RPG 101 - Making a Character pt 1

ZOMGWTFBBQ? Geeks In Love is back? Yes it is my friends, yes it is. Maybe this time we'll actually score some readership. More importantly, my being out of school and working a crappy part-time job gives me a decent amount of time to do some real writing, and I need to get some practice in if I want to score a decent freelance posting.

Anyway, no point in clamoring on about how awesome it is that we're updating again - lets get right into it. With this update I'm beginning a series of articles on tabletop role-playing games (my nerdery of choice), specifically geared toward newcomers to the hobby, but hopefully with plenty that veterans can take away as well.

An obvious caveat: My philosophies on gaming are my own, and if there is one thing geeks are good at doing, its arguing. This is my opinion, based on ten years experience playing RPG's, and I don't expect anyone is going to agree with me 100%. And that's fantastic - don't take anything as gospel just because someone on the internet said so. See how my advice pans for you if you want, but everyone's situation is going to be different. My only goal is to increase the number of people who contribute to and enjoy my favorite hobby.


A quick google search can easily turn up dozens if not hundreds of web-pages filled with horror stories about terrible players and their terrible characters. Its the nature of the beast unfortunately - our hobby is probably the highest form of escapism, and so it tends to attract certain kinds of people with certain kinds of social awkwardness.

I could write about the TERRIBLE things I've seen people do all day. In fact I might just do an article like that later on, but the truth is that you can find stories like that anywhere. Instead of offering you terrifying examples of what not to be, I'm going to try and offer my advice on what you SHOULD be doing when roleplaying. Starting off with, as the title of the post suggests, making your character.

RULE ZERO and the RULE ZERO COROLLARY

Many people in discussions of RPGs and play philosophy like to bring up Rule Zero. Its frequently and often obnoxiously invoked as an argument ender, as if establishing it renders all other in-game conflicts moot. Even so, it is an important part of nearly everyone's gaming philosophy (unless you're James Raggi), and so will be re-written here:

RULE ZERO of ALL RPGS - Have fun.

Yup, that's it. The most important rule, the only one that follows in every game you will ever play is to have fun. You'd be surprised at how often this gets forgotten or neglected.

That being said, however, here's my corollary to Rule Zero, which I personally think is equally important:

RULE ZERO PLUS - Have fun, but NEVER at the expense of another player's fun.

Why do I add this in to Rule Zero? One of the major draws of role playing games is that they aren't zero sum - that is to say, there are no winners or losers. Generally speaking, the players are all working together to tell a story or achieve a goal, and they aren't trying to "win" against the GM or vice versa. A common issue that arises at the table is when someone plays their character in such a way as to be actively detrimental to the story/party/another character, for whatever reason.

As a GM, I've often encountered players who do this and then when they're called out on it, accuse me or others at the table for "interfering with their fun" or "taking the game to seriously." No. No no no. As much as I'm loathe to use the term badwrongfun, this certainly qualifies. If you want to indulge your sociopath tendencies by tormenting others in a consequence free environment, go fucking play Halo or WoW or something - we don't want to know you.

Character Concept

Having established that baseline principle, lets finally start talking about the focus of this article - actually making your character. The first part of any character creation process is the development of a concept. A concept lays the foundation for the rest of the character, establishing a stable reference point from which you can build your character's story. Its important to have a clear concept - your character will be much more consistent, and as a result be much more playable and better developed.

The character concept is what your character ultimately boils down to. In many cases it defines your character's role and/or archetype, or the aspect of such that is most significant in who the character is. Concept is the least fluid part of a character - its the core definition of WHAT, exactly, you are playing. No matter how ambiguous or homogenized the rest of your character's construction is, if you have a firm concept, it will still be a recognizable influence in the game.

A concept should be fairly simple. If your concept is longer than a sentence, you're probably getting into finer details that are a little ways beyond a basic concept. There's nothing wrong with this - jot those details down, put them in later as part of your backstory or personality, but its important right now to have the baseline, immutable concept clearly defined. As you develop your character they will change, certainly, but those changes are best built off of that foundation. If you drastically alter the foundation after the fact, you're basically making a different character and you may have issues with consistency.

(Which WILL make your character difficult to play and will, I can almost guarantee, relegate them to secondary status a decent chunk of the time. Its just the nature of narrative structure. This isn't 100% of course, good play can make up for it, but its true often enough.)

Some general guidelines for your character concept:

1. It should fit the setting. Goes without saying, but I've encountered enough ninjas in Waterdeep to not assume that everyone knows this.

2. It should fit the mood of the game. This is a tricky one, because there seems to be a huge number of otherwise veteran gamers who don't get that not every campaign is an invitation to explore the humor inherent in a world defined by dice rolls and narrative tropes. No matter what some old-schoolers might say, respect your GM's wishes to explore the roleplaying possibilities of legitimate drama, or horror, or thrilling mystery, and don't make a goofy character if it doesn't suit. And vice versa.

3. It should not infringe upon any other character's concept. Okay, this one is VERY tricky. See, campaigns are often organized very haphazardly, with the GM contacting disparate parties and having them make their character's in advance. This means that everyone tends to make their character without considering what everyone else is doing, and sometimes you have problems with overlap. I personally recommend having every doing character creation together, to avoid this problem.

