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There are quite a few threads on the boards already about this. I know I've weighed in before.
There's really no "right" way to do this. Some people start with a personality and build a backstory, others start with a backstory and build a personality, others start with a character concept and build backstory and personality from there.
I tend to be a concept focused PC builder. I try to come up with an interesting character concept and see where it takes me. My last character concept that I turned into a character was a drug-addicted, flamboyant cajun voodoo practitioner. His backstory sort of wrote itself from there, raised in a small village deep in the swamps, fascinated by the local voodoo cult, drawn to necromantic imagery and rituals, heavily drawn into the local drug culture, a sort of local celebrity for his flamboyant ways, etc...
From there I chose an alignment, class and archetype.
My method:
1 - Talk with the DM about the game world and about the generalities of the campaign that we'll be playing. I'm generally particularly interested in our starting location and the types of motivations a character would need in the campaign (does it rely on us being 'adventurers' seeking jobs, for instance).
2 - Speak with the other players about general character concepts they have. This step is mostly for me to avoid conceiving a character that is antithetical to the party. There are some parties where certain personas just don't belong. From here I can generally figure a basic character concept, such as "surly war veteran" or "naive student of magic".
3 - Roll my stats and come up with a race/class combo based on the results and the previous discussions.
4 - When applying ability scores, consider how they might apply to a back story. If, for instance, I'm pulling the classic power-gamer CHA dump stat move (I don't, but let's say I am) ... I consider what may have made my character particularly unlikeable.
5 - During feat, skill, and trait selection I always work each chosen ability into the backstory that is starting to form. Sometimes certain feats, skills, or traits don't make sense at all ... so those are discarded, but other selections help build and flesh out the background and those I take.
6 - The next step is to figure out how I got from my homeland to the campaign start location. The answer may be as simple as "I grew up here" or as complicated as "I traveled interdimensional planes for thousands of years before landing in this place" (ok, probably not that one). Determining how I got to campaign start usually helps me round out enough to be happy with my background.
7 - With a background determined, it's pretty easy to conceive of a basic personality. Taking that, I jump into the first few sessions and let the personality build through interaction with other characters, with NPCs, and with the game world.
That's it ... not a very complicated process, but I find it works.
I believe there are no easy guidelines for this.
I think a good start is taking a look at the charakter's attributes, skills and abilities and ask yourself:
"How did I get these? How did they affect his development?"
But you could also go the other way round.
If you know how the character should be, you have to come up with background situations, which let the char. to become as he is.
Attributes are a good start for char. personality.
A 7 in an attribute is not just "a little bit" below average. It's clearly below average.
The famous CHA 7 means the character is not just "rough" or "unfriendly". He probably lacks character as well, is shy or introverted.
WIS 7 hates debating and will jump to action, fast. But he also lacks willpower so will also bow down quickly to others.
INT 7 gets quickly confused and has a hard time remembering things or grasping more difficult concepts.
Keep in mind, that possessing a pc class is something very special. The character possesses abilities that most people will never gain, so where did he get these?
One part is probably predisposition/fate and one part probably special training (either through a mentor or the hard school of the street)
Both are great background hooks.
There is so much to write, but I am losing the line.
I always see my characters as living persons and ask myself, how would a person with this background and abilities react to a certain situation.
And the most important rule of all: "NO METAGAMING"!!!
(You don't make your knowledge check, you don't know the weakness of that monster. Period.)
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EDIT: Got ninjad (again)...
But my pre-posters make very good points and I agree.
I came to realize, that for some people it comes more natural to build a persona and a fitting background than for other people.
These are often people with a good empathy (in real life).
Well... it certainly helps.
I like to start with a name first and work from there. For instance:
Name: Lord Furious Crumb
Hmmm....sounds like a wealthy halfling or gnome. I 'll go with halfling.
Class: Rogue or Fighter, I think.
Let's go with Rogue. See, now I am thinking he's the black sheep, ne'er do well of a wealthy family. Maybe he has a temper. Or not maybe he's named after a legendary uncle with a temper but is actually very calm, collected.
And then I start rolling the stats and go from there.
