Your Character's Family

[Lorelai Arundael]

I thought this could be a fun thing to discuss here. Families are an important part of our daily lives, everybody has one and you can't get rid of them, but are they equally important to your characters?

I know a lot of people request for their character's family members to be in play, and some never do. Do you prefer to play your character with his/her family around to depend on, or do you like to play them as individuals?

Personally, I have a mixture of both. I have some characters that have families stated in their Profile, but they're not in play and I don't feel the need to have them in play. Reed Wintersprout and Seraphine Clark are examples of that. But then I also have characters like Lorelai here, who probably wouldn't be as fun without their family around (Yvette and Cris).

What about you?

[Ashton McCartney]

I have entire trees drawn out for most of my characters, and I like to have one person at least in play but it's certainly not a necessity. On the one hand you have charries like Jer whose family tree contains 15* characters who are in play, and then you have ones like Ashton who is the only member of his family in play. So it varies.

* - Disclaimer: Many of these characters are indirectly related through marriage

[Trystan Pumphrey]

For me, it's a mixed bag.

For some characters, like Celia, their family isn't important. Celia's an independent woman. I haven't even really thought about her family.

For characters such as Noelle, her family shapes who she is, for sure. I have Noelle's family tree mapped out a few generations back, but I don't care if none of them ever enter play.

HOWEVER...

When I wrote Trystan, a huge part of his character was his family interactions, since he comes from an interesting background - muggle mother, pureblood squib father. So his family tree is complete with every birthday, everything. What was the most important for him, though, was his two sisters. The relationship between them was so important that I asked my real life sister to play one and I play the other. Not that I don't trust other people to get it right, but the three of them have such an intricate, complex relationship that I wanted to keep them close to home. They're my babies.

So yeah, family is important to most of my characters. As for my canon, Percy, his family is obviously important, and I'm glad to see so many of them in play. But there will always be a couple of characters of mine whose families aren't important to their story.

[Maya Parker]

I've always played characters that have no siblings and their parents are NPCs. I think it's easier to do it this way... however, I've never actually played in a family that had multiple people playing other characters. It sounds interesting... and I was just looking at the family threads that are looking for players. I'm hoping to try it out here for the first time. Once I have I can give a more accurate answer xD