how are ocs created?

@Choco thanks! :D
and there's nothing wrong with reviving a dead thread.

 

Thread necromancy is practically encouraged around here. That way new people get a chance to see old stuff, and to add their own, and the older people get pings that threads they've replied to before are being used again, and we all intermingle in a beautiful dance of interests over time.

 

Games are great too because recycling old characters can completely change them. My Pathfinder Witch was originally an elegant, mysterious Seer with a playfully articulate talking raven familiar.

My players needed a healer-for-hire, so fine, she'll be for hire and only for hire.

Now she's sarcastic, utterly mercenary (You want heals? Pay up. No, really. Hold your guts in with one hand and rummage in your pockets with the other.) and far less elegant.

Instead of using a crystal ball of magical ice to predict things, now it's a (raw, slightly smelly) turtle shell she tosses bones, stones and bits of miscellany to interpret how they fall. In her introduction scene, one of those things is a live snail. She doesn't like the reading it gives her, so she pops it into her mouth, cracks the shell, and feeds it to her familiar, Corvid Lying Cat. She's much more fun this way.

 

@Aviari wow, that sounds like an enormous change. :D

 

Part of it was group change, too. Mysterious And Elegant would not work with the current group, which contains Fighter and Magus drinking-bros that get up to all kinds of unsavory shenanigans in bars and brothels :D

 

I read through this entire thread while I thought about it.
I tend to start wit ha what if, a concept or a name; sometimes I start with an appearance if I saw something that I thought was cool and wanted a character to look like that, but that's essentially a trait.
Thinking back to some of my earilerst oc-est-ocs, (not fan characters or expys) I seem to remember they started with 'I'm sick of blond, waif like heroines. I'm gonna make a blond waif like hero, and his dusky, broad boned heroine partner.' ... I still love them, even though we don't talk anymore.

these days getting a character really fleshed out needs to have them work with someone because it's like a chemical reaction, how they work with other people changes them, even if the concept is basicly the same.

 

@Willowanderer thanks! :D

 

I often find that if I'm stumped for OC creation, I honestly just use a fictional character I already know of as a template, then give them a different name, job, and sometimes class/species (like was human, now weredog. Was wizard, now muggle, etc) Occasionally I'll even racelift them if I feel like they'd suit better as a POC. You'd be surprised how quickly they become an entirely different person from their base form XD

 

@lilacsofthedead thanks! :D

i really like that tip.

 

My OCs tend to have way too similar personalities. I wonder if making them interact for a while could change that.

 

reviving the thread again, i find that most of my ocs are born while i'm in the shower, usually after i find inspiration from someone's content. like with juice, who i mentioned in tumblr.txt this was pretty much how i developed them:

Spoiler: long-ass description

one night i was watching an anime in which one of the characters always carried a juicebox with him, and while browsing tumblr, i stumbled upon a post about a reddit thread for people who grew up having one lifetime supplies of things. so while in the shower, i thought to myself "what if there was a character whose thing is that they constantly have an excessive number of juice boxes on them because they won a lifetime supply of them when they were like eight or something.

how would they have so many juice boxes on them at once? they'd wear like baggy clothes with lots of pockets on the inside, yeah.

actually, a lot of pre-transition trans people i know, myself included, wear baggy clothes bc dysphoria. does this mean they are trans? yeah, that would be cool."

then, i'd mull it over for a bit, then start a new train of thought next time i'm in the shower:
"y'know, would kind of personality would fit someone like this? they probably see nothing weird about their juicebox habits, i'd imagine they'd be sorta quiet and spacey at first, just sipping on a juicebox as they pretend to listen to a conversation while wondering what they are gonna do when they get home later. it'd be neat if they were a heavy gamer, and just had a bunch of juice boxes strewn about around their television as they play. their whole house is a mess. their house is a mess because no one makes them clean it. no one makes them clean it because they have no parents, and are in college.

they are in college? they must be broke all the time. i bet the house is all shitty and run down too, which is why their landlord rents it out to them for so cheap. it woukd be hilarious if they just barely get by by peddling the juiceboxes to broken fellow college students"

and then, during the third shower: "you know, they would have a good synergy with these ocs, i'll put them in this story. since i am putting them in this story, how will i change the character to fit the story's themes and narratives? what can i do to increase synergy?

well, the main antagonist character is ignorant, and would probably be very confused as to what their birth sex is, but i think they'd relish in his confusion, because that means to them that they are succeeding at androgeny. it's pretty hilarious to them. they have to be some form of nonbinary.

