Character skills can be divided into three categories (with some overlapping): skills that enhance the character’s ability to survive/succeed in adventures; skills that the character archetype is expected/required to have; and the oddballs from left field, which I refer to as Characterization Skills.

The last category also includes anything from the first two categories that the character has developed significantly more extensively than other skills in their respective categories.

Characterization skills representing defining personal traits and abilities of the character, things that make him or her stand out relative to their peers, a gold mine of characterization that GMs often fail to exploit.

Character Psychology

Why has the character chosen to learn the skill to the extent that they have? What does it say about the way the character thinks?

Take cooking – there are three basic approaches to the culinary art: precisely following directions, then tweaking it into perfection; throwing things together by instinct to construct a culinary tour-de-force; and incorporating a level of artistry into the finish of dishes. Each of these can be elevated to the point of being a master chef, but they represent very different philosophies.

Or take painting – there are multiple different schools and styles, but some of the key alternatives are minimalism (reducing a scene to its essentials), expressionism (using elements symbolically to provide additional information and context), enhancement (presenting images in a supra-realistic way), realism (presenting images as realistically as possible). Again, very different philosophies – and there are many more if you go beyond the styles that were developed after the reformation, which is the end of the time periods upon which most fantasy games are based. And, again, these can all be developed to the point of being a master painter.

In both of these examples, the philosophies can be extended to cover the whole approach to life of the character. They are representatives of an attitude, a way of thinking.

Sometimes, the player has given deep thought to how these choices reflect the character they want to play; at other times, it is incumbent on the GM and player to analyze the in-play persona presented by the character and interpret the skill retrospectively. Either way, these skills can be indicative of how the player want to interpret the character in play; the provision of opportunities to do so is then incumbent on the GM.

Character Background

Who taught the character the skill?s What did his parents and teachers think of the character learning the skills? What influence did it/they have on the character’s early life?

The answer to the last question might be ‘none’ – but the more tightly the character’s abilities and background can be entwine, bent to the purpose of making him unique and compelling, the better.

Character Activities

What do the skills say about the day-to-day activities of the character, especially those which take place in his leisure time? What opportunities for interaction with others do the skills provide? These are all opportunities to feed the character adventure hooks and roleplaying opportunities.

Character Socialization

Similarly, in in-game social occasions, these skills provide subjects for the character to discuss that are outside the normal expectations and clichés; they make the character more of an individual in such settings and less of a figurehead for his character class / archetype.

Character Knowledge

What associated and ancillary knowledge does the character posses as a result of having the skills? Scientific history is full of serendipitous combinations of seemingly-unrelated knowledge; the more of these that the GM can find/create and then incorporate into his adventures, the more the character’s role within those adventures comes to feel like an outgrowth of who he is, and not something that could have happened to any random character. If this occurs regularly, it can impart a sense that the current in-game situation (whatever it is) was always destined to happen to this particular character or group of characters. That can be a useful conceit to infuse into a campaign in which the PCs star to an extent that begins to strain verisimilitude (“Why does this sort of thing always happen to ME?”)

Character Challenges

Again similarly, the more a character can utilize these aspects of his uniqueness to solve problems encountered in-play, the more the game harnesses and reflects the uniqueness of the character, and his personal approaches to life. This never happens by accident; it can result from the player looking for opportunities to utilize a skill into which he has pumped skill points, or simply finding ways to match his expertise to the needs of a situation in order to find a solution to whatever problem has been encountered. But, by far, the most common reason such opportunities exist is because the GM has deliberately built them into the game that he is running.

It’s a reasonable assumption that the character is always looking for ways to exploit whatever skills and knowledge he has to get himself out of trouble; that should force the GM to do likewise when designing campaigns and adventures.

Intra-party relationships

There are three ways in which characterization skills can be relevant to intra-party relationships. First, one character can consume the product of the skill; everyone eats, for example. Second, relationships between skills can provide topics of mutual conversation, creating those relationships in the first place or providing them with added depth – a cook and farmer, for example. And third, once again, is the concept of serendipitous combinations of skills yielding a sum greater than their parts – an artist and a bureaucrat can cooperate to forge official documents more effectively than either alone, for example.

Once again, this won’t happen by accident; the players have to be actively looking for ways in which they can combine their different talents in response to the in-game situation, and that (in turn) won’t happen unless the GM first gets the players into the habit of doing so (by actively suggesting it as a solution to a problem that would otherwise be much harder to solve), and second by creating opportunities for the players to look outside the box, in particular by blocking more obvious approaches (or seeming to – quite often, one character can provide a means by which a second can bypass such blocks).

It is also often necessary to break up the party, at least temporarily, by requiring characters to be in multiple locations at the same time, then twisting the situation so that the skills that the players thought would be necessary to advancing the plot are no longer relevant, forcing the characters to improvise. After all, assuming they are playing intelligently, they will do their best to match ‘assignments’ to ‘skillsets’; it follows that the situations will usually need to be somewhat different to appearances if this sort of innovation is to become relevant.

Forcing Characterization Skills?

Characterization skills are so useful, indirectly, that some GMs actually mandate that characters take at least one. Players who are good roleplayers will often take one or more without prompting, whereas most Combat Monsters and Min-Maxers will have to be dragged there, kicking and screaming. I know at least one GM who offers extra skill points at character creating while restricting what they can be spent on, purely to encourage the selection of Characterization Skills. Still others threaten players with a reduction in XP awards (on an individual basis) if characters don’t contribute to solving the challenges of the day.

Personally, I find all three of these approaches to be heavy-handed (but better than nothing in the case of options one and two); a far better approach is to warn players that there will be times when being a rounded individual will be more important than focusing completely on character enhancement in areas they are already competent in, defining what is meant by “well-rounded” (it doesn’t mean a skill level in every possible skill, for example) – then following through by designing challenges that can’t be solved by force or simple skill rolls.

This is a lot more difficult than designing challenges that can be overcome in these more straightforward manner, but the rewards are fairly obvious. And, once players get into the habit of viewing their characters holistically, they will carry the approach into other games under other GMs, even into games of unrelated genres, where that GM will be educated in the significance of the approach – spreading the assumption of good roleplay as they go.

Can you name the Characterization Skills of each party member in your current campaign? Do you keep a list of them handy? Have you looked for the serendipitous combinations, and ways to exploit them? If you answered in the negative, perhaps you should think about doing something to remedy the lack. Look for the Characterization Skills and ways of taking advantage of them!