Creating a backstory and fleshing out my characters is one of my favorite parts of RPGs. I usually start with race/class, roll stats, think about what I may want to do with skill/traits/feats then let it marinate in my noggin for a little bit.
Once an idea hits that I want to explore, I start writing. Sometimes I write a lot. My last character bio/backstory was over 2K words. While I'm writing I'm also picking skills, traits, feats, spells, etc. to compliment the backstory. I try to infuse the character's history with a few NPCs (family, friends, etc) and a couple of plot hooks just to give the GM some possibilities for roleplaying if needed.
I like to create flawed characters that have goals, motivations, fears, skeletons in their closet, and that may have made mistakes in their past that they regret. Ya know, kind of like real people. :-)
I like to always keep a handful of Personas that are vague enough to fit just about anywhere. Sometimes its a variant on a previous character, sometimes its a classic archetype. These are mostly used for "on the fly" games where character generation is more the "hey, wanna do a one-shot tonight?" rather than "so I've been designing this campaign setting..."
There is already a lot of good advice in this thread so I'll keep this short.
We all want our characters to kick ass and always know what to do and always keep a cool head under pressure, because they're heroes, right? Most of us do this to some extent. I find that flaws are just as important to characters. Maybe you ramble on about things inappropriately, or have a drinking problem, or don't trust small sized humanoids, or misplace your trust, or waste your money, or fall asleep on watch.
It doesn't have to be a major feature of your character, but in the course of roleplaying with my party I find them more memorable than a slew of good traits.
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Add something of yourself to every character. The more you relate to the character you've created, the more depth and realism that character will possess.
It would be cool to have a list you could randomly roll to generate Character personality with drives and such.
I'm not going to attest to the quality or lack of in this random generator, I simply typed random character personality into Google and it was the first result.
I think the point of showing the random generator that I did find is to show how you could absolutely, easily, build one that is customized to your world and your party's play-style. I highly recommend it if even one of you are interested in it.
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When I do a character, I usually start with something simple, be it a name, trait, race, class, move/comic/book character, a weapon, a picture, a cool idea, etc. Just something to act as the gimmick. Then from there I expand out.
I think the most important thing to remember is you don't need to make a legend. Grandiose backgrounds are nice, but well-written and fleshed out is better. Be prepared to answer simple questions. Who were your parents, any siblings, why are you an advnturerer, how did you pick up your class.
If playing a non-human race, think about how it affects your perception. For example using an elf, "I've lived here for two years, hardly enough time to get to know the place."
Make sure you have foibles. A perfect person is boring. It doesn't have to be anything major, and introducing them during a game can be interesting. Just found some undead? Maybe you just find them creepy. Play it out, verbalize it, but don't go too dramatic on it. Make sure to note it for future RP opportunities. Maybe even include a background element on it.
Add something of yourself to every character. The more you relate to the character you've created, the more depth and realism that character will possess.
This is good advice, but at some point, if you really get into role playing, you'll eventually want to take the opposite approach and create characters as far from your normal self as possible, just to experience the difference.
One of my favorite characters is an insane, evil wizard who routinely murders anyone in his way. He's vain, venal, cruel and self-delusional.
.... wait, I was supposed to describe a character that was different than me... oh well.
Seriously though... right now I am playing the following characters:
A dryad/elf hybrid female druid who sees herself as an avenging spirit for the forest. She is impulsive, protective, loyal and has a bit of a maternal response to humanoid children. Having grown up in a dryad oak grove she's not very good at dealing with social situations and is far more comfortable sleeping in a tree than in an Inn. Since her oak grove and mother tree were cut down by humans and goblins in the service of a demon-worshiping cult, she harbors a grudge against those races.
A half-orc ranger who was raised as a slave and escaped by secretly taking bits of scrap metal from his blacksmith master and creating a spiked chain which he used to kill his master and escape from the slave trader village. He harbors a grudge against slavery, but is otherwise mostly just interested in indulging his desires for food, women and fine cigars. He's fascinated with gizmos, gadgets and unique magical items. He's sort of like batman he's got so many gadgets and toys he uses.
