Random Character Personality, Culture, & Backstory Generator

I’ve spoken before about my love for random generators, and this one is a crown jewel. You can use it to different depths as befits your needs, such as rolling a small handful of dice to make an interesting background character or rolling a few more to make the culture of a foreign country. It also serves as a fairly robust system for understanding the inner workings of other people and as a descriptive language it helps you to clearly see more aspects of others, though in that endeavour it’s hardly complete. Still, using it as a get-to-know-you tool leaves you with a very good understanding of someone. Much of what follows is not original work, but a compilation of type and trait systems from antiquity and modern psychology. Because of the broken legal system, there’s a strong chance that the science is under copyright, but if it gets taken down I’ll still have my own copy floating around so feel free to message me for it.

Personality Core

The centralmost traits to a personality. This is generally the minimum of work I put into developing a background character to give them texture since it provides enough information to make someone more distinct than just an occupation or an outfit but only takes a few seconds to generate. After rolling centers, you can choose between either the Temperaments system and the Big 5 as befits your taste. If I’m going deep, I’ll generally do both for sheer completeness. In a hurry I tend to roll a the prime center and a temperament.

Centers

The relative ranking of your centers, which I often refer to half-jokingly as the Triforce, forms the basis of your perspective as you approach any subject, your values, and your primary negative emotional drive. The primary center forms in childhood and is incredibly hard to change. Roll 1d3 to select one as your primary center, then 1d2 to order the others. Your most divorced center will also have your least active negative drive.

• Mind: Concept, thinking. Often looks for or most values themes or novel ideas in their media. This center’s primary negative driving emotion is anxiety.

• Heart: Emotion, relationships, the social. Prefers character driven media and thinks about stories in terms of character development and interaction. Greatest negative emotion is guilt or shame.

• Body: Action, instinct, sensation. Tends towards plot-driven media, thinks about stories as a series of events. Negative drive is anger.

Remember that these are perspectives, not stats. A body- or heart-centered person can still by smart, heart- and mind-centered people can be athletic, etc. There’s a tendency to think about heart the wrong way so it’s worth mentioning some notable examples of heart center’d characters include Steve Rogers, Eren Jaeger, Link, and Steven Universe. The stereotype is that heart center’d people are mostly women and body focus’d people are mostly men, but that’s a narrow view of other people as well as the system.

If you want to take this a step further beyond just a ranking, include the distance between each center. Roll 2d3-1, which will give results from 1-5 with the middle values being more common. My own rank of centers is Mind > Heart > Body with huge gulfs in between, which I’d write as Mind -5- Heart -5- Body. Someone else with the same ordinal rank may have Mind -2- Heart -4- Body, meaning that the 2^nd pair is twice as far apart as the first, but still closer together than any of mine.

The core idea of centers came from the Enneagram system and was loosely adapt’d by extrapolation.

Temperament

Strictly speaking you only need one of the two models between Temperaments and the Big 5, but you can use both to be more thorough. Temperaments can be harder to grasp and manipulate in your mind without learning the whole thing. See footnotes to make the two system agree with one another.

The Temperaments of the 4 Humours is one of the oldest systems of personality. This system is intentionally broad to cover general trends, don’t treat them as restrictive charicatures. Pinkie Pie of MLP and Samantha Jones of Sex and the City have the same temperament. It’s a common foundation for stories. You can think of it as a 2 separate 2-axis systems lain over one another, relationship/task orientation vs intro/extroversion and emotional response speed vs duration. Select one with 1d4.

• Sanguine: People-oriented extrovert, quick response for short duration. Strengths: Friendly, Cheerful, Energetic, Compassionate, Loves people, Forgiving, Confident, Charming, Talkative, Fun. Weaknesses: Weak-willed, Egotistical, Emotionally unstable, Gullible, Too people-pleasing, Shallow, Scatterbrained, Disorganized, Self-absorbed, Chatterbox. Notable examples include Michelangelo, Pinkie Pie, and Aang.

• Choleric: Task-oriented extrovert, quick response & long duration. Strengths: Takes the lead, Independent, Hard worker, Goal-oriented, Strong-willed, Practical, Confident, Loves a challenge, Thrives under criticism, and Determined. Weaknesses: Hot-tempered, Cruel, Rebellious, Stubborn, Harsh, Insensitive, Arrogant, Rude, Workaholic, and Bossy. Notable examples include Captain Kirk, Toph, and Raphael.

