Persistent Characters vs Story-Specific Characters

Which style of character creation do you typically use?

  • Persistent Characters

  • Story-Specific Characters

  • Neither of these matches my style of character creation

  • I use both styles equally.

Results are only viewable after voting.
I stick with persistent characters. I have five that I like to use, and that I've been developing for years. They've practically become my children by this point, and I know them all so well that making new characters feels alien to me.

I tweak backstories the most, since each genre of RP has things play out in different ways, and appearance is obviously in question for that, but personalities largely remain the same. I have a wide variety of archetypes to choose from, and all the characters work well bouncing off each other, so they usually bounce well off of other people's characters. And I just love them so much, why would I abandon my babies for the sake of variety?
 
I use both quite a bit. Usually how it starts is I will make a character from scratch for a roleplay and at some point they end up sidelined. I'll go to make a new character, remember one of my old characters.

Spend the next few hours reading through old character journals etc. Then I usually use a few traits and details to form a new character. Though I try not to go crazy with details. I try to allow space for them to grow qnd adapt to the world they are thrown in. I also try my best to model my characters completely different than my IRL personality.

It's really just the style I am most comfortable with. Every so often I will adventure outside my comfort zone and try something else.
 
I like making story-specific characters because I find that writing persistent characters for rps is kind of meaningless when I have to tweak some aspects about them that might even ruin the characters' identities as a whole so I might as well create a new one from scratch.
 
I do both. Most of my characters are persistent characters but there are a few that are rather hard to change. One in particular stands out because she has a cybernetic eye. Rather hard to move her anywhere that's not sci-fi.

But most of my characters are persistent.
 
While I voted both, it's kind of a transformative process. To use the same character more than 2-3 times is rare for me (~5% of all characters made) but I have still managed to build a large collection of favorite characters.

Basically, one-off characters that I make sometimes get re-used if it's easiest choice when I have no prep time, the setting is similar, or I really miss playing that character. Sometimes, there's just a specific character that I find myself dying to play again, and any attempts to re-create them makes it feel like I'm just re-skinning them, or they end up failing to embody everything that made them fun to me.
Honestly, since so much of them is just personality, if I find a hard time fitting that character or its backstory into a given setting it's probably too far out there for me to be interested in it.
 
For whatever reason in my experiences I've almost never used persistent characters, I actually didn't know there was an official term for it until I read this thread.

Whether it's original things or alternate universes I find I'm immediately drawn towards creating a character specific for the situation. Though I can see how it would be beneficial to work out a well rounded character or two that you can transfer from one setting to another it never really occurred to me to do it. I think that with using a persistent character I would feel as though I were stuck in a box and unable to change anything about the character to better fit the setting/situations that they're in. Obviously this is not at all the case, it's very easy to tweak things as you go but shrugs.
 
Well,I prefer Persistent Characters, they remind me of myself and Tourism. Going from one place to another for an period of time and space and also having started off at some location.

Story-Specific are in a doomed destiny to be gone and Dusted off the Shoulders of...Revery.
 
Story specific for me, the most common theme between them that idea have is maybe occasionally re-using a face claim, but that's about it.
 
I tend to lean towards story specific character creation. However I have and will reuse a primary handle for the shorter roles. This would be when the story line was a shorter time frame. Or one meant to morph into another in the future. Kind of like chapters in a series of RP's based in the same setting and general character types. Like the Chronicles of Narnia.

My reasons for creations specific to the story line are that I identify with the characters. Growing the tale through there eyes. And to do so altering their names, faces, and personalities is quite important. Otherwise it would be more like Blue was running around playing dress up and not immersing herself in the role play.
 
I have a few persistent characters in my personal deck of OCs but more often than not, they have changed and evolved over the years due to me constantly wanting to change and improve them as well as fit them into new stories, and if it gets to a point where I get tired of said character, I have no problem scrapping them and going back to the drawing board, plus in general, I like trying new character ideas when encountering new premises. So I guess I'm somewhere in the middle.
 
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