The aforementioned human cajun voodoo witch. He likes to pretend to be a wizard or a cleric and has a mundane hunting hawk that he passes off as his familiar. He's actually a gravewalker archetype so his real familiar is his poppet which he keeps hidden most of the time. He is radiantly flamboyant and loves to gamble, whore, drink, do drugs and otherwise exercise his addictive personality. He is currently plotting to depose the town's mayor and take over the town himself. He's not all that great in a fight, but he's amazingly adept at manipulating people to get what he wants.
You will notice that none of my concepts are focused on class mechanics. That's deliberate. It is almost irrelevant what class my characters actually end up playing. I try to work it out so that they end up choosing the class that makes the most sense for their backstory.
Ergo my dryad/elf is a druid because the closest class training opportunity she had was the local druid. The half-orc picked ranger because that gave him the skills he needed to track down the slavers who captured him. The human chose witch because that seemed to fit his background best.
Blasphemy I know, but I like to integrate the mechanics with the personality.
My 5th level druid came about from a discussion about trying to replace the rogue as a scout. There's a feat 'hermean blood' that lets you add 2 skills with the same ability score to your class list, so i took stealth and disable device. This establishes
1) A slightly sneaky personality (but the class constrains me from going all the way to chaotic) He's good with traps, So his father was a clock maker and his great grandfather was probably recruited for his clockmaking ability.
2) That he's young and idealistic, because whatever else you say about Hermeas oppressive regime most of the people there are relatively nice, the streets are clean, and there are no wandering monsters gobbling up peasants, crime ridden slums, or crazy cults raising their own undead armies. He quite frequently mutters "i never should have left the island..." when bad things start happening.
3) I got him the scholar of ruins trait to get knowledge dungeoneering, because I'm sick of the godderdam rung druids not knowing how to identify ecological features just because they're underground. That comes with a small bonus to knowledge geography. So he has a working knowledge of dungeons, probably from reading too many (illegal in Hermea) pathfinder tales and mooning over maps. So he thinks he's "street" enough to shop in the black market of Promise (hermeas capital) without quite getting the fact that the black market in Promise is safer than the regular markets just about anywhere else.
4) Alignment: Neutral good, because I like playing the hero and a druid has to be partially neutral. He's seen both the problems that come about from an overwhelmingly powerful central authority but also the amazing changes it can make in a country's quality of life. He wants to try to balance the two.
My advice: know the type of campaign you'll be playing in and who you'll be playing with. Some character concepts are great for one campaign or one group of people but not with others.
One of my favourite recent characters was a rogue called Cassius Brewer. The campaign I played him in was set in a city that was under occupation by the forces of the Dark Lord and all the characters were members of the resistance. Cassius was an an innkeeper and former boxer who didn't normally bother with weapons unless he thought there was a really good reason. His fighting style lent itself to a setting where you couldn't carry much weaponry in public. Mechanically, he relied on Improved Unarmed Strike, Weapon Finesse and Two Weapon Fighting in combat and he did surprisingly well.
If you have a grasp of the setting you can also think ahead to where the character might go. For example, Cassius started off as Neutral Good but slowly became more ruthless as the campaign wore on, which was an idea I came up with in character creation I think. It was fun to watch him change. Anyway, he was great for that campaign but would have been a really odd choice in, say, the game we played which was about a knightly order.
Hope that helps. :-)
Take a facet of your personality and enlarge it until it becomes the foundation of the character's personality.
Hyper exaggerate some part of you that people rarely see.
Create a concept, then work on a background to explain why the character chose the class. Use character traits to fill out the background an add quirks to his personality or unexpected abilities. I wrote up a paladin that was raised by the church and added canter as a trait, he spent too much time around the prison and picked it up. Have fun creating characters that go against stereotypes. A gnome barbarian can be fun.
I like trying to figure out what could exist in the setting, but might be a bit unusual -as I think "adventurers" have to be unusual examples of their society. Some of my favorites have been:
The human unarmed fighter who was actually a 'cured' natural born werewolf who had been exiled from his pack. At 7th level he 'found' his lost wolf aspect through Leadership - a Warg who had a higher CHA than the human.
