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Everyone likes characters that go against the status quo, whether that means holding an unpopular belief, having a different worldview, or seeing events differently from the average sentient being. But for these norm-breaking characters to work, storytellers need to write them well. Read more »
Making a villain for your roleplaying campaign is always tricky. You want them to be intimidating and fun to fight, so the natural instinct is to spend a lot of time fleshing them out. But what if your players don’t like that villain? Then you’ve … read more »
Most principles of character likability work for a broad audience. But when a reader identifies with a character in your story, it can alter likability in ways that are difficult to predict. What’s more, every reader could identify with a different character, creating highly varied … read more »
This may surprise you, but we play video games, and often those video games have characters that we like. But why do we like those characters? What makes a character come off the screen and stick in our memory? That’s what we’re talking about today, … read more »
Have you ever noticed how many more articles there are about writing female characters than there are about writing male characters? Are women such strange and unusual creatures that we need an ever-growing number of articles to tell us how to write them? Read more »
Character karma is a useful concept that helps us understand how to craft stories that are engaging and satisfying. While I’ve mentioned the concept in many other places, it’s overdue for a full article on the ways it affects our stories. First, what is character … read more »
Characters that spend a lot of time together need to have a certain spark, a certain pop, a certain fizz. They need to interact in such a way that makes us want to see them interact more. That’s character chemistry, and it’s what we’re talking … read more »
Making your protagonist a relatable underdog is a great way to encourage your audience to bond with them. Unfortunately, it’s easy for this effort to go wrong. Instead of feeling sympathy for your hero, the audience might think your character is whiny and unpleasant. The narration … read more »
We talk a lot about character competence, and one of our listeners had to remind us that we’d never really explained what that means. So this week, we explain ourselves. We talk about what competence means, why it’s important, and how competent various characters should … read more »
If you’ve ever put down a story because you didn’t care what happened, there’s a good chance it was suffering from poor character likability. That’s our topic for this week, and we are joined once again by our excellent guest host Sarah. What is likability? … read more »