The Cynic's Guide to Roleplaying (Liber Scriptis Malum)
By Edvyn

Hello, fellow roleplayer, and welcome to my humble guide in which I will pretend to be an expert in an arbitrary field and push my personal views as fact. Roleplaying - playing a role - is a subtle, multifaceted art which can take entire weekends to master. We must create convincing characters, write up engaging stories, prepare interesting settings and fill gaping plotholes which arose from our own incompetence. Fear not, reader, for I will teach you how not to be horrible, or how to be so horrible that you'll find - or perhaps found - your very own community of equally horrible roleplayers. You could call it bizarro-CORP or shitheads anonymous. Advice about managing groups of horrible roleplayers will be released in appendix I. Let us move to the first section, character conception:

CHARACTER CONCEPTION
Concieving a character is, ultimately, much harder than concieving a child in the real world. It's quite easy to - pun intended - fuck it up. Everyone knew what they wanted to be when they were a kid, the heroes they empathised with in comic books and fairytales alike. I, for example, loved wizards, and it depresses me to this day that I cannot grow a proper beard. Fiction is filled with archetypes and stereotypes that we shouldn't avoid but use to our advantage. When you create your hero or villain, look to the heroes and villains you knew and loved. Gain inspiration from them, and if they're vague enough you can outright plagiarise them without anyone noticing. We are often told to think of the character as a person before giving them their abilities, but in a comic-book setting like Champions the powers and personalities are intertwined. Powers can form the basis for a character concept, with a personality and history being tacked onto the character like graffiti on public transport. This may appear shallow at first, but understanding your character in this shallow way will save you tears and friendships in the long run. Your character is a tool to bring about story development, not your precious baby, and must be treated as such. All characters have their place. All characters begin, all characters end and all characters have limitations unless you, the player, are a tool. Keep in mind the following points:

*REALISM IS NOT ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND. It may seem like common sense to make a character as human as possible, and you may even be tempted to commit the mortal sin of creating a self-insert. Sometimes you just need to tell realism to piss off. I want you to get wacky. Zany. Goofy. Off-the-wall radical. Your character could be a walking caricature, a gross exaggeration of a person that would simply not exist in our real world. Even serious characters can be exaggerated, and some of the most successful serious characters are. Look at the hulk, doctor doom, wolverine and captain america. They're not realistic inside or out, and that's what makes them so fun to read about. For christ's sake, don't copy deadpool. That is not at all what I mean by exaggerated. Deadpool's a hard act to follow, even for some of the people writing him, and your deadpool copy is more than likely to end up a writhing mass of unfunny not unlike this guide.

*