What to put in a character reference

There are two kinds of character reference. One is for you. One is for the person you write with. They’re not the same document, and trying to make one do both jobs is why so many get skimmed.

Yours can be as long as you like. Theirs needs to be readable in about a minute.

What they actually need

Someone picking up a thread with your character needs enough to write to them. That’s a shorter list than most people expect:

• A name, and how to say it if it isn’t obvious.
• What they look like, in two or three lines. The pictures do the rest.
• How they carry themselves. Loud, watchful, tired, restless.
• How they speak. Clipped? Formal? Do they swear?
• What they want, right now, in this story.
• What they will not do. This one saves more trouble than the rest combined.

That is it. Everything else is yours.

What to leave out

Long backstories are the most common mistake. A childhood written in full is useful to you and almost useless to them, because it doesn’t tell them how to respond in the next reply.

If a detail doesn’t change how someone writes to your character, it belongs in your private notes rather than the shared page.

The same goes for stat blocks, full family trees, and anything you haven’t decided yet. A reference with gaps is better than one with invented filler you’ll contradict later.

Pictures do the heavy lifting

Two or three good images say more about a face than a paragraph ever will, and they say it faster.

Pick a main one that looks the way you actually picture them. Add a couple that show something the first doesn’t: full body, a different expression, the clothes they wear. Four or five is plenty. Twenty is a gallery, not a reference, and nobody scrolls to the end.

Write the first line for a stranger

Assume the reader knows nothing and is deciding whether to keep reading.

Not: “Mira Vance, 27, born in the lower quarter to a family of…”

Try: “Mira is a courier who knows every roof in the city and trusts nobody who uses her full name.”

The second one tells you how to write to her. The first tells you where she was born.

Keep the private things private

Plot you haven’t revealed, notes on where you want the story to go, reminders to yourself: none of that belongs on a page you hand over. Keep a version that only you can see, and share the one that helps them.

One link, not three paragraphs

However you write it, the goal is the same: something you can send once, that loads for someone with no account, and that you can update without sending it again.

That’s what re:plyr is for. A character holds the description, the private notes, and the pictures that belong to them, and it has a share link you can turn off when you’re done with it.

Once it says what you want, save a copy of your own. Sheets outlive the sites they live on, or they should: how to back up your roleplay characters.

The document is the easy part. Keeping it short is the work.