LARP Question Tuesday: Character Quirks!

Gunnar

Gunnar

Squire
We all have them; whether your orc's honor is the be-all-end-all, or you've decided to play your character super stern after something in game happened to them.

What's your favorite character quirk, and why? Was it already in your race/culture packet, or did it evolve from playing your game, or did you make it up before you started playing?

-Ali
 
Probably a toss up for my Imladari High Elf.
Best quirk is either his blind, unwavering loyalty to his rulers/country or his obsession with wine. He refused to even swing a sword when one of his rulers was enslaved and attacking him (which I got a KB from them, ouch). And his obsession with wine I think is responsible for a great deal of his early game networking. It also lead to him acquiring a massive (OOG real) table spread of silver plates and the like.
The loyalty is definitely from the packet. While the wine is a little more of a stereotype that I picked up before playing.
 
Jonathans quirks, the 2 major ones was coming off foppish at times and also a horrible flirt when eating fudge.
 
Character quirks are one of my favorite things about roleplaying, especially when they occur organically and/or surprisingly. It's amazing how the littlest thing can set off a character completely.

Zara has accumulated a couple of quirks over the course of her growth, but the most obvious one is that she cannot stand it when others do things which are "unnatural" to their person/race. For instance, she absolutely hates it when Ona tucks his tusks into his mouth -- it looks wrong, it looks like he's just a jaundiced human, and she will resort to physical violence to make him stop. On another occasion, Irina has affected a "human accent" for a joke, and it absolutely freaks her right out of the room. The unnatural-ness of it gets right under her skin; it may be that the concept of pretending to be something else altogether is reprehensible to her, I'm not even sure. It's not something that I planned for, definitely not in the race packet, but happened naturally in-game.

She also has a particular complex about her tusks, which naturally curl into themselves, and will lose her mind if anybody remarks upon them. Fortunately nobody has hit that red button yet -- woe be unto he who does.
 
My dryad exclusively eats with her hands. She thinks carrying around utensils is too annoying to bother with, and doesn't want to have to touch metal to eat, so even though she's a knight, she still pretty much always eats with her hands.

Also, she gets increasingly anxious the longer she's stuck being inside a building. She spends most of her time out on the balcony or sitting on the rocks outside if she can, because even after three years in the modern age, being around civilization just doesn't feel quite right to her, and buildings are the epitome of civilization.
 
My elf, Anja, hated dirty jokes and swearing. The dirty jokes would make her sputter and blush, and she only swore when things were really, really bad.

Race changing also really, really freaked her out. She never considered race changed folks to be 'real' whatever they had changed to.

And she liked apples, and was always carrying at least two every game.
 
Being a Kin, especially a raccoon, we adore shiny things. Or even noisy things. Pretty much anything that can be picked up really that has no value (and some that do). We spent many minutes just playing with tape and wrappers. And of course they become "ours".

Now our actual posessions that have value are always "ours". And we take great offense to people taking our stuff. I spent a long time yelling and throwing a temper tantrum over "my stuff" and accusing someone of stealing it, even though they didn't. People tried to calm him down by offering him stuff in return but they didn't understand that I didn't want their stuff I wanted my stuff. It was a lot of fun to role play.
 
As a sarr, I really tried to wrap my head around 'apex predator', which lead me to some stuff from both the packet, as well as original quirks.

However, her largest one is family. You can insult her sixteen ways to sunday, and I'll get up in your face and it will blow over. You do something to one of my family members, and its usually an express trip to the circle, do not pass go; do not collect 200 gold. Exceptions are if they started it; but only sometimes.
 
I think one of the funny quirk about my character is the unpleasant feeling touching metal causes. The look on people's face when I ask them if they can open the doors for me :). Most of the doors are made of metal and he would touch them if he really does not have a choice but most people are nice enough to help.
 
My most interesting quirk is how my MWE determines if someone is "People", I read it once in an old Spider Robinson book and have just run with it. If they say "Please" and "Thank You" they're people. It's fascinating to me who is on the list of characters that he doesn't really consider people, and the list of monsters/villains that he does.
 
So, when I build my characters, I actually ascribe quirks to a D6 and roll once or twice. I develop other quirks in game, but it gives me a fun start for some things that round out a character so they aren't just "bad necromancer witch" or "angry barbarian".
I also add "loves bumblebees" to all my characters because I just really love bumblebees, you guys.

V: her D6 roll = addictive personality, which resulted in her being a big ol' drunk after a certain IG turning point for the better part of a year.
She also hates any discussion pertaining to her age - she's roughly 60 in human years, and that she's in the twilight of her life makes her blisteringly uncomfortable. She may or may not have killed a man over it.
Oh, and she has NO GAME with dudes, because once mateship comes into play, she is like a big dumb baby. She also can't dance.

Abbath: D6 roll = stutter, which has become a really fundamental shaping element of who she is. Has no problem talking when she's yelling.
Loves physical humor - especially funny faces. Irina leverages this masterfully.
Really loves to dance and drum, but never has a chance.
 
One of my favorite quirks I had as The Black was his long held belief that Dragons were not real. This belief stemmed from his background and where he was from, things like Fae, many monsters, and Dragons just did not exist in his land (to his knowledge). This belief led to The Black arguing with a supposed Dragon that there was no real way that the Dragon could prove he was actually a Dragon, a conversation that still makes me laugh today. Eventually The Black had to accept that Dragons were real, and I had a heart-breaking moment when The Black's adopted daughter (Trillian) who was indeed a Dragon asked him, "Does that mean you don't believe in me?" That quirk was fun to play.
 