the main theme of their development could be that they progressively become more interested in and friendly with the others as everyone becomes closer. they could be an observant person, and become close enough to the protagonist to notice how unhealthy the protagonist's relationship becomes later on."

and then the development train slows down a little and i move onto other characters, but i'll occasionally cone back to them with snippets of new canon, such as "holy shit juice and orlandeau would make the cutest pairing if..." or "i bet alex's narrative could be that she becomes a lot less terfy over time due to being moirrails with juice. yes, they'd make cute moirrals"

 

basically, i think when building an oc, i like to literally build the oc by hammering in character details using relevant question to the last detail i thought of. i think static guiding questions are good when you need to create the foundation for a character, but characters really get their charm and depth when you use spontaneous development questions like this

 

The quickest way for developing up to 13 (!) OCs at a time:

• pick a naming scheme. Mine was "The German words for the numbers from zero through twelve, as anagramms"
• finalize your thirteen names.
• Look at character Name. Decide which two dimensional description you want to use as your basis (for example: Null = cyberpunk protagonist, Iver = Hot Dude). Whenever you can pun, do (Chat = cat boy, Chess = literal chess computer robot)
• draw what comes to mind. Fiddle with details until name and image fit together good. This cahappen in parallel with deciding the previous step.
• Look at your pictures. Now ship the OCs. Those two look kind of similar? Boom, siblings. Two guys would be a fun ship? Tadaaaa, they are now dating.
• figure out additional characteristics from their looks, name and the surrounding setting, like jobs or interests by fiddling, playing around and so on.
• ????
• congrats now you have 13 OCs that are probably ridiculously hot because you are unable from not accidentally making your characters way too attractive.

 

I love those character development memes for precisely this reason. Giving your character mundane tics and trivia makes them more real, even if you're never going to mention that particular detail. It's one thing I like to ponder when looking at other people's characters (and sometimes just other people). What traits does this character have that we will never know about because they're stuck in the creator's head? Does Draco Malfoy have a terrible pen-chewing habit? Does Aragorn have a food allergy? Does Rand al'Thor do the temperature-regulation leg-outside-the-covers thing? Was best meal Black Widow ever had sushi in a tiny hole-in-the-wall that closed down a month later so she'll never have it again and pines forever?

 

@Ipuntya @IvyLB @Aviari thanks! those are all some cool tips. :D

 

@IvyLB i find the names first process really intetesting, especially since stuff like names and physical features usually come last for me. juice got their name as a nickname they received in grade school they really liked that stuck with them into college, and less obvious names like orlandeau i decided on as subtle reference to certain insignificant quirks i gave to the characters later on in the development (orlandeau hates seaworld for keeping killer whales in captivity. seaworld is notably in orlando, florida. orlandeau is inspired by orca, a mogeko character who happens to be a human killer whale)

whichever name (first or last) isn't a reference to something, i find from a list of names of the same entomology as the referential name, whichever one i feel just fits best with it (in orlandeau's case: ansel)

 

I usually don't do names first either but since these characters are A Set for a setting that kind of hammers on the numerical symbolism thing as hard as humanly possible the only real question was 'which language's number words do I anagram into names'.
But it's a fairly specific process that might not work elsewhere.

 

A lot of my names are words in other languages that sound right. My paladin's first iteration was an archer (holy hell has she gone through a lot of changes) so Saetha is either "arrow" or "green" in some language I completely forget. Taiga, my witch, is named for the frigid, forested tundra terrain and then became a swamp witch somehow? Nix, my mafia assassin, is the epitome of stealth and silence so a word that means "nothing" and is also a slang term for "to kill or eliminate" is perfect :D

 

An awful lot of the characters I've got batting around in my head started as characters from tabletop RPGs or various computer games. I've got a pretty strong tendency to default to making most of my characters waifs and strays and street-rats of one sort or another, orphaned or kicked out or run away, but not necessarily full-on tragic backstory, just, like, ouch that's rough. (And then there's Shikarra, who yes is technically an orphan, but it doesn't count if your parents died when you massacred your entire extanded family and set fire to the estate in the most epic of epic tantrums.)

Names I'm usually terrible at, I just bat around sounds until they sound nice. Occasionally though I'll pick ones with meanings behind them, like Shikarra the Kinslayer is from shikaree, "big game hunting" in uh Hindi I think?, and her heretek buddy Kovalska Soulforger is from kowalski, "smith" in Polish.

pleeease tell me it's okay to infodump more about my characters, I really want to but i'm so conditioned against infodumping that i need a go on signal before my brain will accept that it's okay. :|

 

i'd love to hear some infodumping? :3c