What it makes
This random character generator builds one complete fictional person, not a list of adjectives. Set a genre, a role and a couple of constraints, press the button, and you get a card with ten fields filled in: a name, an age, a one-line summary of who they are, their appearance, three personality notes, what they want, what they need, the flaw that keeps getting in the way, a secret they are carrying, and a note on how they speak.
The want-and-need pair is the part that does real work. What a character wants is the thing they will chase for three hundred pages: the promotion, the confession, the ticket out. What they need is the thing that would actually help them, which they usually cannot see yet. The gap between those two is where a character arc lives, and a character description generator that only hands you eye color and a hobby will not give you one.
The secret field works the same way. A secret is only useful if it can be found out, and if being found out costs something. The generator is prompted to produce secrets with a price attached rather than trivia.
Every field can be re-rolled on its own. If the name is wrong but the flaw is perfect, swap the name and keep the rest. Nothing resets unless you ask it to. Every character it writes is an adult, and it will not produce real or famous people.
Craft tips
Generate one character at a time, not a cast. A cast produced in a single batch tends to come out balanced and bland, because each person is implicitly written to complement the others. Generate the protagonist, live with them for a day, then generate the person who will make their life hardest.
Use the generator for the character you are avoiding. Most writers know their lead and have a vague fog where the antagonist or the sibling should be. The fog is where a random character generator earns its keep. You are not outsourcing invention; you are being handed a concrete first draft to argue with.
Argue with it. The best result from a character generator is often the one that is nearly right. When you read "wants the commission" and think no, she wants to be forgiven, the tool has done its job: it gave you something specific enough to disagree with. Change it. Keep the disagreement.
Keep the contradiction. If the personality notes contain two traits that do not sit comfortably together, such as "generous with attention" and "allergic to being managed," resist the urge to tidy them. Contradiction is what makes a person feel observed rather than assembled.
Turn the voice note into a rule. "Answers questions slightly later than expected" is a stage direction you can apply in every scene. A one-line voice rule per character does more for dialogue than a page of backstory, because it is testable: you can look at a line and see whether it obeys.
Let the flaw cost something on the page. A flaw that never loses the character anything is a personality quirk. Before you start writing, decide the first scene in which the flaw takes something away. That scene is usually chapter two or three.
Convert the secret into a clock. Ask who else knows, and what happens on the day they decide to use it. A secret with a possible discovery date is a plot engine. A secret nobody could ever find out is furniture.
Do not fill in what you do not need yet. Appearance and age are the fields writers over-invest in. If your story never puts the character in front of a mirror, a sunburnt nose and an oversized coat is plenty. Spend the effort on the want, the need and the flaw.
Write one scene before you commit. A character is not real until they have refused to do something. Put them in a small scene with one obstacle and see whether their voice holds. If it does not, re-roll the voice note and try again; if it does, the rest of the card will survive contact with a draft. In DreamPress, the generated card carries straight into chapter one and stays in the story's memory, so the flaw and the secret are still there thirty chapters later.