Just a bit of meta-gaming went into Amory's biggest quirk. I am /terrible/ at puns, especially in conversation. I have no godly idea how to construct one on the fly, and while I find them hilarious, playing a character who has punning as a racial trait was going to be... difficult...

So, Amory hates puns. Loathes them. Which has created a lot of great rp with my fellow Dryads. ~.^
 
I like to think of Rollo's primary quirks as being:
1 - he doesn't want to be at the center of things; he views his lot in life to be helpful to others so that they can be the Big Damn Heroes®.
2 - he tries to treat everyone with respect, even if he might otherwise think they don't deserve it. That goes double or more if they have a title.
3 - he goes out of his way to discourage flirting with him.

Whenever I come up with a new character, I try to pick three or four things about my prior character to play the opposite of. Much of Rollo developed out of wanting to break away from my prior primary who generally flirted with everyone, tried to be the center of attention when he could, and was all about being the Big Damn Hero.

Almost all of my characters have some sort of accent - it generally helps me get into their mindset by phrasing my thoughts in their voice.
 
For my lizard-kin, it's definitely his self-consciousness over his accent. He learned common as a second language, and talks very slowly and precisely to be sure that he is saying the correct thing. He also talks fairly quietly in an attempt to cover it up, but this often leads to people not understanding him, which makes him have to repeat himself and he becomes very embarrassed in his head.

For my Sarr it's his name. I went for a proud, tribal warrior with him, and until he believes someone has earned the right he insists they refer to him by his full name. However people often mispronounce it, and that just annoys him even more.
Also, being from an isolated island culture it's fun to not understand extremely simple things that people from the mainland are talking about. Snow? Horses? Other races? What the hell are those?
 
It turns out that when my primary is happy, or when she needs to feel comfort, she sings. It started in the kitchen when cooking for the CT chapter (mostly because I IRL sing when I cook), and has morphed through her celebration of life while being married, and now it's an intensely personal and private thing as she finds her way through responsibilities that have been offered to her.
 
What's your favorite character quirk, and why? Was it already in your race/culture packet, or did it evolve from playing your game, or did you make it up before you started playing?

Tempesta - I made her a child. When I first started playing her she was only 10 or so years old. Now she is 14 but I still play her as if she were a child. Favorite quirk - She freaks out, can't keep a secret, doesn't understand most slang or "adult" talk. I used the race packet as a guide and thought it would be very fun to play a child. Someone completely innocent.

Tzydl - I went with the part of the race packet for pa'ani. I enjoyed reading about the familia who are very good at alchemy and then ran with it. When I first started contemplating making a character for LARPing, I wanted one who didn't do magic. So I did it. Favorite quirk - bucket list: be the alchemist with the most recipes.

Dixie - I just wanted to play a stereotypical butch southern hillbilly. She has hardly anything to do with the race packet except for her career and clothing. Favorite quirk - lets no one touch her beard.
 
My dwarf Morgan's Scottish accent and love of all things drink.
 
Irina never lets anyone share her drink. Food, whatever, but not drink. She even carries a cup on her belt for when people are passing a bottle around, so she can partake without drinking from the bottle directly. She believes that to share a drink with someone is to know their secrets, so her familia considers the sharing of drinks to be a very intimate act. I can count on two hands the number of people she's EVER shared a drink with, and four of them are direct siblings. I came up with this quirk after having Yom Kippur break-the-fast with some Argentinian extended family, one of whom ran out of water but declined to drink from my class by noting "I don't want to know your secrets". I never got to ask what she meant, but the exchange stayed with me and morphed into one of Irina's defining traits. It's also spawned some ridiculous roleplay, like people stealing Irina's cup and pretending to drink from it just to rile her up (it works), or Irina having to snatch her cup out of a Baroness's hands because the latter didn't know it was a Thing (sorry Ezri!).

Nadarin didn't speak at all for the first couple years I played her. She still pretty much never speaks above a murmur, unless it's yelling to someone in battle. She used to communicate mostly by writing in her little book and showing the words to people, but her best friend Vry was a Hastur Volg (Barbarian) who couldn't read until recently and so she started whispering. I also learned some very basic ASL and used that for things like "thank you". For a long time nobody knew whether she was physically mute or just emotionally traumatised (she would shrug when asked), until the first time she yelled to warn someone of incoming danger during a fight. Nowadays she speaks at low volume with people she trusts and just doesn't talk around the rest of everyone. Vocal affectations help me get into character, and not talking for long periods (specifically not shooting off sassy quips) is a challenge I was interested in taking on, so the two combined into my tiny quiet Elf.
 
My primary Kasuni, a celestialist, has a couple of quirks:

1. She loves giving second chances and believes in redemption, even when no one else does.

2. She hates carrying things. If a magic item isn't jewelry, she's not likely to carry it. She has one handed edge, but won't carry a sword. She has alchemy, but won't carry globes. She picked up earth magic so she wouldn't have to carry potions. She has her wand attached to a mana purse with a string so she doesn't drop it. She hates her mana purse.

3. She loves magnets. This last weekend, she stuck around the field of the big Saturday night battle after everyone else left, even though there were still some monsters on the field (seemed to not be aggressive anymore...) to find her magnet necklace that fell during the fight. She carries magnets that are flawed to make her take double damage from all elements, because they are magnets.
 
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