Daeranilen

Okay, this and its follow-up (How to Worldbuild for WT) are taking me a lot longer to write. First, it's a lot harder to generalize about character history/world development. For the most part, I can't give you nifty advice about character histories the way I can say "positive and negative traits are not an actual thing" for personalities. There's a lot of equally good ways to go about both character history and worldbuilding! The other problem is that character histories (and worldbuilding, but histories especially) are where you start to see a lot of my personal biases crop up in bigger ways. Writing this was super hard because I was const

So, I think some things need addressing about my "How to Balance" guides and about their relationship to the WorldTrain (https://www.deviantart.com/worldtrain) application process in general. Let's jump right in, yeah? Protip #1: There's No One Way to Make a Good App I'm eventually gonna address this with a "How to Balance Your Character: Whole App Balance" guide, but I think it bears repeating now: these guides specifically represent my way of developing characters. My guides represent one mode of character creation: mine. And they're not complete yet! One thing the guides haven't addressed yet is how sections relate to each other -- how, for example, having a substantiall

All right, I don't really have much in the way of introduction for this, so let's skip the intro and jump straight in. I have some serious sassmastering to get to. Protip #1: Skills and Weaknesses Should Tell Me About Your Character's Personality For future reference: every section on the app should tell me about your character's personality. Every. Single. One. But this is especially true of the skills section. Even on the individual skills level -- it is basically never enough to tell me, "Slicey McStabbington is good with a sword and will be evenly matched with most sword-wielding opponents," because I will sit here like, "Okay. Cool. Yo