Why is this important? Simple - whats the point of a redundant character? There isn't one, of course, which results in lack of involvement and hard feelings, usually. Would Harry Potter be any good if both Harry and Ron were orphans raised by muggles, each called to be the chose one to defeat Voldemort? Would Ghostbusters be improved if every character were a brainy scientist? No. A character is far more fun to play when it occupies its own role. Again - its just the nature of narrative.

4. It shouldn't be anything particularly "extraordinary" without the GM's permission.

And as a side note to GM's - you really shouldn't ever give that permission.

Some explanation here - I put the term extraordinary in quotes because of course I mean extraordinary from the perspective of the setting. Also because OBVIOUSLY you're going to be wanting to play extraordinary characters in an absolute sense - this is escapist fantasy we're talking about after all, and role-playing is fun because you get to pretend to be exciting characters. Your character should be unique and interesting and fun in ways that contribute to the overall campaign.

This is where the problem comes in - see, everyone wants their character to be a unique special snowflake, and that's fine. But frequently this drive to be unique causes a player to forget that she's one of four or five main characters in this story, and in order to rise above those poor unoriginal plebs they try to play something...weird. Relatively speaking.

Examples from my experiences include the young woman who, in a World of Darkness campaign, tried to tell me her character was actually a fallen angel, the guy from the same campaign who wanted to be a demon, the dude who wanted to play a SECRET vampire in a Mage campaign, and at least one person in every game of DnD I've ever run who wants to play some kind of half/half/half thingummy (usually for munchkin purposes) or a tressym or a dragonborn warforged totemist or something equally oddball.

This really goes back to the first two rules (fitting the setting and fitting the mood) but its different in that these concepts can still do both of those things and cause problems. Solution - find ways to be unique that aren't attempts to be "more unique" than everyone else.

Development

Now we're getting into the framework that's built off of the conceptual foundation. Don't worry - the hard part's over. Once you have a solid idea, developing it should come naturally.

Think about who your character is, as laid out by your concept. Now, throw in some twists and complications - work with your GM and fellow players to hook these complications in with the campaign background, if possible. Note that these complications don't have to be negative per se. When I say complications, I just mean any deviation from the standard version of whatever archetype you're developing.

Complications could really be anything. Use your imagination, cross-up the standard tropes in unexpected ways. The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself questions about the how and why of your concept, and then take those answers and ask more questions about them. You can find lists of "character development questions" online - those are nice places to get started, but I personally prefer to just let my mind wander and see where it goes.

Once you've come up with a decent chunk of complications, write them all down in a list. This, basically, is the framework for who your character is. (As opposed to the concept, which is WHAT your character is.)

Lets work with an example from concept up to this point:

I'm playing in a game of Dr. Who - Adventures in Time and Space that Caitlin is GMing. She gives me the background - the characters are members of a loosely organized grassroots Earth-defense type collective called NETWORK. Each has encountered some fantastic element of the Whoniverse at some point in their lives, hence why they are in the organization. Typically, each will have some way in which they can contribute to the Earth's defense against alien threats.

I hit on a concept pretty quickly - I'm going to play a technical expert, a gadgeteer electronics whiz. That there is my entire concept to start. No one else wants to play a techie and it certainly fits the setting, so I get the go ahead.

Notably, Dr. Who is generally somewhat silly and humorous, though it can drift into pretty excellent dramatic moments from time to time. I'll keep that in mind as I go.

So, I start asking myself questions about my techie, using the answers to ask more questions and I write everything down. Each answer is a "complication" - a way in which I deviate from just your basic "tech expert."

How old is he? - I'm thinking youngish, like maybe he's a prodigy. Rose was 19 when the 9th Doctor picked her up the first time, so lets go with 19.


Damn, that's young! How did he learn all of these technical skills then? - His grandfather taught him a lot, but he's got an instinctive, Kaylee-esque knack for stuff.


So no school then? - No, he never went to college or anything. Since this is a humorous/zany game I think its safe to go the route of he knows how to make incredibly complicated things work but he doesn't really know the science/technical details of it. Its all instinctive.

His grandfather, huh? Hows the family? - He is like his grandpa, his father is like HIS grandpa, IE the rebel gene skips generations. His father and his great-grandfather are proper businessmen, that is to say painfully boring so far as he's concerned.

So he's a rebel? - You know what, I think he is. I think he's a tattooed punk-rocker whom everybody assumes is an uneducated street thug, until he surprises them with his technical genius. Aggressively indie-rock, with a hate-on for "proper scientists." Doesn't care about making money.

How'd he get into NETWORK? - Well, with his rather...uh...random talent for technology, I'm guessing that he accidentally creates very powerful and unusual devices all the time. One of these could have led him to encountering aliens, or something along those lines.

And there you have it - I have a fairly definitive list of traits that have established my character quite well, I think. I started with "techie," and ended up with Jackson Connolly, wunderkind inventor, mechanic, technician, and punk with a chip on his shoulder.

Once you've made your list, its time to move on to the next two steps - I like to call them the Before and After segments, or the Causes and Effects.