Image credit: Freeimages.com / Yarik Mishin

This article was inspired by a question raised on twitter by Kevin Mason @jackmonkeygames, or more specifically, my response to the question:

Q: What’s Your Best Tip for creating a memorable character?
A: Enjoy the process of creating the character.

That touched on a thought that’s been tickling around the back of my head for a while now that I was sure would make a good article, about whether or not ditching the sense of whimsy that characterized a lot of old-school gaming back when it was contemporary has also killed a lot of the fun value of gaming.

When you first start generating characters for RPGs, the mechanics tend to be overwhelming, and so those are what you focus on. It’s often only once you have a handle on the mechanical essentials of your game mechanics that characters itself stops being a mechanical act that can be done by a game roller or spreadsheet and becomes a source of entertainment in its own right.

Because most really good characters come about not because of a brilliant insight into the workings of a game system, or the ability to min-max, but because they become a story in their own right, scratching the creative itch that’s inside all – or at least most – of us. It’s a story in two parts: the creation of the character and his backstory, or how he got to where he (or she) is when they enter the game, and the story of what happens to them once they are in that more dynamic environment.

‘Book’ One: Character Creation

“Book” one of the character’s story is created by the player as a mostly solo effort based on the game world, societies, etc, supplied by the GM. In theory, once those parameters are known to the player, he is then challenged by the GM to create an interesting character who has emerged from the different experiences that this premise provides.

Almost immediately, it becomes clear that the GM either hasn’t created everything that the player needs, or isn’t telling the players everything that he has created. So the player invents things to plug that gap in creating his vision of what the character will be, sometimes called the character concept. When he submits the character concept for GM review, the GM considers whether or not these additions supplement or conflict with the conceptual twists that he intends to offer as adventures and plot developments and in-game discoveries – all the things that he has decided and hasn’t said.

If the character offers an opportunity to highlight and explore some of those unsaid elements, especially some that no other character will focus on, and doesn’t conflict with any, it gets approved; this may or may not be before the character is generated in terms of game mechanics.

If the character’s concept conflicts in its assumptions with what the GM has in mind, then there are two options: negotiate some edits to resolve the conflict, perhaps tantalizing the player with part of the hidden story, or simply tell the player “this part doesn’t fit my campaign plans”, rejecting the proposed character in whole or in part.

Some players are prone to take this as personal criticism of their creative skills, but they should not feel that way; it’s often the case that they have been too successful at creating a character that ‘locks into’ their view of the campaign world.

Personally, as a GM, I try to find a way in which the player’s misapprehension of the game world can become a flawed understanding of that world on the part of the character. While there may still be the odd item that needs negotiated revision, this permits an awful lot of what would otherwise be rejected to pass, giving the character (and through him or her, the player) a stake in the revelations to come. It stops being just an intellectual exercise when you have an emotional investment in the world, and one of the big tricks is getting players to make such an emotional investment. The best conduit is for the player to have an emotional investment in the character and his life – for it to matter to them.

Through The Looking Glass

Once you make a character as a ‘simulated person of interest’ within a game for the first time, you never create characters the same way again. Even when creating characters using game mechanics for which you are unfamiliar, your first goal will be to make a ‘simulated person’ who is going to be interesting and entertaining to play. You have ‘leveled up’ as a player.

It’s also at this point that things can go horribly wrong. The player has one view of the sort of things that their character will be doing, and the GM has another, and if those things don’t mostly match, the character will NOT be as much fun to play as intended. I sometimes think that there should be a space on the character sheet for the player to articulate what they want to get out of playing the character in terms of entertainment.

If the player is looking forward to the character skulking down darkened alleys to clandestine meetings, the GM needs to know this – because he might be focusing on entirely different story opportunities for the character. But, all too often, the player himself can’t articulate this information, so it would frequently be a waste, or worse, would miscommunicate to the GM what sort of activities the player wants to roleplay.

There’s nothing worse for a player than for what he perceived as his big ‘character moments’ to be perpetually handwaved. It makes you feel as though all the effort put into creating the character in the first place is under-appreciated, and hence you are being under-appreciated as well.

For that reason, there needs to be an ongoing dialogue between player and GM about what was fun, and what wasn’t, and an effort on the part of both parties to try and understand why this reaction has occurred. It may be the GM’s responsibility to create an environment in which the player can have fun, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know what entertains them.

