out of my comfort zone, ya know?

"Diversity" in RP is a tricky thing, in my opinion. At the risk of infuriating someone, it's almost laughably easy to tell when a man is trying to roleplay a woman and vice versa. At least, that is my experience, but then I am someone who is highly observant and intuitive about behaviors and subtleties that many others miss. I have roleplayed male characters, and while I'd like to think I've done a decent job at it, I would never sit here and say that I can portray a man as well as an actual man could, because I am not, and never will be, a man. And no, I'm not interested in gender politics, I'm simply giving my own opinion here.

I think that people give their best RP performances *by far* when they stick to what they know. That doesn't mean you could never *convincingly* portray another race/gender/etc, but I don't want convincing quality RP, I want mind-blowing. Whenever possible, anyway. I don't think it's necessarily brave or edgy or courageous or what-have-you to leap far out of your comfort zone and believe that you can jump into the mind of a character whose shoes you've never even thought about, let alone walked in. That smacks of arrogance to me. I could give some examples, but I don't want to further risk ruffling feathers.

<Snipped quote by Raxacoricofallapatorius>

If you're beautiful irl though, it's all you know

You would know ;) <3

I wonder - does anyone else have a character archetype (so, something that is somewhat defined and common in media) that they rarely see in RPs?

I feel like I almost never see "Big Burly Manly-man with Family they love to talk about" at all.

Fat people. Dear God, where are the fat people?

<Snipped quote by Andreyich>

Modern beauty standards being shoehorned into pseudo-historical settings is a whole other annoyance worth its own post, so thanks for bringing it up. Though @stone raises a good point in that not enough people are creating faceclaims worth using, and you often gotta scour, like, Ilya Repin paintings to find any portraits worth the while.

Dude, you know all the women in the 12th century had fake lashes and bronzer, what's wrong with you? :P

If it's any consolation, I used this image for one of my characters: wikiart.org/en/daniel-ridgway-knight/…

This might seem contrived, but I want to improve in writing and I often like setting challenges for myself when it comes to characters. As someone else already said it, limitations breed creativity.

Thanks for this post.

To the argument that playing a role you like is the chief joy of roleplaying, I'd counter that some people have the most fun not by tailoring that one aspect of the story (their own characters) endemically to their own tastes, but by contributing to immersion on the whole. Sometimes that means making a personal sacrifice for the greater good, in a sense, in the form of playing homelier characters, or ones who match a weird, alien beauty standard, or ones who tell different stories through their deformities, disfigurations, ugly personalities, mistakes, regrets ... (basically, who make the world feel more lived-in.)

"Diversity" in RP is a tricky thing, in my opinion. At the risk of infuriating someone, it's almost laughably easy to tell when a man is trying to roleplay a woman and vice versa. At least, that is my experience, but then I am someone who is highly observant and intuitive about behaviors and subtleties that many others miss. I have roleplayed male characters, and while I'd like to think I've done a decent job at it, I would never sit here and say that I can portray a man as well as an actual man could, because I am not, and never will be, a man. And no, I'm not interested in gender politics, I'm simply giving my own opinion here.

I think that people give their best RP performances *by far* when they stick to what they know. That doesn't mean you could never *convincingly* portray another race/gender/etc, but I don't want convincing quality RP, I want mind-blowing. Whenever possible, anyway. I don't think it's necessarily brave or edgy or courageous or what-have-you to leap far out of your comfort zone and believe that you can jump into the mind of a character whose shoes you've never even thought about, let alone walked in. That smacks of arrogance to me. I could give some examples, but I don't want to further risk ruffling feathers.

Interesting insights all around; thanks for sharing. If you're willing to expound, what were the signs that tipped you off to male players playing female characters badly (and vice-versa)?

I don't play enough women to feel called out, but should that ever change in one of my many self-imposed writing challenges, your advice may prove indispensable.

<Snipped quote by Kassarock>

Thanks for this post.

To the argument that playing a role you like is the chief joy of roleplaying, I'd counter that some people have the most fun not by tailoring that one aspect of the story (their own characters) endemically to their own tastes, but by contributing to immersion on the whole. Sometimes that means making a personal sacrifice for the greater good, in a sense, in the form of playing homelier characters, or ones who match a weird, alien beauty standard, or ones who tell different stories through their deformities, disfigurations, ugly personalities, mistakes, regrets ... (basically, who make the world feel more lived-in.)

<Snipped quote by GeekFactor>

Interesting insights all around; thanks for sharing. If you're willing to expound, what were the signs that tipped you off to male players playing female characters badly (and vice-versa)?

I don't play enough women to feel called out, but should that ever change in one of my many self-imposed writing challenges, your advice may prove indispensable.

Some of the easiest and quickest to spot are the over-sexualized gals. Often lesbians, but not always. Often aggressively seeking to hook up with others. Many times these characters are young women, on the cusp of "sexual awakening". Or they're hookers/prostitutes/"bad girls with a heart of gold", etc. They're often used to blatantly fulfill personal fantasies of the male player. There's little subtlety to them, they're tough, they're aggressive, they're bold, they're basically men with breasts. There is a great complexity and tenuousness to a young woman discovering her womanhood and the brutish "bull in a china shop" demeanor doesn't really jive.

On a similar note is the tendency to overplay aggressiveness (sexuality aside) in general. I don't mean blatant, physical violence or anger. But women behave and communicate in an entirely different way than men do and it's very easy to project "what I think the other gender is like" rather than what the other gender actually *is* like. Again, some of these differences are so subtle, and I may not be able to explain them well, and if I fail there, forgive me. Men tend to be direct and forthcoming in their words; they say what they mean, they don't beat around the bush, they speak words to accomplish something or make something happen. Women are far more complex and indirect in their words sometimes. They speak to express thoughts, feelings, wishes, disappointments, and believe that doing so will then result in the actions. For instance, let's say we're roleplaying a farmer and his wife, and there's a hole in the roof that needs to be fixed. All the farmer's wife has to say is, "Tom, you need to fix that hole today, there's a storm coming in!" But in her mind, he can see the damn hole, he should be able to figure out that it needs to be fixed, so she says, "You know, I were real disappointed when our supper got ruined the last time it rained and all that water came in." Whereas Tom simply needs her to remind him that there's a hole in the roof that he's perfectly willing to repair, she'll express how his neglecting it made her feel, thinking "Well, if he cares about me and the kids, he'll perk up and get it done!"

That may be a clumsy example, but there you go. Men who RP women will almost always forego those subtleties and just plunge ahead with "speaking their mind" bluntly. They may even realize that this isn't an inherently feminine trait and skirt around it by claiming that their female character is "unusually blunt" (which goes right back to most of them being too bold/aggressive to be believable as women).

To be fair, it's somewhat easy to pick out the women trying to RP as men sometimes, so don't think that my reply is some kind of dig against male players, because it isn't! It's just that there are differences in the sexes that go far beyond the physical. And it's tricky to have the awareness of who one is, and who one *isn't*... to make it believable.