The paladin from a disgraced order that had lost their home city to a black dragon. He was dirty and smelly and swore like a sailor and spent all his time in the swamp hunting down the dragon's minions in an effort to reclaim his family honor. He looked nothing like a traditional paladin.
Dwarf urban Druid living rough in Ptolus, diving the future in crumbling stonework, talking to his gun, and eating out of the trash.
I love breaking Stereotypes! Gnome Barbarian lol "I m a MONSTER!"
I wrote one up with plans to switch to a shaman after 2-3 levels. Father was killed saving him from a bear and he was found by a barbarian tribe and adopted.
I love breaking Stereotypes! Gnome Barbarian lol "I m a MONSTER!"
I actually played a gnome barbarian. He was friggin' awesome! He was a boozing, wenching, gambling bare-chested brawler who loved nothing more than teaching the local heavies a lesson about picking on someone their own size.
His backstory was that his parents were killed in an orc raid when he was but an infant, but the orcs who killed his parents were so impressed with his desire to protect and avenge his parents that they brought him home as a pet. In the end he fought his way out of the orc village and became an adventurer.
He once jumped down the throat of a tyrannosaurus rex to save the party cleric and cut them both out from the inside.
He was pretty badass in all honesty.
I have no real science, sometimes I begin thinking I want to play a class I have never played, other times I love a good picture and I work from that picture to a concept, other times I adapt a character I really love and rework it into a character. But a few things I try to do with the background is express/explain something of ther characters personality, world view and what brings them to where they are in the world and why on earth they would be adventuring.
It's possible someone has mentioned this already, if so, I'll just say it again.
I found, at least for me, picking a skill and having the character almost specialize in the skill helps with choosing a direction for a character.
For example; I wanted to make a rogue character with a bit of different flare than just sneak, steal and backstab. So, I went through all of the skills that they had and found Disguise to be interesting. Finding my skill root as it were, I then did what I could to make the character awesome with the disguise skill. This gave me an idea about his backstory, as one would have to explain how a person got so good at what could be considered an obscure skill.
Then it came to me; this character would be NE, now I just need to figure out how disguise would fit with an evil character. I decided a serial killer would be interesting. Which then lead me to a relatively fun way for him to disguise himself. I proceeded to make a character that would disguise himself using his slain opponents faces (DM allowed it, because it was awesome and yes this is for a PC but could be for a NPC.) And like that, Guise the Face Stealer was born. Oh the stories I could tell of his short adventures.
From there I gave him a full backstory which was relatively easy knowing what he did, what he was good at and how his personality is. In the end, for me, I looked at a skill, made them awesome and then asked the question "how". How did he become good at the skill? How did he become a serial killer?
Another potential example. Perception, a skill used by everyone. However, if you find ways to make him a bit better at it than others it can be interesting. For instance, you could have a character with high perception, the reason he's so good at perception is because he's a consulting detective (Inspired by Sherlock Holmes). He observes the environment and rarely misses a detail. From there on you go into how he became great at perception and how he became a detective.
TL;DR = Try focusing on making your characters awesome at one particular skill then ask why and how he became awesome at that skill in story forms.
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I had put some personality trait info in my comments, but I'll try to focus on them here.
I know some role players who build their characters around personality traits. That's a fine way to do it and can make for very interesting role playing. It sure beats the heck out of role playing "my character is the best XXXX on the planet" style of role playing, although even that's better than just quietly rolling the dice and reciting results....
My preference these days is to allow the personality traits to develop from the concept, and to evolve over time, just like a real person. When you build a character around a personality trait, they tend to become static. Which is fine, and in some cases even makes sense. I just like my characters to evolve and grow.
So I'll go over my druid's personality.
At level 1 she was a very naive and trusting character. But she was also very skittish and quiet, rarely speaking out or asserting herself. Having grown up in a dryad grove, she was particularly wary of men, especially men with axes. She had difficulty with the concept of money and trade, and essentially gave her gold to other party members who, being mostly lawful good, would try to get her things like armor or weapons. She really viewed herself as a dryad who happened to be free from the grove.
