based off a ttrpg event

3. What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?

Hm! I want to say it was her appearance. I think I typically start with appearance for many of my oc designs or else I won't be able to think of anything else for them, unless I have a personality bouncing around in my brain already.

4. And reverse, which one of the four things did you struggle with the most?

Role in the story! I first made her for a homebrew campaign during 2020 that we absolutely did not ever get around to doing, and I didn't really know much about playing dnd/ttrpgs aside from a 45-1 hr oneshot I did that didn't really utilize classes or anything and one spontaneous rpg thing that didn't really finish since it started with some normal roleplaying (as in chat style rp) to begin with. Our current session is where I've been able to actually flesh out her backstory as a character and have her interact with others.

18. Does the character have other characters connected to them? Do you have a family tree and "offscreen" connections made up for them or do they exist in a vacuum purely for the purpose of the story?

Yep! Initially, I was trying to think of if she was married with kids or single with plenty of nieces and nephews. Single with many nieces and nephews is her current status! And since we had a holiday hiatus, I was thinking more about her family life. I'd already been considering it during our prologue session and managed to nail down at least one sibling, but over December I managed to (slowly) come up with eight more siblings for her because I thought it'd be really funny to make her and her siblings Santa's reindeer (even though they aren't reindeer). Mistletoe is somewhere in the middle, and I need to figure out the age gaps and birth order of her siblings.