How close is your Fan Fiction, or other writing, to your own beliefs and experiences? Options

[Black Hand]

Anyone on this site who reads the Fan Fiction, can see the alternate and incredibly different worlds that emerge from playing Morrowind and Oblivion. Even just the starting sequence in Morrowind inspires radically different interpertations in these different stories.

So, the question I pose to my fellow writers, is the title.

how much of yourself is in your Character? Does he or she do the opposite of what you have learned, because you are curious as to what the outcome of the alternative is?

Or do you just truly roleplay and let the Character you designed react in his or her own way in this fantasy world?

For myself, my mode of thinking is heavily influenced by eastern philosophy, and fighting credos. For example, in Karate, (Which I was forced to endure as a young child) My Sensei would always ingrain in me the importance of focus, and not necessarily supressing emotion, but not letting it cloud your judgement during a sparring match.

Years later he is speaking through Goren Andarys, The Master of the Morag Tong in Ald'Ruhn whose trade is a monk, (Hand to hand being their major skill) and Sethyas velas, My Character, is a young learning individual, who can make dumb choices based on his emotion.......much like me.

Later on I would read the Art of War by Sun-Tzu and actually apply it in many areas of my life. (As well as my Fan Fic)

But's thats my example of it, so where do you guys stand?

[The Metal Mallet]

Hmmm, interesting topic Black Hand. It's a little weird for me to decide, because I had different reasoning for each of my characters that I focus on in my fic.

What I look for (in most cases) is for my characters to be as human as possible. At least for my Savlian character, I wanted him to be more of a grey character than a straight white character. He's done both good things and bad things in my fic, which is what I was going for with him.

With Simion, I mainly wanted to challenge myself and see if I could believably write a character that is mad. Hopefully my readers believe in his condition. He seems to be well-liked by some of my readers so I guess I'm doing a good job with him.

Then Hlodir and the Count are basically black characters, I didn't really do anything fancy with them, other than integrate some interesting things with them in the plot. I guess I more or less roleplay these guys. I still made sure that they experience human emotion though, just more of the darker feelings: anger, fear, ruthlessness, vainity, etc...

I think that some attributes of my characters reflect myself just because I tried to make them as human as possible. And since my life is the only human life I know significantly well, most of that is used for humanily qualities.