How much time do you spend on your characters per week?

Very little, honestly? I've not been a very active roleplayer in a while though. I've had like, five active characters in the last eight years, but have never played more than two simultaneously. All of my characters have "built-in" histories, so to speak, because either because they're all related (five generations of crazies at 'Souls) or because they've been repurposed from a would-be novel I'm not writing. And while a few of them have had extensive off-board happenings, those are one-off "sit down and write a backstory" instances that take an hour or two and don't reoccur.

Ongoing plotting happens incidentally more than anything else and typically involves me and @Invisie on AIM talking about something else entirely when one of goes HEY WE SHOULD DO A THING.

I've been far too lazy to do graphics or whatever for my characters the last few years, in part because I do post relatively infrequently. It's not an important part of RP to me anymore since I do so much graphic/web stuff elsewhere. I don't wanna do that in my free time, haha.

tl;dr I am a lazy roleplayer these days and spend far more time administrating than anything else related to RP. <_<

 

It really depends. On average it probably is less than an hour a week. I have not made a new character in a while. That is if you don't include roleplaying itself.

 

I voted about 6-11 hours per week - only because I try to devote at least an hour per day to replies or plotting or stuff with all of my characters per day. Sometimes it ends up being more if I have more time. That is the reason I will generally only participate in one rp at a time - I don't have time to hop site to site and keep all of the histories and whatnot in my mind. LOL ;) The most I'll play is two at a time which I'm attempting to do right now, but one site always gets the bulk of my characters and time generally.

 

I see why you have formulated your question that way, even if it let me at first, my first reaction being "I spend time writing, not time on or with my characters!" But yes, you have included graphics too, so it is slightly different. Graphics are something which doesn't occur often - I'd say 1-2 hours a month or less.

Otherwise, I do write every day, for at least one hour. I guess it would go to 20 hours a week or more, especially if I add the planning - but this is the thing, I am planning the story, I am not planning my characters, This confuses me.

 

For developing the character, I used to come up with most of everything during roleplay. Now I come up a more detailed idea of the character. As I roleplay, I come up with more details. Favored characters also get a detailed history written about them...sort of a character journal of their past.

 

I don't tend to spend much time on extras, like family trees or back stories or long lists of attributes beyond a basic biography. The most extra time I spend is on drawings. :)

I tend to discover things like favorite food, mother's name, etc as I role-play. When I need the information, I come up with it and then make note of it for future use.

Not to say that I don't do extras from time to time. I'm kind of in awe of people who do spend lots of time to get really depthy.

 

Well, I voted 21+ a week with the understanding that you mean roleplay as a whole. If not... That might be a little inaccurate (but maybe not totally because I'm a freak). I have 51 characters. I like making them new icons, I spend hours looking through images when I'm not actually writing. I look for home layouts. Each character has their own board on Pinterest, so I spend a lot of time looking through relevant quotes, wardrobes, foods, and other PBs who play their family, friends, lovers.

My fiance says I spend more time with roleplay than he does working and it's true. I am a sad, sad person.

 

I have this sickness, where I just can't stop coming up with ideas and creating new characters. So, I spend quite a bit of time fleshing them out, and then even more time on them with actual roleplaying and developing them.

 

It averages out to 2 to 5 if you include most week's posting/coming up with threads. Not all my characters are active at the same time- but when I create them they'll come with intricate family trees and YES I'm weird and a fashion snob so I'll have notes (or uh, polyvore collections) dealing with fashion sense/aesthetics cause to me the aesthetics ties back to personality (I sometimes need some visual cues to help me center on a character... and avatar/sigs do not always help in the slightest).

 

Not much.

Of course, I think about my character a lot, and about other characters that I write for. Plus the entire site is pretty much a discussion point over breakfast and washing up. But writing for a certain character takes up less than an hour a week. Sometimes I spend way more time writing for NPCs. Or just adding to the wiki.

Come to think of it, I don't feel like I am writing for 'my' character much at all. I write for everyone's character... which is sometimes disconcerting for some people :P

 

Writing for other people's characters is fine too. I used to do some moding for some friends and I enjoyed it a lot cause I'm constantly creating new characters and seeing how my friend's characters have to tackle these characters. And now that I am trying to get my own site going I've noticed more and more that I'm more excited for the fun things that can come form moding them than than creating my own characters. But I guess it just depends on how you see it.

I guess I just like creating characters in general and don't really need rps for that. I mostly just look for rps so I can play with my characters. They might change a bit but their overall character is the same. And sometimes it's like watching how your character develops in an alternate world where different things makes them act differently kind of thing. X3 but yeah I guess my answer would be...12-20 hours a week?

 

Honestly, there's rarely a time when I'm not thinking about a characters history, family, hidden secrets, future potential plots, etc. They're always just kinda, back there. Running in the background constantly.

 

I have a devoted partner in crime for our current story and we spend every spare minute doing everything you listed. If I am not actively creating something, and am at work or doing something for classes, I am thinking about a character, a place, a description, a plot, a new storyline within the main story. My buddy is the graphics person, doing hours upon hours of things to make the world more alive for us.

It's truly an obsession right now. That waxes and wanes, depending on life obligations and energy levels and also the story. But this is a new spin on an old story we did ages ago and it's revitalized us both so for now, we're putting in some major hours. Wish we got paid for this! ;)

 

It depends on what's going on in my life. Like right now I'm adminning a site, so I'm trying to stay online whenever I'm home because the site is just launching and I don't want to lose potential members by being offline. So I'm spending like 5 hours a day doing something related to my characters, because if I'm gonna be online I'm gonna be active, you know? When I'm first creating characters, I put a lot more time into them. If they're already created and running smoothly, I cut down to maybe an hour or two a day per character. But again, I could have six or seven characters going at a time....

And now that this is all out in the open, I realize that I really should get an off-line life 0.0 :P

 

I am on a live rp, so I must be there about 2 hours a day. Right now I am on a pause cause I got commissions, but I can easily becomes obsessed with my ocs! Totally!

Thought for that, I must have devoted partners and find myself more times. I am very much devoted and almost harass peoples to come and rp, I also am an admin, so I am forced to invite the newbies for a rp and see if they are shy, if they are I must warn my other admins to be a lil softer to that person.

 

Well I misunderstood before voting so the numbers are waaaay of.. but at the moment I don't spend much time on my own characters. 1) I'm a one-site kind of person, 2) I never have too many characters, more than one and the favouritism starts up and 3) being the root admin of a new site I have other things to do.

Things well definitely change in the future when I have more NPC work to do. I also prefer to do creative stuff throughout the life of the character not just before I start playing them, e.g., I want them to develop at I post.

 

I usually spend at least six hours or more on building a character, even if it's a character re-vamp. If you put in the time the character usually comes out in a decent way. However....now that I've really given into my character making compulsion...I spend a heck of a lot of time working on characters each week.

 

I probably spend faaar longer than I should - pretty much any time I'm not working or something, I'm working on my characters.