Forums » RP Discussion » Opinions on "general purpose" character profiles?

I specifically mean "character" profiles which are not really a character, as much as a list of characters as well as a bit of info about what the player prefers to play.

I've been considering making a profile like this where I could play as characters who are too WIP to merit their own pages yet, or who I haven't decided to keep. Would also free me up to experiment with shorter RPs instead of having to stress out about making a full-blown character for everything.

But I was wondering about community opinion on such characters? Is it a taboo, or just preferred to deal with one character per profile? I've seen a few people around doing it, but it doesn't seem that common, so I'm curious about consensus.

I personally prefer to have individual profiles for my characters, but I see multi-character profiles quite a bit, so I would say it's probably fairly common. I wouldn't have any issues RPing with someone using a profile like that.

I don't think there's anything inherently bad about multi-character pages. I think that if you were to do that you'd have to be very clear about which character you're writing at any one time but I don't see it as anything different than having multiple NPC addons to a character page or something like that. As long as people know who is doing what in a post then there's no reason why not.

Personally the reasons behind why I don't like doing it are purely aesthetic as it limits design choices for character pages, and I think that may be why a lot of people don't tend to do it, but I haven't heard of anyone having a problem with other people doing it.

It's a fairly common practice. I've got one, myself, used mostly for a mix of characters with very limited info or that I'm not too sure about, ones that were only meant for a very limited use in the first place, and some that are semi-retired. I also have a couple profiles that focus on one character, but also have a page for secondary characters associated with them - one features family members, another features some tribe members that I wanted to keep consistent.

There are some issues you can run into, though. Some folks have a strong preference for playing with characters who have their own profile. Groups that allow adult content will often forbid any profile that includes a minor as a precaution against underage characters being exposed to/involved in anything that would go against RPR's site-wide rules, and some groups can be very particular about admitting only single-character profiles (or at least those grouped for IC reasons) and even requiring certain types of info be included. More generally, each character slot only allows a limited number of widgets and images to be used, so a multi-character profile can run out of these fast.

Sometimes people are under the impression that we don't allow these, on the theory that it would deprive us of sales of character slots, so I just want to chime in that we do allow these.

Ha I didn't think about the character slot thing at all... Nah in my case it's mostly that I'm REALLY lazy with setting up new characters and find it to be kind of a bother to keep doing it every time I see an ad that interests me. It's the reason I didn't bite on a few, I didn't have a character for them already.

I wasn't sure if it would run into problems with some groups or partners though. I know there are people who don't like dealing with anon characters and I wondered if group/list profiles were in the same boat...

I'd probably set up a proper character profile if I find one of the characters has outgrown the general one though, usually after I get to see if I like them well enough.