Openness
Discovery vs. TraditionHow does this person meet the unfamiliar?
- Higher
- Imaginative, curious, pulled toward new ideas and untried ground.
- Lower
- Practical, tradition-minded, loyal to what is proven and concrete.
PsychScape / The Big Five
Your Personality IsPart of the Adventure.
PsychScape uses the Big Five — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — to give every character a mind, a set of tensions, and a distinct way of facing history.
Take the Test at Understand Myself
See How It Changes the GameExternal paid assessment
Or build a character with the free quickstart
- Five Traits
- Real Tensions
- Characters Under Pressure
Example Character Dossier
Templar Sergeant
The Holy Land, 1129
- Openness41
- Conscientiousness88
- Extraversion35
- Agreeableness62
- Neuroticism74
Disciplined beyond question. Cannot silence the fear.
The Big Five
Five Dimensions. No Boxes.
The Big Five does not drop you into a personality type. It describes your tendencies across five dimensions, and every position on every one of them has strengths, costs, and story possibilities. High is not good. Low is not bad.
Conscientiousness
Duty vs. ImprovisationHow does this person carry duty and effort?
- Higher
- Disciplined, orderly, persistent, hard to move off a plan.
- Lower
- Spontaneous, adaptable, unbound by routine when the plan dies.
Extraversion
Command vs. ObservationHow does this person meet the social world?
- Higher
- Energetic, assertive, expressive, ready to take the room.
- Lower
- Reserved, reflective, selective about noise and attention.
Agreeableness
Mercy vs. AdvantageHow does this person weigh others against themselves?
- Higher
- Compassionate, cooperative, trusting, moved to keep the peace.
- Lower
- Competitive, blunt, skeptical, willing to confront and resist.
Neuroticism
Vigilance vs. ComposureHow hard do threat and uncertainty land?
- Higher
- Vigilant, emotionally responsive, alert to danger and instability.
- Lower
- Steady, slow to rattle, difficult to unsettle.
The profile does not tell you whether a character is good. It tells you where their instincts are likely to pull.
A note on the fifth trait: Neuroticism is the conventional research name for a broad dimension of personality, not a diagnosis. PsychScape calls it the Shadow at the table.
Why It Matters
History Does Not Only Test Your Skills.It Tests Who You Are.
Personality is the pressure behind the choice
A character sheet can tell you whether a hero can fight, persuade, track, or survive. The Big Five adds the pressure behind those actions: what the hero notices, what they fear, who they trust, how they lead, and which duty they cannot abandon.
Most games start with abilities and add personality later. PsychScape starts with the mind.
Make Choices Personal
The same crisis produces different answers from different minds.
Create Natural Conflict
Trait combinations generate loyalties, blind spots, ambitions, and contradictions — without inventing drama.
Make Growth Visible
A clear starting profile gives courage, collapse, corruption, and change something to push against.
The Same History.Five Different Pressures.
The city gate is closing. Your orders say withdraw. A crowd of civilians is still outside the wall.
Five characters. One moment. Five different first thoughts.
Openness
Is there another way out that nobody else has seen?
Conscientiousness
What do the orders, the drill, and the chain of command require?
Extraversion
Who takes hold of this before the moment is lost?
Agreeableness
What is owed to the people left on the wrong side?
Neuroticism
What is the danger everyone else is underestimating?
Choose Your Route
Play Yourself — orBecome Someone Else.
Playing yourself offers recognition and immersion. Playing someone else offers discovery and distance. Both produce strong material at the table.
Route A
Put Your Own Mind Into History
Take a detailed Big Five assessment and build a PsychScape character out of your real tendencies, strengths, and tensions. Do not imagine what a generic hero would do — find out what you might do when history removes the safety of the present.
Take the Test at Understand Myself
External paid assessment
Route B
Create a Mind That Is Not Yours
Set the five traits deliberately, or roll them and play whoever the dice hand you. Step outside yourself and inhabit a mind whose instincts, strengths, and faults are not your own. Character creation is in the free quickstart.
Get the Free Quickstart
Free Man of Ages game tool
Our Recommended Assessment
For the Deepest Version of“Play Yourself,” Start Here.
Understand Myself uses the Big Five Aspect Scale to move past five broad scores and report the ten narrower aspects inside them. That resolution gives a player more to work with: motives, tensions, strengths, blind spots, and the hard choices that make a character memorable.
