So this sounds like a very odd question to most of us. After all, we are gamers for a reason. If you are a smash and kill gamer, you probably are not reading this blog. The rest of us really care about our characters and their story arch. That is a huge reason why we play. In my group, we have character backgrounds, actual prose origins stories, carefully tracked XP and lots of love for each other and our characters.
Then I wrote a story that had another one of the characters in the group. I was really proud of my story, which filled in a story gap and explained a lot of my character’s recent thoughts and decisions. I passed it onto the DM who acknowledged that the characters were very accurate. Everything should have been fine, right? Wrong! The other player had hurt feelings about how his character was portrayed, even though all the other players and the DM told me it was dead accurate. It turns out that he had no idea how his character decisions were viewed by the group.
Maybe your fellow group members are not great writers, but a fun exercise would be to have everyone write a page or two that involved all the group characters. True, one or two people might write something a little inaccurate, but take a good hard look at all the ways your character is portrayed. Are their common themes? Is your character doing something you’re not even aware of? If all the stories have your character hording money, or killing NPCs at random, you’re probably doing those things even more than you’re aware of. Remember, just like real life there is your intentions and then there is how others see you.
