Character Descriptions

[The Mad Hatter]

I just wonder sometimes, why it is that so many people tend to forget important facts like height, body fat and facial features?
I know that some people (most people) find it hard to describe a person's face with words alone and even more so if you have to describe it in as detailed a way as it is necessary to do for other players to be able to picture your character in their minds, so the "facial features" can be explained away by being to hard.
Height, though... I feel that the height of the other characters is very important during interaction. There may be different ideas of what "tall" or "short" is, so those really aren't enough indication of height. If you [writer] is, like, five foot tall, then a six foot character would be tall, but I [reader] might be six foot tall, myself, so I don't feel that that is tall and instead imagine your character being about seven foot, which would tower grandly over my "normal" sized character, who is also six foot ... Or something along those lines.
Body fat or whatever to call it is about the same as with height; my idea of what "chubby" is, might not be the same as what your idea of "chubby" is and even if it was, there are different places for the fat to sit. I, for example, consider myself chubby, but most of my fat is on my ass and boobs, with some of it at my sides, some on my thighs, but barely anything on my stomach, but I've seen other women that I would also call "chubby" who has it all on their stomach.

[Jig]

You've hit the nail on the head; some people (certainly myself) find it hard to describe a character's precise features and so describe them in terms of their presence instead, which lends more to ambiguous descriptors like 'tall' and 'chubby' than it does to facts and figures; that tends to be the default way of describing things in fictitious prose, as far as I've noticed. It's not that I don't think those details are important, but I assume, if relevant, that stuff will naturally unfold in the IC anyway.

The fact I straight-up don't know how tall a human person is or how much a human person weighs is probably related.

[NuttsnBolts]

Out of all the people that you know in one environment, eg: school, work, etc, only a handful would fall into the category of non average body structure. One or two chubby people, a few short, a few tall, but that would still leave at least 75% that would fall under the average body design. So in reality if you we're to describe them you would have to be very precise and it would probably be a little too excessive.

Same goes for RP. Most people are assumed to be of an average body structure and only when you describe it would people notice the difference. So until then I assume that it's not listed simply because there is no apparent need to.

[Ellri]

Normal height in one place isn't necessarily normal in another. The typical Malaysian would be tiny compared to the typical Dutch. Especially if the former is female and the latter male.

We generally don't say anything about body fat, but we do typically note something about weight and/or build. We also find it a bit annoying when people mix that silly imperial system into height / weight. It operates on impractical scaling, whereas the metric system has a precise scaling that stays the same no matter if you're weighting molecules, people or cruise liners, only changing the unit prefix. Well, for the last, megagram is replaced with the identical ton, but the scale remains the same.

[Vilageidiotx]

The reason is because most of this stuff isn't necessarily important. An overly detailed description can very easily become like slamming on the breaks when it comes to pacing. Everybody has their own happy medium, whether it be vague descriptors or cherry picking some details they think help the reader picture the character.

Personally, I think it looks silly when you start bringing numbers into descriptions. Like "Mary Sue was 6 foot 7 inches." or "John Doe was 152 pounds." This isn't crazy unprofessional or anything, i've seen published writers I really like do this plenty of times, but for me personally it always seems clinical as fuck. The weirdest I seen is B/W/H measurements for women.

My own way of doing descriptions is to pick out a few features that stand out and otherwise stay vague. Something like "Robertito was a stocky, big-boned man with an oily handlebar mustache and eyes that gave the impression that he was way too clever for his own good."

[Jig]

Personally, I think it looks silly when you start bringing numbers into descriptions. Like "Mary Sue was 6 foot 7 inches." or "John Doe was 152 pounds." This isn't crazy unprofessional or anything, i've seen published writers I really like do this plenty of times, but for me personally it always seems clinical as fuck. The weirdest I seen is B/W/H measurements for women.

My own way of doing descriptions is to pick out a few features that stand out and otherwise stay vague. Something like "Robertito was a stocky, big-boned man with an oily handlebar mustache and eyes that gave the impression that he was way too clever for his own good."

@Vilageidiotx

Definitely with you here.

[Rithy]

I am TERRIBLE at describing faces, which is why I usually don't write much about them :(

[AlteredTundra]

I tend to go with the presence approach. I don't find writing the character descriptions all that difficult, but I do think it's a little waste of time dedicating a whole paragraph to just how their bone structure is. Like @Vilageidiotx said, explaining too much can work against the overall description. It's why I sometimes like to go the brevity route. Now, don't get me wrong. When the mood strikes, I can dedicate 1000+ words on just the appearance alone. I just have yet to be struck by said mood.

[Vilageidiotx]

And sometimes there is a place for really detailed descriptions too. If those specific details matter to the plot, or if you are writing in the perspective of someone who is attracted to the character you are describing, then it makes sense.