100 Questions
5 Factors
10 Aspects
Personalized Report
What the Report Gives You
- Roughly 15 minutes
- Percentile results across 15 scores
- Compared with the service's own 10,000-person sample
- Developed by a psychology team led by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Ten Aspects, Not Five Labels
- Openness / IntellectOpenness · Intellect
- ConscientiousnessIndustriousness · Orderliness
- ExtraversionEnthusiasm · Assertiveness
- AgreeablenessCompassion · Politeness
- NeuroticismWithdrawal · Volatility
Two people can share a broad score and still be built from very different parts — which means very different character fuel.
Take the Test at Understand Myself
External paid assessment, sold and operated by Understand Myself. Man of Ages is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Understand Myself, and never receives your results.
The Research Behind It
The Research ConnectionBehind the Assessment.
Understand Myself identifies Dr. Jordan B. Peterson as its lead researcher. Peterson is also a co-author of the peer-reviewed study that developed and validated the 100-item Big Five Aspect Scales, which divide the five broad traits into ten more specific aspects.
A clinical psychologist and former professor at Harvard University and the University of Toronto, he has spent decades teaching and writing about personality, meaning, and human behavior.
More detail means more than a label. It means better material for a character.
Read the Big Five Aspect Scale paper (PDF)
Dr. Peterson and Understand Myself do not sponsor or endorse PsychScape, and Man of Ages is not affiliated with either.
Use It in Game
Take the Test. Find the Tension.Enter History.
Take the Assessment
Set aside uninterrupted time and answer as the person you generally are, not the person you would like to appear to be.
Find the Pattern
Do not stop at the highest score. Look for the traits that reinforce each other and the traits that pull in opposite directions.
Build the Character
Carry your five broad results into character creation as the psychological foundation. Keep your report; transfer only what the sheet needs.
Add History's Pressure
Choose an age, a role, a vow, a fear, and a conflict that force the profile to become visible through action.
Your results stay yours. Nothing is uploaded to Man of Ages, and nothing needs to leave your own copy of the report except the numbers your character sheet asks for.
Questions About the Five.
✦ FAQ ✦
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. They are five broad dimensions used to describe patterns in personality, and every person sits somewhere on all five of them at once.
No. It does not sort people into types or houses. It describes where your tendencies fall on five separate dimensions, which is why two characters who share one headline trait can still play nothing alike.
No. Each end of every dimension carries strengths and costs. High Conscientiousness holds the line; low Conscientiousness improvises when the plan dies. Scores are tendencies, not grades.
Your five traits shape behavior, social dynamics, moral choices, and how your character responds to pressure. They also carry weight on the sheet: your highest traits point you toward a Path, and a trait of 70 or above grants a +10 bonus to the corresponding ability score.
Yes, and it is one of the two routes we recommend. Take a Big Five assessment, use your own results as the character's psychological foundation, and find out how you would meet a crisis with the safety of the present stripped away.
Yes. You can set the five traits deliberately to build a mind that is not your own, or roll them on a percentile die and play whoever the dice hand you. Neither route is more legitimate than playing yourself — one offers recognition, the other offers distance.
Because it goes past five broad scores. Understand Myself uses the Big Five Aspect Scale to report the five factors and ten narrower aspects inside them, which gives a player far more material for motives, tensions, and blind spots. It is an external paid assessment, not a Man of Ages product.
He is a clinical psychologist and a former professor at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. Understand Myself identifies him as its lead researcher, and he is a co-author of the peer-reviewed study that developed and validated the 100-item Big Five Aspect Scales.
No. It is an independent external service. Man of Ages and PsychScape are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Understand Myself or Dr. Peterson, and we do not receive your results. Your report stays yours.
No. PsychScape uses the Big Five as a character-building framework for a role-playing game. Nothing here diagnoses anything or makes any claim about mental health.
Use your five broad trait results as the starting values for your character's five traits, then continue through character creation in the core rulebook. Do not reproduce a paid report at the table — carry across only the numbers the sheet actually needs.
Find Out Who You Would BeUnder History’s Pressure.
Take the Big Five assessment. Find the tensions inside the profile. Then put that mind into an age where every choice has a cost.
Take the Test at Understand Myself
External paid assessment