• Melancholic: Task-oriented introvert, slow response & long duration. Strengths: Deep, Thoughtful, Sensitive, Artistic, Perfectionist, Faithful to a fault, Self-sacrificing, Analytical, Organized, and Detailed. Weaknesses: Pessimistic, Moody, Revengeful, Critical, Depressed, Impractical, Insecure, Bashful, Resentful, and Has overly high expectations. Notable examples include Batman, Leonardo, and L.

• Phlegmatic: People oriented introvert, slow response & short duration. Strengths: A real sweetheart, Dependable, Easygoing, Patient, Accommodating, Pleasant, Witty, Gentle, Calm, and Forgiving, Quiet and Stealthy. Weaknesses: Compromising, Shy and Docile, Indecisive, Slacker, Lazy, Slow, Stubborn, Too indifferent, Too yielding, and Teasing. Notable examples include Katara, Donatello, Mikuru Asahina, and Fluttershy.

Combination types also exist, with pairs of types that share one axis or the other being more common than the ambioriented ambivert. You could roll for this by using 2d5, 1d5 for each axis with each 3 being both and each pole having the high or low remainder.

The Big Five

A somewhat more granular view of personality, and the the currently dominant factor-based model in psychology. Much less to learn, but requires the rolling of many more dice. We recommend you still use the Centers system along with this, but only because it addresses different things. You can get a solid character profile using just the Big Five, and many do. This system models the default method for most of the rest of the features of the exhaustive character generator, giving you a scale with named extremes that you place out of 5, with the element that counts as 5 being in all bold. Remember, just because a score is low doesn’t mean it’s bad. Roll 5d5 total, 1d5 for each of the following:

• Openness To Experience vs traditionalism. The ease of accepting or appreciating the new, unfamiliar, or alien vs the familiar.
• Conscienciousness vs spontaneity. High ranks are organized, efficient, reliable, and diligent, but can also be obsessive and workaholics.
• Extroversion vs introversion. High scores gain energy from social interaction and spend it when alone, low scores gain energy from being alone and spend it to be social. Does being around people you like still leave you exhausted?
• Agreeableness. Cooperative, trusting and willing to compromise vs transactional, suspicious, skeptical, and detached.
• Neuroticism vs stability. Describes the ease with which you are pushed out of norm or lose emotional equilibrium. Low scores are resilient, calm, or difficult to perturb.

Since Extroversion is also an axis of Temperament, if you’ve already selected a Temperament roll 1d3 instead of 1d5, dropping the scores that don’t apply to you.

Complexifiers

Goal & Triggers

All characters should have a goal of some kind, and archetypical triggers for core emotional responses. There should be a category of things that set off each of the major emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear ^{aka glad, sad, mad, & ‘frad}. Along with the goal, all of these can be chosen from the prompts in the Table of Values & Motivations. A good example for anger is “don’t tell me what to do”, and a bad example is “squirrels”. Free choice is always an option, or you could roll for it on the Table of Values & Motivations. You can also add character dimension in the true sense by putting that goal in tension to form a character’s internal conflict, either with an opposing aspect of itself or by making a second roll to put it against a different desire. f.x Protectiveness vs Justice could be wanting to protect a criminal sibling who keeps doing bad things you don’t agree with, or it could be wanting to help the general public from within the very system that’s victimizing them but having to do bad things to maintain your position.

Alignment

While I appreciate systems like D&D’s alignment as good for flavour, I don’t think it captures enough variety in the way people behave, so I have my own. There are 3 axes of alignment with 2 extremes and 2 kinds of neutral: unaligned & ambivalent, which can also be thought of as “neither” & “both” respectively. Roll 3d3 and then decide which neutral if necessary for the simple route, or 3d6 with a 1-5 scale plus conflicted for a more granular view.

• Morality: Altruistic vs Predatory. Do you generally want to help or to harm? This is a much more useful distinction than good and evil, since few people are ever the villain in their own mind. A predatory character on the side of good may be a Templar, and an altruistic villain may be well-intentioned and only make “necessary” sacrifices.

• Ethics: Fair vs Corrupt. Do you keep your word and tell the truth when it doesn’t serve you? Will you cheat or steal to help yourself or someone else? Robin Hood is an altruistic corrupt archetype, and it’s easy to find a predatory fair Ifrit.

• Conflict: Pacifying vs Escalatory. Is your first reaction to conflict to increase it or decrease it? This is NOT about pacifism vs aggression: both options can defend when threatened, and both sides can attack when the situation calls for it. How do you try to resolve a conflict if all options are equally available?