By level 3 she had begun to realize her powers and was learning to be more assertive in how to use them. She still deferred to the more confident group members in public, but in combat she no longer waited for instructions and began to demonstrate a level of bravery that might even border on foolhardiness. By now she had learned enough about trade that she no longer gave her gold away, but she still found it difficult to negotiate with merchants. She still spoke very little beyond what was absolutely necessary.
By level 5 she had figured out trade and was beginning to figure out how to make things for profit herself. She did not like interacting with townspeople but she no longer hid outside of town most of the time the group was in town. By now she was developing a real sense of confidence in battle, and had begun to suspect that she was more powerful than any of her party members. This bordered on over-confidence and she developed a reputation for being dangerously impulsive in combat.
At level 6 her lifelong best friend, the party ranger, was killed in combat. This really affected her confidence and she took it very hard. It didn't help that she also lost an animal companion. She might even have reverted to her earlier ways if not for the fact that she and the ranger had been the strategic and tactical brains of the party, and now with the ranger dead, that responsibility was now falling directly on her shoulders. So while outwardly trying to display confidence and decisiveness, internally she was struggling badly with nearly every decision she made for the party.
At level 7 she lost another animal companion due entirely to her own tactical choices, forced to choose between saving her AC and the party sorcerer. This had such an impact on her that she left the party for a while for a spirit walk, the consequence of which was that she learned that she needed to atone for her mistakes and learn to be a more competent party leader and ward for her companion.
Since then she has become far less impulsive, in fact she is perhaps even overly cautious now. She rarely talks, but when she does it is because there is something important that needs to be said. She has accepted the role of party tactical leader, but will not be the overall party leader. She is currently sort of melancholy and prone to mood swings. However, since she has become more cautious and taken more of a battle controller role instead of jumping right into battle, the party has been much more successful, and that is again giving her renewed confidence in her ability to lead the party.
So her "personality" is basically a work in progress. How I play her today is quite different from how I played her two years ago. She is wise and I try to play her that way, but she's just average intelligence so I play her wisdom mostly as gained through experience. She rarely makes the same mistake twice, and while two years ago I played her as a sort of flighty teenager with a grudge, I now play her as a more mature, thoughtful leader who feels responsible for the whole party.
Most of my characters are played like this. My favorite character ever is one that started as lawful good, slowly went totally insane and is now chaotic evil (but still thinks he's lawful good) and is about as far removed from his original "personality" as it is possible to be.
I'll give you an example of how the character I had mentioned earlier, "Guise" played personality wise.
As I said before he was a disguise master, so technically while in a disguise he would play any part he wanted or needed to. However, I'll just give his actual overall personality.
When finally de-masked by the big evil bad guy, he simply began to laugh so hard he was nearly on his knees. Not only because he had tricked one of the party members into coming onto him as an elf woman, but because he found some new toys to play with (I.e. the party). These are toys that he planned on messing with down the line. Not necessarily kill, just make life chaos for them.
He had an almost insatiable lust for faces and would attempt to add more to his collection whenever the opportunity presented itself in a discrete manner. For example; dressed as a human woman he seduced a man into giving him information and then meeting him upstairs in a room for a reward. (He payed of course.) When he got to the room the man was disrobing. Still in disguise he told the man to turn around so that "she" could use a special technique 'she'd' been working on for some time. He did so and my character backstabbed him, stole his face and left a note on the chest the man was then stuffed in. Basically thanking his toys (the party) for bringing him to the town, but he had to part ways.
This character would also be seen mumbling to himself, a side effect of killing people and taking on their identities. Truth was, he was actually talking to the people he had killed. (or so he thought.) Besides sudden bursts of laughter he was actually a calm and collected person that smiled at the threats of his enemy and would always be studying random people as they were all his possible targets. He would also taunt his toys. For instance, after freeing one of the divine class characters from jail then disappearing, he left a note on the character bag saying, "Now you owe a murderer one. :D"
I gave the character over to the DM to use as a sort of background character to cause chaos and possibly save his toys when need. I did so as I didn't think a serial killer would survive long in a good group and I was trying to be a team player. Most of our games don't go long enough to develop our characters as much as we needed.
TL;DR = Guise the Face Stealers personality traits were insanity, cold blooded, fun loving, lusting for faces and generally messing with peoples heads.