I suppose most of the time, I go at it in the same way I think of people when I see them in real life. Height and weight only come to mind if they are noticeably different, and what I note the most will ultimately be one or two unique features. If they are especially unassuming, I might not notice anything, and likewise an unassuming character might end up with no descriptions at all. Conversely, if I were to write a description based on @Altered Tundra's J-Law signature, i'd probably end up going into more detail because i'd be noticing more detail... for blatantly obvious reasons.

Of course, none of that matters if you don't write in any sort of character description at all, but that is my two centers anyway.

[The Harbinger of Ferocity]

I tend to avoid the rank and file height, weight and attributes are usually described as has been mentioned before. They seem out of place, with numbers being the worst of them in that unless the numbers are being explicitly read in some format - say a medical document or official format - they fail to "mesh". Vagueness sort of works better in these regards, or at least comes across as more natural; "A head taller than many a man." "Uncharacteristically muscular for a woman." "The firm sternness of an aged face pocked with a rough, short beard."

None of these examples give explicit details as to what you're reading about - leaving it mostly up to the reader's imagination - but they tend to get brought up again later on... sometimes by multiple characters in a row, which leads to a really strange trend where everyone notices the same thing... and mentions it one after another. Even more amusingly this can result in where perceptions of a character change post to post, not by fact but sheer opinion as you noted; "tall" is what to someone who is six feet in height? Is the comparison known previously? Hopefully it was in the character sheet.

The reason it tends to get forgotten or repeated? I believe it is, by and large, relevancy. If a responding player does not consider the detail truly that important to their character or themselves, which is often a consequence directly related to their level of roleplaying and maturity in it, it flat out gets dropped. Sometimes this even happens to the responding player's character who magically change features with no apparent reason short of retroactive continuity, be it intended or not.

Either way, my rambling over, I appreciate "effective comparisons" like the examples I noted. They give the sort of sensation that you can generally picture and "know" what the writer is trying to say without explicit, almost mechanical details.

[Baklava]

I would probably say it depends on which section I am in. In the Advanced section, I would expect the other players to not only read the entire description of my character, but also reference it in the IC itself. If I'm posting in casual-- and perhaps this is overly cynical of me-- I count myself lucky if they read the whole thing... much less reference it in the roleplay itself/EVER. All in all, I would much rather just use a picture instead of put a bunch of effort into a description that nobody else except me seems to care about.

Personally, I do prefer more detailed descriptions and I whole-heartedly wish that was the trend, but it's not. It's frustrating to have a crystal clear picture of one character while all the others are the equivalent of old-school runescape graphics.

If I like an RP enough I tend to draw the characters-- and the only characters I spontaneously tend to draw are the ones I can picture. (Especially since I have, in the past, drawn "fuzzy descriptionless runscape blobs just to be treated with a "that's not how they look" instead of thanks)

I don't think numbers like 5'7" and 150lbs have any place in IC, but when listed in the character sheet, it doesn't detract from the story at all and only adds to everyone being able to collectively be on the same page.

[Dinh AaronMk]

You got to leave a little lee-way in there to accommodate for reader perception. And oftentimes it's better to not put things up to specefics, as explained by Vilage. Metaphor and simile can go a long way to building not only a physical description but also something of an emotional description that might be experienced by others. There's a difference in weight between saying "His hair was brown" and "His hair was a rich earthen brown".

Same would apply to the sort of descriptive vehicles the federal and state government would like to have for stuff like driver's licenses. Except giving precise increments detracts all creative abstraction. You can say it for sure: but the context then becomes important. If two characters who are detectives are discussing the physical profile of someone, or there's a missing person's report on them then it would be expected that height and weight are mentioned as simply part of the dialog or on the props for that scene. But no one casually describing another person would use exact height-weight ratios, and neither should it come up in informal writing such as RP'ing or entertainment writing.

This falls into such work being classified as informal writing, where reports where specifics such as this would be deemed formal. Both fields have their mechanical expectations which would have to be met. Informal writing is to entertain so does away with a lot of dry statistics and specefics in the same way formal writing does away with metaphor and simile in order to carry information in a precise manner. Formal writing is written to be interpreted clearly with no mistake on what's being said, what the content is about, and so on. But informal story-writing is written informally like the writer is telling the reader this story person-to-person: and for that you don't use specifics.

You want to captivate the reader. Not dry them up and kill their interest with a sledgehammer of textbook profiling to the face. It needs to flow in a captivating way, with emotion as the vehicle on which it sails. So giving up height-weight ratios there's a thousand ways to describe someone as "short" or "tall". "Imposing and giant" might be a simplified way to describe a body builder, for instance.