The reason ethics is separate from morality is that it describes how you view morality separately from your own moral standing. If you want something more in-depth than that you can

If you’re using this for a game, something to settle before you ever start playing is the view on alignment: is it the sum of your past actions or description of personality? Both are equally changeable through play, but how you solve disputes over alignment will hinge largely on this distinction. The philosophy comes down to Batman vs Picard: “It’s not who I am underneath, it’s what I do that defines me” vs you are who you are inside, even if you haven’t had the chance to show it yet. While we prefer alignment as a description of personality, both option are equally valid. When in doubt, roll to decide.

State and Response

This charts how a character responds to different conditions. You don’t need to roll for all 3 axes, nor do you have to deviate for both sides of what you do roll. The simplest method is to choose a temperament, making a up to 3 lots of 2d4. For the Big Five core, you may roll for how many traits are affected and which ones they are, or select what makes sense with what you’ve already built. You can also use Neuroticism to determine the flux table _{Flux & Spread in Table Construction will be its own post in the future} for how far each state pushes other traits. Since this is a much larger amount of rolling and recording, rolling temperaments is much easier.

• Stress/Relax. What you become in extremes. Note that being at ease here refers to a state other than neutral.

• Healthy/Unhealthy. What you should/not be for the good of your functioning and emotional wellbeing, or alternately, what you are when in a psychologically un/healthy state.

• Want/Avoid. What you want to be and what you want to never be. Often this is both internal and external, as the things we want in ourselves we also find attractive.

Culture

From the work of Geert Hofstede, you may use these to generate a cultural outlook at any scale from a full civilization all the way down to the individual, though they were described in terms of the scale of best fit. Still, each person very likely has something to say about each factor, and is likely not to be perfectly in line with every rating. Some elements are changed from Hofstede’s original intention, but the results are still interesting, notably the second six. If you’re only here to generate culture for a nation, consider jumping over to my Climate & Terrain Generator to build that culture a homeland and surrounding territory, jumping down to the Race section to make a population, or the list of Values & Motivations to roll some things the culture values that aren’t dimensions like you’d find here.

Nation

Roll 6d5 total, one for each of the following, with the bold trait being the higher number:

• Power Distance. Acceptance of rank, distribution of power, and social distance of roles in a hierarchy. High: “You can’t say that to him, he’s your boss!” Low: “Yes, but he’s still a person.”
• Individualism vs Collectivism. The degree to which the needs of one may be infringed upon to serve the needs of the other, and which gets the credit for achievement. A low score will credit a group with completing a task, where a high score will credit group members according to their input, especially if that input wasn’t equal between members.
• Uncertainty Avoidance. High scores dislike ambiguity or doubt, preferring structure or predictability. Low scores are more comfortable with the unknown elements of change. A very high score would prefer a known ill to a risky good.
• Competition vs Cooperation. The default expectation for agents, either groups or individuals (see above). Score leaning one way doesn’t necessarily look down on the other, but it does happen.
• Long Term vs Short Term Orientation. Does the distant future or the near future weigh more heavily? How far ahead is the time-horizon? Short-term societies also tend to place importance on the past.
• Indulgence vs Restraint. Self control and regulation vs gratification of desires and the acceptability thereof.

Note that the third dimension, Competition vs Cooperation, frequently has a gender divide. While it may by anachronistic in some cases, but we generally assume total gender equality when applying these traits to individuals. If you want this decision to be random, use 3d2: if the scale has a difference between what is expected of the genders, if they converge on one axis or not, and which axis that is if necessary.

Organization

Cultural attitudes applying to guilds, businesses, and other hierarchies. Roll 6d5 for each of the following:

• Results vs Process. Pretty straight forward. Ends by any means or means to any ends. If the final product is the same, does it matter how it was produced?
• Job vs Employee. Do you consider just the role, or a person who happens to be in a role? A high score is likely to consider people of the same role as interchangeable.
• Professional vs Parochial. To what extent are you expected to incorporate parts of your role into your identity? The parochial are likely to consider the traits and expectations as applying to their personal lives as well, where the professional treat them separately unto a punch-clock attitude.
• Closed vs Open System. Low scores favour transparency, high scores consider the goings on of the hierarchy to be the business of the upper brass only. Kickstarter projects are open system, Apple is closed system.
• Tight vs Loose Control. Micromanagement vs autonomy. Involvement that upper levels of hierarchy have in the affairs of the people beneath them.
• Normative vs Pragmatic. A low score will make decisions based on what the situation call for, a high score will like by the rulebook.

