Pre-made or made-to-order?

[Carpe Diem]

Hello, this is my first time posting a discussion thread, so forgive me if I mess something up.

When it comes to roleplaying, do you prefer to make the character for that roleplay, or do you have OCs that you use throughout different roleplays, given they are fit for the kind of roleplay that you are using them for? This is discounting canon characters from fandoms, of course.

I have found throughout my time roleplaying that a lot of people like to create their characters based on the plot, or on the fly while planning for an RP, while others seem to have OCs that they have created beforehand and just require a tweak or two to fit the setting and/or plot. This is more common on certain sites where you actually make the character before plotting any kind of RP, but I'd say BMR has a fair mix of the two, or at least that's what I've seen over the years that I've been around.

So yeah, do you have an OC(s) that you like to use, or do you make the character once the plot and general idea has been figured out? Show your work below.

 

[Sync]

When I approach an RP, I always make an OC for that story. While I may unconsciously make one character similar to another character between different stories, I don't have a bank of characters that I choose from and think "yes, that person will fit that story".

So, yes - I'm a made-to-order writer.

 

[Baka]

I am 'made-to-order' kind of writer as well. I think I have never gotten any action for my ready-made characters after I stopped roleplaying on F-list. I have a few OCs that I do roleplay sometimes with, but I have yet to advertise them here. If I get a huge craving to use one I might, but the approach of creating characters tailored to the story at hand has worked better.

 

[Romanticism]

Made-to-order, definitely. Part of the fun of RP for me is finding things out about the character as I'm making them up, for the story I'm putting them into. I guess that can happen with pre-made characters, like subtle differences in a cyberpunk universe vs. a high fantasy universe (kind of a multiverse approach?), but generally I prefer the former style of characterization.

 

[Siph]

Back when playing in MMOs, pre-made characters were definitely the natural choice. Here's the character I created, here's her backstory, and here's some hooks we can use to start an RP with her. It makes it really easy for spontaneous short-term things, and for possibly longer-term stories within a group.

Nowadays, however, my RPs are not in MMOs, far from spontaneous, arguably not short-term and never in a group. Though I often reuse tropes or bits of backstory, my characters are always born from the prompt me and my partner settle on, instead of the other way around. When I see RTs that detail pre-made characters with tons of backstory, faceclaims, etcetera, I often find their possible hooks far too restrictive, and frankly . . . I ain't gonna read all that.