A broader life-lesson

One of my greatest assets in life has been the capacity to find something to enjoy in everything that I did – whether that was the camaraderie of workmates or the sense of satisfaction at seeing the work I had done each day, or the joy of playing with numbers. Even tasks for which I was not best suited let me enjoy the challenge of doing the job better than I thought I could. This has enabled me to put 100% into everything that I do, every position that I held.

I wish I could pass on that secret, I’m sure a lot of readers would want it, but I don’t know how I do it, or not completely. I can tell you that part of it is actively looking for such an enjoyment vector from day one.

I apply the same approach to my GMing, but with slightly modified targets. Instead of “the best that I can do”, the goal is “the best that I can achieve in the time available that will satisfy the need” – I’ve talked about how I prioritize prep tasks in past articles, most recently in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity.

Not only does this approach help you do your best for each element of your game prep, and improve efficiency leaving more time to both relax and smell the roses AND improve your game prep that little bit over the minimum that will do the job, providing some all-important polish, but it helps immensely in guarding against burnout.

When people read the “About” text that I’ve provided, many ask how I can stand to run the same campaign for what will be 35 years in September. I have three answers: first, I take time off as necessary to recharge; second, it may be a continuous history but it’s not the same campaign (not one of the players I now have were at the table when I started. Several of them weren’t even at school yet); and third, because I enjoy what I do, and the setting that I have created is vast enough to contain enough plotlines to endure for that period of time.

A related question is how I can plan a campaign to run for a decade or longer. The answers are the same. Or how I keep players for that long – ditto, plus I make it fun for them, month-in-and-month-out, to the best of my ability – and that has to be to a reasonable standard, because they keep coming back. Or how I can write two articles, usually containing a lot of substance and not much fluff, every week.

The Collaborative Approach To PC Creation & Maintenance

The collaborative approach to PC creation and Maintenance goes even further than the baseline that I described earlier. In this technique, players – with the encouragement of the GM – supply him with resources and game materials related to their character and the other people in their character’s lives. Once the player has submitted something, the GM is free to twist or spin it however he sees fit, and to use or not use it as seems appropriate. But GM prep time is always in short supply – so the odds are that if you supply something, it will get used eventually.

If you want your character to learn a particular skill, players, find a way to make it interesting (and fun) for the GM to enable you to do so. Create an NPC to do the teaching, offer a couple of plot hooks for how this education can be used to tie the character’s education into adventures, even toss in a line or two about what else the character might be doing with this time but won’t be if the GM lets the character learn/improve the chosen skill – you have no idea which shot will hit the bullseye.

But don’t overwhelm the GM, don’t bombard them with material – and the bigger your submission in terms of game world, the longer you should expect a response to take. Assuming monthly play:

• An NPC artist with some fun quirks and some unlikely personal connections might see action in a game session or two.
• A new arch-enemy, six months or more.
• A new magic item, somewhere in between – or not at all, depending on how over-the-top it is.
• A new character class could conceivably sit on the shelf for more than a year, depending on how much the GM wants to fiddle with it. I’ve also had situations in which a proposed character class was inappropriate for the campaign world as it was, but would fit in just fine with the campaign world as it was going to be in two or three years (monthly play, remember).
• If you enjoy digging out maps or making maps, create a shared space in dropbox and every time you make something new, add it to the collection for the GM to draw upon as resources.

The more you, as a player, contribute, (1) the more fun you will have when something you’ve created gets used, (2) the more fun you will have when discovering whatever twists the GM has put on your creation, and (3) the more time the GM has for putting prep time into other things that will be fun and/or interesting in the campaign.

It’s CRITICALLY IMPORTANT that these be presented in a format the GM can use. If he doesn’t have the facility to print out maps, give him hardcopies. If he works electronically, as I do, DON’T give him handwritten material – it will simply sit on the shelf because he may NEVER find the time to type it up for you. Take the GM’s preferences into account, and – if in doubt – talk to him about it!

A lot of players think it’s enough for them to spend time tweaking their character, planning what feats and abilities the character is going to obtain next, and so on. But if you really want to take your character’s participation – and the fun you get from it – to the max, look beyond your character sheet. Make the GM’s job more fun for them, and they will have more capacity to make your job as a player more fun for you.

It’s not uncommon for players to do this sort of thing when creating their characters. Why not make character creation an ongoing process?