Age

Whether the age of a civilization, company, or a person, I use the same basic procedure, which I call a quick table. The simplest way to generate numbers with no materials is to use consecutive fibbonacci or lucas numbers, where the next term is the sum of the previous 2, either starting as 1+1 or 1+3. Choose a consecutive set of them that fits as your set of ranges. Since all numbers that follow that algorithm scale by phi, if you want more or less granularity you need to change the scaling factor to something smaller like 1.5 or 1.3 etc. If you want to bias older, number them going down; if you want to bias younger, number bottom to top; to easily bias to the middle you can alternate numbering from each end, but a more exact method would be to number up to what you want the middle to be and number down on the other side. Those become ranges, which you then write to the side and roll. Here’s a table I made using 1.3 as my factor, rounding to the nearest whole number, and setting 30 as my middle.

Age	Weight	Range
18	3	1-3
23	4	4-7
30	5	8-12
39	4	13-16
51	3	17-19
67	2	20-21
87	1	22
112	–	–

Whatever you roll becomes the bottom of your range, and the next item becomes the top. If you land on 30, you’ll roll 1d10 to generate an age from 30-39.

Values & Motivations

Finally a piece of true original work, and perhaps my best contribution to the generator as a whole. The table of values can be used for many many things. Setting life goals for a character, rolling the crux of a life changing event, setting core emotions, defining a character dimension, determining one of the central values for a culture, the theme of the next story arc, etc. A roll of Relationships for anger can be a family member or ex-spouse, betrayal by someone close, or angst over the lack of a love interest, a sister’s abusive husband, or some general feature about a kind of relationship that’s a sore spot like when people are pressured to choose one’s family over oneself and bow to the family’s wishes in all matters. Each item could be taken in the affirmative or negative, presence or absence, etc. Roll a cluster of 3d20 or so to characterize events, or just singles and make up the context as relevant.

1. Protectiveness
2. Achievement (do it for the challenge)
3. Recognition (do it for the glory)
4. Understanding
5. Truth
6. Relationships
7. Sensation
8. Identity
9. Utility
10. Survival
11. Purity
12. Possessions
13. Control
14. Justice
15. Authority
16. Exploration
17. Meaning
18. Freedom
19. Creativity
20. Responsibility?
21. Privacy/Autonomy?
22. Tradition?
23. Emotion?
24. Occupation/activity?
25. Compassion?

You’ll notice there are more than 20 items in that list. Choosing a 20th item is hard, since it’s difficult to find something that can’t be made out of the other elements. Responsibility could be Protectiveness + Relationships. Privacy could be Recognition + Freedom, etc. With the recent insight that you can use an existing character’s conflict to generate items for this list, I expect it to grow with time. I may also come back and turn it into a huge table with a set of prompt words for affirmative and negative to make it easier for people to broaden their thinking about each item.

If you want to use this as a get-to-know-you tool or to really richly develop a character in complete depth, give a specific position on each item in the list.

Odds and ends

Oh, did you think we were done? You can stop here if you want, I have several little odds and ends that serve as good descriptive languages yet.

Elements of Intelligence

More original work, this time recycled from a previous post. Use the following to generate mental things such as strongest/weakest traits or what would go wrong if you went insane. For example, a Pattern Recognition failure might be seeing patterns everywhere, or it might be not seeing the causal link between two things.

• Pattern Recognition. Aside from the obvious, also includes noticing trends and correlations.

• Extrapolation. Includes pattern completion which is so a different thing, seeing how rules interact, following through with reasoning, applying rules in new situations, and drawing conclusions from premises. The complementary process to

• Abstraction. Following conclusions back to premises, boiling things down to base elements or pure forms. The fundamental operation involved in creating metaphor.

• Concentration. Mindfulness, focus the bulk of your faculties on the task at hand.

• Multithreading. Efficiently switch between tasks.

• Parsing. The amount of information, including sensory data, that you can sift through at once. Related to observation.

• Recall. Efficiently store and retrieve memory.

• Hypotheticals. Proposing something new and performing mental operations on it is a special kind of imagination, and the elementary form of the one we tend to mean by the word. One might also call it conjecture, proposition, or invention. “What if it were different?”

Race

I like fantasy, and what’s more I like original fantasy elements. Race isn’t personality, but it’s convenient to have it here for when I’m generating characters. Here’s a set of tables for generating a race from scratch.