[Ellri]

we often find it convenient to use descriptions of others, say when we're looking for them, "he's about 170-175 cm tall, thinly built, but not just skin and bones." But we won't list in the IC, unless there's a data sheet available IC, stuff like "he is 172.83 cm tall and weighs 74.021 kg". The reason we would not list that is that IC our character(s) would not have that precise numbers under most conditions.

[tsukune]

For CS, I'm not the type who can be 'ok' with an image dump and that's all to the character's appearance; I prefer at least a brief description, because sometimes it can reveal a little more than just the outward look of the character i.e. the choice of clothing, some little habits that give hints to the character's personality or ethic, etc. For numerical values, I'm more concerned with height than weight: for weight, generic adjectives to describe the build and statue of the character is good enough for me, while for height the value can give me a better gauge of the height difference between the characters, especially when the characters are talking to each other or certain actions where the height difference may be a prominent factor.

In IC, I agree that going into details about the character's look is not necessary, and if overdone may affect the flow - which is why I'm more inclined to do that in the CS rather than ranting about it in IC.

[The Mad Hatter]

Forgot about this thread... I should probably answer it >.>

For the height/weight issue, I really didn't mean for it to sound like I want people to write "John is 6'4" and weigh 140 pounds" sort of stuff, even though I do realize in hindsight that that was how it came off... The point I was trying to make was that it differs what height is considered short/normal/tall and/or skinny/lean/normal/chubby/fat depending on your social circle, nationality and general perception of the world. I, myself, tend to use very colorful descriptions, I suppose. I'll write stuff like;
"Although her meager height was barely enough for anyone to consider her an adult at first glance, the bulging masses of muscle moving beneath Jane's fair skin certainly did get the point across."
Or
"Even without the effect of his heels, John still towered about a head over most of his peers and his long, slender limbs did nothing to make him seem any shorter, but instead made him seem somewhat malnourished."
I know that my way of writing it is also up for interpretation and so on.

And with describing facial features, I don't mean for people to go down and explain every little blemish or pimple or whatever, but that most people don't describe facial features at all and if they do, it's usually either with words like "John had sharp facial features", "Jack had a strong jaw" or "Jane had soft, warm features". I would at least like to know a little bit more than that, I guess.
I write stuff like;
"With almond-shaped eyes like Lily's, it was easy to see that she at least had some orient ancestry, even if the sky blue of her iris was from other genes. One would barely be able to tell that her eyelashes were as fair a shade as they were, due to the thin-rimmed glasses sitting on the narrow bridge of her button nose. It would be hard to ever catch her without a glimmer of warmth in her eyes and a smile playing on her thin lips, even on her bad days."
This as just written quickly and I realize that I could have transitioned better between various features, but I guess it does get the point across well enough...

[Fillet]

I'm not a fan of detailed physical descriptions of chars like you are, @The Mad Hatter. I feel they aren't necessary and takes a lot of work for me to imagine each slight part of their feature - unless, of course, the particular feature comes into play in the story at a particular point, for example Harry Potter having eyes like his mother's. I much prefer large brush strokes when describing their physical looks, like a caricature; something that gives me an idea what they look like and I can fill in the rest - just like the world or the story the char is in. The whole lot is mostly filled in by the reader's imagination with scaffolding in place by the author, and necessary pieces that the author insists is rather important to the narrative to convey the message, set up the plot, or to create the wanted atmosphere.

[Foster]

Usually details are left blank to let the reader picture an 'ideal' character for the situation, even ideal for when they're being awkward or clumsy.

[Makky]

I tend to be random with my bodily details.
Hands here, knees there. Mostly hair and bright eyes.
Brow creasemarks, necks strained especially, a limp, cheekbones
or the folds in skin as a body moves. Reaction takes, etc.
I kinda transitioned through certain phrases of writing
- only thoughts
- only action
- only description
Thankfully, now I'm a (better) mix of all! ^___^
Well, somewhat still in the description part.
Which is probably why this thread so appeals to me.

I don't mention weight usually because one, it's complicated
(what is a foot and can I say everybody weighs 50-60kg instead?)
and two unless, it involves sentences along the lines of:
"That kid looks like they weigh a quarter of a truck"
and or, "Wow, those veins man. Scary movie3.", thinking the units
exactly a person weighs is irrelevant in my book.

I do however, notice height is more of a staple in my
writing than others. Weird. Never thought of it before.
@vilageidiotx brought up something else I hadn't thought of before
until now.

Maybe since (most, casual or otherwise) RPs are more about
telling than showing, prose is based mostly on telling about
the sort of impression you're supposed to get.
Given people are different and imagine differently from individual
to individual, @foster's point then, about keeping things nice and vague
to accommodate the other person- which I had admittedly,
first scoffed at- fits better too..