The Ultimate Original Character Planner: How to plan all of your OC info

Why Character Planning Matters for Creators

Anyone who has started writing a story or creating characters has seen the amount of information that can pile up. Understanding an OC can result in much writing and often spread across many documents. The ability of character planning is one of those underappreciated skills in creativity that can go a long way, and tools that can help plan disparate pieces of lore, biography, and more can prove invaluable to generating fantastic original characters.

Planning matters in creating OCs because the potential to lose track of a story seed or an idea can be a genuine concern. What good is an idea for a character if you can’t track that idea down for later? That is why CharacterHub was designed with oc planning in mind, able to help OC creators retain all the essential information about their characters, worlds, and projects.

CharacterHub as a Character Planning Tool

CharacterHub includes many valuable features based on the needs of creators, among which are oc planning tools that make it easy to refer to characters and settings. Rather than turn to piles of docs on a Google Drive or a private wiki, you can use CharacterHub as a character planner for writers and artists. Here are some of the most essential features on this oc planner website.

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Character Planning Website Essentials

The latest update to CharacterHub has put character creation first in several ways. For example, the three-column layout emphasizes creation on the left and a character planner on the right. The leftmost column features a primary “Create” button that opens up many options in addition to helpful social features. 

However, as you begin creating characters, you’ll see that the rightmost column includes an original character tracker for at-the-glance reference and editing. You can also filter the list by a character’s corresponding project.

The Character Profile

The foundation of character planning on CharacterHub, the character profile is a highly customizable database-style page that allows you to write virtually unlimited information about a character broken down into distinct sections. The amount of customization on a character profile is something we’ll cover in a moment, especially as it serves the purpose of a character planning sheet.

Of course, while only partially fitting into the topic of planning, character profiles are also entirely customizable, such as the color choices on the profile for my character, Dash. Such customization can be helpful - for example, you may have thematic colors for specific stories, factions, or settings.

Story World

Story worlds are one of the coolest features of CharacterHub as a character story planner website. Some sites lack the foresight to create a “setting” entry that can link multiple OCs from a single project. CharacterHub recognizes that setting is just as crucial to understanding and planning OCs as the actual profiles of the OCs. Instead of devoting time to each OC profile explaining their connection to a setting, distracting you from building out their biography and abilities, you can instead connect a profile to a story world, which serves as a profile for the setting.

Using the story world feature, it becomes possible to lay out the groundwork of the character's setting and its governing rules and style, meaning you spend less time repeating those elements on character pages and more time writing about the characters themselves. The less time you spend on a character planner's “meta” elements, the better.

Some of the key features of the story world feature are similar to those of character profiles, which include customizable sections organized as you see fit. However, default sections include everything from theme songs to character listings and roleplay information. Plus, with over a hundred traits that can be customized further, you can get into the technical about a setting, allowing for character profiles to flourish under their connection to that particular story world.

Folders

By far, however, the power of CharacterHub as an original character planner comes from the “folders” feature that allows you to create specific organizational folders and collect characters and worlds in only a few clicks. Subfolders allow for even further specificity. For example, perhaps you are developing characters occupying different story setting periods - you can make a subfolder for each era to track it all.

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Here are some of the best parts of the folder system you can use as an original character tracker:

• Folder visuals - You can add custom folder images and cover images to each folder you create for some visual interest and consistency in planning.
• Detail description space - You can use the description portion of folder management to establish what the folder’s purpose is and what creations it organizes.
• Add and move creations at a click - Character planning is easily handled with an add/remove character feature. You can also easily set a hierarchy by using the reorder button to organize the listing of characters in a folder based on your priority - simply drag their icons around!
• Creations automatically organized in a character planning sheet - Your creations list in a folder is automatically split between characters and story worlds, taking care of a significant hurdle for character planning for writers.

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Customizing Your Collection

The features of character profiles and story world entries are nearly limitless. So far, we’ve mainly focused on a broader, top-level planning system for original characters with folders based on projects and settings. Still, planning is just as important at the individual character level. CharacterHub features essential tools for planning OCs that you can use and customize as much as you wish.

Tags

Tagging is one of the most valuable features of a character planner tool for writers. Tagging is so powerful that it could probably be the focus of an entire article, but for now, let’s look at tags in two ways.

First, tagging is a great way to create quick references to the themes and aesthetics of a character. For example, if you are developing an 80s-style cyberpunk anime character, then adding tags of “1980s”, “cyberpunk,” and “anime” are excellent tag choices. It benefits you because it helps you lock in concepts about your character that can be associated with keywords. However, it can also benefit the larger CharacterHub community because searching tags for inspiration is part of many OC creators’ design processes.

Secondly, suppose you have specific terminology or elements that make up your characters, such as factions, species, or abilities; in that case, you can use tags to create quick references in an organized manner. Of course, you also have a unique tag creation concept. In that case, you can also create an avenue for exposing your character to other creators for feedback and comments, which is a thrilling perk to tagging.

So tags are a valuable planning tool but are just as powerful when sharing characters.

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Sections

CharacterHub profile pages for OCs are organized by sections. Creating a new character profile for planning an OC includes some standard default sections for a character profile. However, you can add, remove, and reorganize sections as needed.

• Description - Your chance to write out a basic description of a character. Of course, you don’t need to go basic, either. You can generate additional description sections to get into specifics.
• About - One of the most helpful sections also has many permutations. This panel features an organized list ranging from primary biographical and statistical data to completely customizable features based on your unique characters and settings. Want to adapt your OC to a tabletop RPG stat block? You can do that easily through the About section.
• Images - The image section allows you to upload and organize reference images associated with your original character. You can also create specific folders for different types of art, such as fan art, sketches, or costume sets. The image folders feature is like the flexibility of the folders feature of CharacterHub.
• Background Story - Sometimes, you may want to introduce an original character through a story hook. A background story section can introduce or build on essential character information creatively.
• Moodboard - If you are a creator who explores character concepts based on vibes, the moodboard feature is excellent. You can upload images representing more abstract elements of a character’s vibe, personality, or style and organize them as you see fit.

Most importantly, if any of the dozen default sections aren’t enough for your character profile or planning approach, the blank text section allows you to create something more customized for your character planning sheet.

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CharacterHub Meta

Included in every character profile on CharacterHub is an essential section for situating the OC among the thousands already on the website. The meta-features include marking whether or not an OC is NSFW and if there are any trigger warnings associated with them. These features help keep the larger community safe. The emphasis on safety also includes the creator’s openness to Rolechats.

Organizationally, there is also an “add to folder” feature, so if you create a new character and have a project folder in mind, you can add it immediately.

Also included is creation attribution, connected to the more significant idea of adoptables and character ownership. You would detail that here if you traded or bought a character from another person.

This section also features privacy controls, allowing you to set a character to private, unlisted, or public. You can control who gets to see your characters and settings.

Sharing Your OC Collection

Because CharacterHub is built on database principles, it becomes straightforward to share your characters with the larger community and play into the addictive nature of exploration. Thanks to great planning tools such as tags, story worlds, and folders, other users can stumble upon one of your character profiles and find themselves bouncing from OC to OC that you have created.

Using the character planning tool features on profiles, and the more extensive folder system makes CharacterHub a perfect character planning website for any character or setting you can come up with.