The question here is, how predictable are your characters? Do you always know what they are going to do, and if not, since the character is a product of your mind, why not? Do you flip a coin to make decisions?

Here's a quote from Rick. on another thread that we kinda hijacked that I'd like to respond to:

Here's the thing though... does Ulda ALWAYS kill the bandit? My characters may kill the bandit, or not, but I rather like it when I don't really know which way it will go to start with. If I'm fighting a frost spider, and a bear or wolf joins in to help kill the spider, my characters will generally not attack or kill the bear/wolf after the fight even if they attack. After using a creature to train up block or one-hand or something, the creature is almost always allowed to live. I KNOW that going in, so it's not a random event. but if for some reason the character is angered and just strikes out at whatever creature is responsible for the anger, it may or may not be planned by me in advance.

I intentionally don't get the dialogue fix that prevents random dialogue selection, because I rather like the element of chance introduced in responses, and role play that may result.

The more years I've spent roleplaying the more unpredictable my characters have become. When I first started playing Morrowind I came from first-person shooters and didn't roleplay at all. I didn't even know what roleplaying was. I just played as myself, taking the actions I would take if I were in those situations.

When I began to roleplay for the first time I did everything in my power to control my characters. I spent a massive amount of time on a character and a character's story before their game even began. I could spent as much as two months finalizing the tiniest details of a character's personality and plotting the character's story in advance. If I felt the story began to go off the rails, I would often start the character over again so that I could "do it right."

Nowadays I take a looser approach to roleplaying. I am learning to incorporate accidents, mistakes, and other chance events into my character's story. Interestingly, it was Skyrim that persuaded me to adopt this style of play. This game's "blank slate" approach to character generation encouraged me to discover my characters as I play. I don't know if it's this way with other folks, but the earlier games encouraged me to finalize my characters before I started a game.

I now think that it is much more fun to not know what is going to happen. I start my games with a rough character sketch and a short outline of what I expect that character will probably do. And we generally follow that outline pretty closely for a few hours. But I am increasingly open to letting my character "take charge" and allowing random events alter the course of my games.

Once I began to absorb randomness into my storytelling I found that my characters also began to change as we played as well. The two seem to go hand-in-hand with me. It's not at all unusual for my characters to begin a quest line and then change their minds. I've played many characters who thought they wanted to be a part of the Dark Brotherhood or the Thieves Guild but became dissatisfied for one reason or another and left.

I think my games are more interesting to me now that I don't know what is going to happen. It's true I have lost some of the writerly satisfaction of crafting a story and then seeing it unfold exactly as I had imagined. But that's more than offset by the excitement I feel when serendipity takes over and a character or a character's story shoots off in a direction I never could have envisioned on my own.

My characters personality and quirks decide, what they will do and how they will do it. I may plan out "this" kind of build, but end up with something else because in particular situations xxx skill was used instead of the planned zzz skill. Which also affects there personality.

Take my newest character, Akemmi, which means beautiful in Japanese, she started out with red hair and green eyes... I wanted her to be a "rebellious " daughter of a well to do family, she ended up with a sweet and young /innocent face and I changed her hair to blond and eyes to "human dragon"... a mix of blue, brown and grey. I got her to Whiterun and decided to take a pic of her.... low and behold, her eyes were back to green. (If the colors were next to each other I would just think I had bumped it before exiting the C.C screen)

This actually makes her look not as "innocent ", just young. So... she's leading me on a merry chase to pin down her personality and the quirks that will let me give me clues as to how she will act and interact with the world...

And I really hope that makes sense...as I can't read it over on my phone.

Most of my characters grow and change throughout their games in response to things that happen to them. That’s what keeps me interested. They often surprise me, because as well as I think I know them I am not really seeing things through their eyes until we’re in the game, for the most part.

I play my characters as real people in a magical world, not as extensions of myself. So while they are products of my imagination, they are their own distinct entities and I do not pretend that I am them or that they are an in-game representation of me. This is how I can keep playing the same quests and dungeons over and over. I have been through Bleak Falls Barrow too many times to count, but with each new character I see it for their first time.

For example I am playing a Skyrim version of the Oblivion NPC Dar-Ma. Her reaction in Bleak Falls Barrow when a certain elf that she had freed darted away was one I have not seen before. She ran after him to warn him it was dangerous and he should not run back there! That was not something I had planned, so I was surprised when it happened. But it was definitely something that Dar-Ma would do.