Trait	Weight	Range
Bird	2	1-2
Fish	1	3
Ungulate	3	4-6
Furry predator	3	7-9
Other mammal	2	10-11
Reptile	2	12-13
Amphibian	1	14
Insect	1	15
Elemental	1	16

Relation	Weight	Range
Ancestry. A descendant distant enough to be its own thing	4	1-4
Grafting. Bits from the thing have been removed from the source and attach’d to create a chimera or biological cyborg.	2	5-6
Similarity. Like the thing, but not. Rather like the relationship between sharks & dolphins or snakes & eels.	3	7-9
Construct. Built by, for, in the image of, or to resemble the thing. Like grafting, but less messy.	1	10
Affiliation. Not actually related, but acquired traits via close association. The traits just sorta rub’d off on them.	2	11-12

Degree of separation from humanoid	Weight	Range
Leaning ex: D&D Sorcerers	4	1-4
Properties ex: Planetouched	4	5-8
Kemonomimi ex: Prof Kokonoe	3	9-11
Furson ex: Tieflings	2	12-13
Anthro ex: Fisk Black	2	14-15
Mostly, some humanoid traits ex: Mrs Brizby	2	16-17
All.	1	18

Giving them a size is a little trickier. For animals, the total number of species by size is a low-leaning bellcurve, so you can roll 4d6 dropping the highest on a table like this:

roll	height
3	3in
4	5in
5	8in
6	1ft
7	2ft
8	3ft
9	5ft
10	8ft
11	13ft
12	21ft
13	34ft
14	55ft
15	89ft
16	144ft
17	233ft
18	377ft

Using 4d4+3 dropping the highest will yield a curve that’s the same shape but with a smaller range, which is perhaps more suitable to humanoids, but that’s assuming both that they follow the same trends as animals and that you’re generating a whole race and not an individual.

I don’t have data, but for individuals I’d assume that population goes up as a creature increases in size, it also increases in the territory required to sustain it. Since mass increases in an x³ way and area increases in an x² way, then within the same space you’ll probably get a pareto curve. Here’s a quicktable I made By asking Wolfram Alpha for the powers of 1.3 and choosing 8 starting with a number that looks reasonable if it refer’d to feet, biasing towards the small. Technically I should also make the weights a pareto curve for realism, but on the one hand a roll out of 120 is annoying, and on the other a linear one like this is a compromise between realism and narrative expectation.

height	weight	roll
2ft 10	8	1-8
3ft 7	7	9-15
4ft 10	6	16-21
6ft 3	5	22-26
8ft 2	4	27-30
10ft 7	3	31-33
13ft 9	2	34-35
17ft 11	1	36

You could roll on that by asking Wolfram Alpha to roll 1d35, or you could use the virtual base method: Roll 2d6. The first gives you the multiple of 6 to use, and the second adds its result to that. A 6 on the first is read as 0. Therefore 3,5 would be 23, while 6,3 would be 3. I set the cap for the table at 17ft 11in because the next jump up was 23ft 4in, which seem’d a bit much to me. I could’ve chosen a different scaling factor, but this was easy because I could ask a machine to spit out a bunch of them. If I were making the heights themselves by hand I might use lucas numbers, but that’s about as high as is reasonable. Using lucas numbers or powers of 2 would’ve given a different curve shape, but that’s a bit too steep. I chose 1.3 because it’s just right for inches, Lucas numbers are about right if you’re using cm though. Take the 6 highest of the first 14 and that’ll give you a range from 47cm to 521cm.

There are other factors for generating creatures, particularly things like animals having a different primary sense orientation or social structure, but we’ll cover that when I get around to writing up a random creature generator.

The Other Race

You can fairly easily generate random ethnicity by using a flat distribution and list as many different ethnicities as apply, or by making a table of the demographics breakdown that best represents the character’s place of origin and using those proportions as weights. Remember that if you’re doing this for a game and you give different stats to different ethnicities, you’re a racist. There’s more variation within races than between them.

Real-world demographics also make it easy to roll gender etc. The demographics for gender assignment at birth are slightly off from even, with women being 51%. Intersex anatomy also has about a 1% occurrence, that’s a separate roll from gender assignment, so 2d100. Similarly, you can generate orientation and gender identity realistically since the proportion there seems to be pretty consistent in countries with decent LGBT rights, at least for what gets report’d. About 1% of the population is trans* or otherwise not cisgender’d, and about 5% are either gay or bi in a 3-2 ratio. Again those are separate figures, so you should separately roll 1d100 for gender and 1d20 for orientation, which you can further break down with 1d5 if your character isn’t straight.

