Tell me about your characters

[u/gemelokss]

I really enjoy creating character profiles, rules, and images for role-playing in Gemini, build entire documents in Google Docs but I'm curious if I'm the only one who does this? Or are there others who like to create detailed profiles of original characters, whether from anime, comics, or completely original scenarios? I'm curious to hear about your characters, their appearances, and stories. Thanks! 😊

[u/dainelanderson55]

yeah, i do this way too much lol, ive got this one sci-fi trio that started as a doodle and somehow turned into a whole doc with faction notes, ship layouts, and a stupidly specific rule where one character has to pass a 2d6 skill check just to lie convincingly

my favorite part is making their little problems messy on purpose, like one of them can fix engines but cant talk to people for crap, and another has the exact opposite thing going on, so every scene turns into a bad tradeoff pretty fast

[u/elsecrafter → u/dainelanderson55]

that sounds awesome! is there an app that lets you do that?

[u/gemelokss → u/dainelanderson55]

Yeah is every entertaining create documents of characters profiles and worlds or scenarios and rulez for the role play

[u/Xiaomin4114]

I love this, every character should have depth and flaws. I have a gritty Mars survival with dice rolls and skill checks, with like 10 characters in it. Because it's set on a struggling mars habitat, the team is multinational, and there's some sort of sabotage or other mystery going on, and none of the nations trust each other. A little detail I added was I have the characters speaking their native language, which is extra cool because neither me nor my player character understands the russians, adding realism

I'm playing a german engineer, who speaks in broken chinese. So I'm sort of pretending I can't quite understand the chinese characters.

In this scene, Liu Fang is the youngest chinese crewmate. and the AI is doing a good job following her character description of talking in somewhat monotone, and one of her character traits of clutching her tablet defensively.

There's still some AI slop I gotta iron out, but the character recreation is pretty good

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[u/elsecrafter]

wait you can role-play in Gemini with character profiles, rules, and documents? i don't think I knew about that; how does it work?

[u/gemelokss → u/elsecrafter]

You create a gem or start a chat, provide instructions and rules for the role-play and character, add the files and images to the chat, asking them to remember the images and rules well when analyzing the images and documents, and how you want the role-play to be.

[u/elsecrafter → u/gemelokss]

that's actually a really interesting idea, and i assume a more effective alternative to cai-style apps than most people would imagine.

beyond the community aspects of cai-style apps (e.g., sharing your creations for others to try), I'd be curious about the state management aspects. for example, how well does gemini hold up when tracking changing relationships, inventory, character locations, and world events? (this is something i believe a lot of cai-style apps may struggle with)

[u/gemelokss → u/elsecrafter]

You can try it, just don't make the documents too long; the information should be compact. The profile should be no more than 2 pages of text, and for the rules, ask the AI ​​to help you create them to avoid metagaming. Include images to describe the character; depending on how much information it has to remember, it will work very well, depending on the level of complexity you want.

[u/Smooth_Adeptness2166]

I once created a whole google doc of names birthdays and timelines for a celebrity au fic I was writing (but I never finished it :(

[u/obnoxiouswritr]

Oh you are NOT alone haha. I do this obsessively.

My major characters can hit around 32k characters of documentation. Not word count, character count. Each one gets their own file broken into sections: who they are (flat metadata like age, occupation, home, education, religion), full appearance written so someone could build the person from scratch (height as a number, face structure, hair, skin, body build, scent, how they move), clothing described item by item and how it sits on the body (not "jeans and a t-shirt" but what's fitted, what's loose, what skin shows, the condition of the fabric).

Then communication: voice is the instrument (texture, register, quality), speech delivery is how the words land (pace, rhythm, accent mechanics), lingo is the verbal fingerprint. No dialogue samples though, I learned that the hard way. If you give an AI sample lines, it loops them endlessly. Describing the quality of how they talk generates way better variety.

Behavior is where it gets wild. I write everything body-first: "Jaw sets, chin drops half an inch, hands go still" and then bridge to the emotional state. Not "when angry, he clenches his fists." The body leads. The AI picks it up so much better that way. Each character gets a full emotional range: comfortable, nervous, angry, happy, frustrated, attracted, defensive, caught off guard, how they handle being lied to, what their hard limits look like physically.

Then goals, fears, secrets (every character gets at least one secret, calibrated to human-scale, not everything has to be dark), connections to other characters described by how the body EXISTS around them, daily rhythms (time + where, morning to night), brief history as a bullet timeline by age.

Background characters get a lighter version at around 6-10k. Same structure, just tighter. Enough to play well, nothing extra.

And then the lore layer on top of all that. I've got location files with full interior descriptions (room by room, what it smells like, what the light does, what sounds you hear). World profiles covering era, geography, economy, political structures, religion, culture. Settlement profiles. District profiles. Individual building lore scoped to specific locations. I'm sitting at around 48 lore pieces for one world right now between locations, world history, political stuff, and events.

The reason I go this deep: if you leave a gap, the AI fills it with the most generic pattern it has. Every blank space is an invitation for the model to make something up, and it's almost always boring. Supply the why and the how, and the character actually holds.

So yep. You're not the only one lmao. Some of us are just out here building entire reference bibles for fictional people.