As far as backstories, a character’s history shaped them into who they are when our game starts, and to varying degrees their histories can continue to inform their choices. However like real people my characters are capable of growth and change, so a backstory for me is not at all a set of rules to play by. This is why I don’t talk about my characters’ alignment as if their morals and ethics cannot evolve in the course of their games.

I don’t need to flip a coin to make decisions, but I have used dice to fill in for NPCs whose game-given AI is not always up for responding to complex situations. I suppose a Magic 8-Ball would work as well.

I really like that approach, and some of it is much as I envision things. I love random events that change my perceived view of the character and constantly surprise me with things in a perspective I hadn't anticipated. I find it is a sort of paradox, in that while my character is always me, I am usually not the character... or vice versa. it's the mix that makes it interesting when the unexpected happens.

Hi Neil...didn't see this thread till now. Ha! Well, in competition Ulda is run like Sir Rick or very close to......she has my game knowledge. This is a new thing for her. In the first four rounds Ulda was handicapped by my need to RP her. To learn how to do things first and to cover a 'set piece' of logical game progression. However, YOU Neil, became the agent of change.....which it turns out is a good thing. If it wasn't for you, she would still be having to RP her way painfully through each comp Round.....so y'know....thanks for that m8 . I don't want to re-hash the heated debates that caused me to change her MO, but let's just say it occurred in Round four. Began with the wooden long bow and ended with you instantly obtaining the Bound Bow. After that Ulda grew beyond her restrictions and now is at ease with utilising my prior knowledge to its fullest....cheers Neil

In regular play.....I still like to RP her learning to smith before doing it, learning to brew potions before doing full on alchemy and asking Farengar for enchanting lessons before trying it out. Yes she does have some set pieces that she always does because they are a logical outcome and doing it differently wouldn't make sense. She always Fus clears the long tables in Dragonsreach after Proventus scoffs at her Dragonborn ability. She always does more or less the same dungeons in the same order near the game start, but may or may not choose to do say Amrens sword in Redorans...or get Andurs amulet. After getting the full UF shout, and building Lakeview....by around level 20, she's out of 'set pieces' and the entire game becomes much more random.....whether to get the Sanguine Rose.....whether to join the DB..concentrate on getting word powers or do say CoW. It's all up for grabs then?

Ulda generally tells me ( by feelings not speech) if she's happy with doing or trying a cave....but I might temper her choice to swing the odds of survival of its a bad cave. I call it giving her intuition....but it's really me intervening to say NO that one is lethal....don't go in!

Even though I did not write out Cades story as we went, it still played out in my head. He had RP reasons for being a treasure hunting adventurer. Maya gave him the list of things that they were to try and get. While he did not have the same kind of personality as most of my characters, he did have some.

Akemmi will be more of a long term character, even as DiD, I actually came up with a decent backstory, for...the DiD deaths. As I guess we decided on a Legendary marathon? For the next round. I will be writing out her story, I have already written out part of it. It's a matter of catching up to a certain point each time she dies, some things, like actually going through Helgen, won't be added to the story each time... even though that will happen.

Thing is I am used to charters that don't die often in the 400 to 500 hrs I play them...sure they may only get to lvl 40ish, but that is because of my play style. They may not be DiD, but that doesn't mean I like seeing them die.

They tell me there stories throughout the time they are on my screen, but like a person I haven't seen in 20 years...they aren't dead, just living outside my line of sight.

Tell you what. First, we all know that Ulda's going to join the DB, because how else can you get the third word for your favorite shout? Role play it any way you want, isn't that the bottom line? I'm not certain I see the point of shouting the table clean, except that it's fun to do, but if you do it every time, it's not a random event, eh? So,. I started a new character today. She rented a room at the sleeping Giant, went in, closed the door, undressed and went to bed.

First thing in the morning the drunk (Embrys?) is standing there beside her bed and he says "Either I'm drunk, or you're naked. Possibly both." She got out of bed, and beat the hell out of him for walking into her room unvited, and having the nerve to speak of her state of dress... or undress. So, she fought him, she fought Sven, she fought Orgnar, and she fought Delphine (briedly to be sure) before getting the heck out of the inn. That's the first time a character has done that, and it may well be the last... but it's a random event in character, eh?

Although Faendahl has managed to get himself punched a few times...

Punching Embrys is random behavior, clearing the table in Dragonsreach every time is not.