D&D Devours Hours of My Life...

Ok, so I have always been interested in D&D (Dungeons and Dragons for you non-gamers). My dad used to play - not so much after I was born, but he had the books/figures still. I loved the style of the 3.5 version cover-art and used to flip through them in book stores. I never really got into the game itself until I met Remy. Once he introduced me it took hold. I spent hours flipping though his handbooks and came across "Complete Adventurer" with class listing for such things as Ninja, Dread Pirate, Street Fighter, and Scout. I always liked the Rogue class (hence the User Name) and Remy thought I'd like the Scout class better. We then sifted through his collection of figures and came across the Wood Elf Skirmisher. Now that I had a character I needed a name and backstory.
Well, this was all YEARS ago - like 4 or 5. I have spent an ENORMOUS amount of time on the character I named Amara Yori (Eternally Faithful if you use the name meanings). I know every minute detail of my character - to the point where she's almost a second personality.
Somehow I ended up deciding that she was going to be a half-elf gypsy and not truly accepted by either her human-gypsy or her Elven clans. This non-acceptance somehow evolved into physical abuse by the gypsy clan (not to put a bad light on Romani... it just turned out that way...). I think the way it worked was that I decided she picked the Scout class based on her skills to traverse, track, and hide in the woods - all methods of survival while with the gypsies.
To further delve into my character's psyche, I actually "interviewed" her. This ended up being a 13 page dialogue between me and my character. I discovered a lot of stuff about her while writing. She's truly become like a person struggling to take form outside my head. But I guess all writers feel that way about their characters. Wonder how strange it is to watch a movie based off of your book and see your characters actually take form...
Anyway, the one thing about Amara I never accomplished before was her physical appearance. I only had a basis in my head due to the figure Remy gave me. Over the years I started to collect pictures off the internet that I hoped to one day combine into Amara, but I'm not that great at drawing so it was always pushed off until later. Also, since I had the figure, I didn't really need much more than the basics for game play.
Well, I reconnected with my friend from high school and she had a few sketches of one of her D&D characters on her Facebook. I liked her drawings and sort of commissioned her to draw Amara. Now I needed to truly know what she looked like. I spent the next FOUR hours - count 'em, FOUR hours - writing up a 2-page physical description of Amara. What kept me FOUR hours?
1) As mentioned, the character was abused as a child and is riddled with scars. Saying such was enough of a description for playing, but I needed something more concrete for the concept art. I wanted to map out every scar. And so I spent at least 1 1/2 hours deciding how she would have been attacked, how she would have defended herself, where the wounds would have actually been inflicted, and how bad each wound would be.
2) Amara has a cat companion in the stories I write of her, and I needed to figure out what cat breed I saw in my head, so I spent at least 45 minutes researching cat breeds.
3) For her armor I spent about 20 minutes flipping through the pages of my D&D books, as well as looking at the figure, in order to find the best way to describe what she was wearing.
4) For her equipment - this took the most time - I started off researching my books to see what equipment she would have, and how - in the D&D world - it would look and be crafted. I then started my research on the character's most prized possession, a bow her mother made for her. I researched how to make bows, the best type of wood, the best bow type for her (the recurve bow), the size of the bow, and the best natural material her draw string should be made out of. I then went into describing how the bow is designed, and there were two key elements I needed further research on. One was the fact that she has blades on the outside of the bow and I needed to know how long those could be before the steel would hinder the bow's ability to bend when fired. The second thing was the end of the recurve bow where she would attach her draw string. I wanted an animal important to her Elven clan to be whittled into the bow, and so I went back through my D&D books to find the best option - decided on unicorn. Finally, I researched arrows; how they are made, the style of feathers (fletchings) and how they effect the trajectory, and the technical name for each component.
5) Last thing I did was riffle through my collection of fox tattoos. Since Amara has a famed red fox tattoo on her neck I had collected cool fox graphics off of DeviantArt.com and finally decided on a few that could work for the tattoo.

True, I probably didn't need ALL that research for a simple concept art, but I like my characters to be true-to-life and wanted to make sure that when I decided something for my character that it could actually be that way in real life. *Shrug* What can I say, I'm obsessed - which is why this is post number 2.