A Guide to Character Creation

Welcome to my character creation guide. I'll be walking you through, step-by-step, the pieces of the profile as well as offering suggestions for the creation of your character. First of all, how do you access your character sheet or profile? Well, you go up to the top of the page here, and find "profile". Click on it (it's circled in red in the picture below).


Well, now that we're in our profile, we can do a variety of things, but for now, let's work on our character sheet. It's the last link at the top on the right, so let's click on that.


Well, it says that we haven't activated our sheet, so we'll click on the button that says 'generate', and there we go! Now we have a character sheet to work on. First, let's look at the sheet before we start filling it out. There are two sections, one on the left and one on the right. The right one is a very long form with places for information about our character. That's cool. And on the left, there's an "image management" bar. So, we can upload a large picture of our character here. I recommend using photobucket or imgshack to store the picture, then direct linking from there.

On the right, we see these blanks:

Character Sheet wrote:

Name:
Age:
Sex:
Height:
Weight:
Occupation:
Hometown:
Appearance:
Personality:
History:
Weapon Name (if applicable):
Weapon Description (if applicable):

Well, most of these are self-explanatory, so I'll be brief with those.
Name: Your name; the style of your name doesn't really matter, although European will fit better since Final Fantasy Eight was meant to have a European feel.

Age: Okay, if you want to be a new SeeD candidate, you should be between 5 and 15. If you plan on playing a SeeD candidate older than that, remember that you must qualify to be a SeeD by 20 or you are discharged from the Garden. If you want to be a SeeD remember that you should be a qualified roleplayer and not a beginner. If you don't want to be a SeeD at all, just choose an age that fits well with what you want to do.

Sex: Male or female? In this world, your sex doesn't really matter.

Height: How tall are you? This is only here so that we can get a better visual image of your character. If you're uncertain of a height, please post in the Character Creation forum.

Weight: How much do you weigh? This is only here so that we can get a better visual image of your character. If you're uncertain of a weight, please post in the Character Creation forum.

That's the basics, now for the harder stuff.
Occupation: What does your character do for a living? Is it their defining point? Remember that it is a fairly modern world, so things like the internet and such do exist.

Hometown: Where was your character born? This might impact their beliefs, how they feel about certain things, and their family. For example, if you grew up in Fisherman's Horizon, a pascifistic nation, you would be very different from someone who grew up in Galbadia, a militarial nation.

Appearance: What does your character look like? How do they dress? Do they have any other defining physical features? Scars (note, scars over the bridge of the nose are probably a bad idea, unless you can differenciate

Personality: Why does your character react to certain things a certain way? Are they friendly, cold, energetic, lethargic, or do they shield themselves from everyone else? Does your character spend long hours in the library or training or doing one specific thing? Why? What are your character's motivations, their dreams? What do they want out of life? And remember, a good rule of thumb is that you should have at least one short-coming to every strong point. So if your character is a specialist at para-magic, they should be bad at something of equivalent prominence. Maybe your character is good with boxing, but terrible with a gun. Or they're great with para-magic, but they can't get the hang of junctioning to save their life. It should be equal.

History: This should probably be your longest section, feel free to write a lot here. This should be a fairly detailed history of your character's life up until the point that you start playing them. Let's say you want to play a fairly normal young SeeD candidate. They weren't orphaned or anything tragic. You would begin by giving us some information, maybe about their parents, and about their childhood (best friends, pets, etc.), then continue into why they wanted to become a SeeD. If you have tragedy, then write about it, but remember that orphans will be overly scrutinized in order to keep a semblence of reality in the game. Not everyone is an orphan.

Now, this next bit is only for those interested in being SeeDs.
Weapon Name (if applicable): Most people in the Final Fantasy VIII name their weapons, for one reason or another. If you don't want to, then just give the common name, like sword or whatever.

Weapon Description (if applicable): If you want a specialty weapon, then please describe it in detail. We should be able to get a good idea of what it looks like and how it functions from your description.

And that's it! You've created your character. Now you can fill out the blocks in your profile, and request a character review. Good luck!