Special mentions

I feel like the above is fairly complete, but a few other things to throw in for good measure that might get proper writeups when I chew on them more:

• The 5 Love Languages system by Gary Chapman, those 5 being gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, touch. In my experience people tend to have a top 2-3. Use a rolling system like the one for centers for this.

• The Holland Codes, also call’d RIASEC for the names of types it uses to describe how people work. They’re arranged in a ring, with people generally having a primary and a distant second. Briefly, they’re Realistic doers, motoric, who work with things; Investigative thinkers, intellectual, work with data & ideas over people; Artistic creators, aesthetic, who work with ideas & things; Social helpers, supportive, who work with people, Enterprising persuaders, who work with people & data; and Conventional organizers, conforming, who work with data. Each has a clear opposite, and while that doesn’t mean you can’t also score into that as your secondary, it seems to be rare.

• The colour system used by Magic: The Gathering is interesting in how it arranges natural allies & enemies. Each has their own set of motivations, tactics, tendencies, and virtues. Surprisingly robust for being so compact. I thought several times about doing a whole write-up on this system, but they kept being scrap’d.

• Conflict resolution style, a 2 axis system of un/assertive & un/cooperative alongside a triad of typing systems, listing competition, accomodation, avoidance, compromise, and collaborative, the last 2 being different applications of both assertive and cooperative. It also contains a typing of passive, agressive, assertive, and passive-aggressive, as well as the tendency for you vs I statements and desires vs positions.

• The [number] types of love/relationships, sometimes call’d the Colour Wheel Theory of Love. I sometimes see different lists, the version with the most types I’ve seen listing Eros, Ludus, Storge, Mania, Agape, Pragma, Phileo, Philautia. If I were to seriously apply it, it’d likely take the form of a primary and secondary type like Riasec or an ordinal ranking. Interesting to think about different types of relationships though, which is also why I like the grid of troll romance from Homestuck. I’ve had my own crack at this along the lines of Elements of Intelligence brewing in the background for quite some time.

• Erin Palette of Lurking Rhythmically mentions a simple adaptation of the D&D alignment system for use in My Little Pony settings. While I do like its use for MLP based games etc, the most valuable part to me about it is the observation that the axes of alignment can be anything you want at all. Enlightenment & Romanticism, the Mortal Sins vs either Heavenly Virtues or the combination of cardinal and theological virtues, any of the many Virtues systems in the Ultima series, the political grid of the game NationStates, chad vs autist, sweet vs savoury, etc. The point is that if you’re using a system of alignment, make sure it tonally matches your setting or is otherwise relevant to the primary space of creativity.

• Core Aesthetics of Play, which I got from Extra Credits. What are your core engagements in the things you like? The ones they identified were Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression, & Abnegation. Youtuber Uniquenameosaurus has adapt’d the concept a bit and add’d 1 or 2 in later videos of his. I’d give this a full ordinal scale treatment, perhaps with distances infix’d.

• The Clifton Strengths Inventory is a description of 34 different traits you could possibly have. Detailing it is exhausting, but it’s getting its own article sometime soon.

• I had a longer section here detailing the Drama system. I’ll retype it at some point.

• Last and least is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. A set of 5 binaries that the internet can’t help but fawn over constantly like a complete description of all a person is. Look up. Look at my system. It’s enormous and I still don’t consider it complete. 2⁵ is just not a big enough space to work in. Besides that I disagree with the way the whole thing is arranged, many of their axes aren’t even real opposed dichotomies. This gets a place on my list purely so I can dump on it. If you simply must use MBTI, use this site for it, their about page explains in detail that they aren’t really Meyers-Briggs, their system is actually just the Big 5 with an MBTI paintjob because the acronyms make it easy to explain to people.

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This’ll be for another day, but I’m working on a way to procedurally generate names. Currently most systems I try are too unwieldy to use simply, but it’d be a handy set of tools to have. The most recent test of mine came out Jiotch Fuiagteisg Vrothed, which is still a bit of a mouthful and took several minutes to generate one phoneme at a time.

E: I decided to see what the total possibility space was for this system in the broadest of terms. Only considering factors I would actually use but using every part of it including 3 rolls for backstory gives a total of 2.6*10⁵⁷ possible outcomes.

Wow.

E2: Put in some links and the section for generating size.

E3: On review, made the size table a little more fun to use.