Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
Character Creation
One of my deepest convictions about roleplaying is this: that it's
about playing characters, not about playing a sheet of numbers. This
is true whether I'm playing a game of tension, high atmosphere and
in-depth character play, or an investigative game about finding clues
and piecing together the evidence, or a violence game about
hitting people. My enjoyment derives from the fact my character is doing
things, not from the fact that I have high stats and I'm getting to make
lots of dice rolls.
My attitude to character creation is heavily coloured by this. One
thing that puts me off about a lot of games is when I read the
character creation rules and they simply tell me how to generate a
string of numbers. Sometimes they say 'Now all you need to do is add a
character background!' as though what life someone's had has no
effect on what abilities he develops.
For me, the highest purpose of character creation is to let the
player come up with a character concept, and then allow him to
give the character stats which reflect the abilities that such a character
should have.
One ideal for character creation which I think is fairly laudable
is that in brief it should take the player through the course of the
character's life. Then they know what the character's life has been like.
This helps to create a character concept without really having to make
much effort.
PURE CHARACTER DESIGN, WITHOUT WRITTEN RULES
This is the way I do character creation in many a game I
run, whether it's one I've written myself or a commercial game. I
sometimes abandon the written character creation systems in favour of
this. Here's how it works.
The first step is to come up with a character concept. The player may
come up with a concept by himself, or the player and the GM may agree
on one. If the player has come up with a concept on his own, then the
GM may ask him to adjust it in order to make it fit better with
the game he has in mind.
Once the concept is agreed upon, the player and GM talk over the
character and discuss what life experiences the character has had.
This will allow them to end up with an idea of the character’s age,
what abilities he will have, and what equipment he will start the game
with.
Finally, once this has been done, the player and GM together decide
what levels of stats the character should have. The GM has the final
say on this. Sometimes the player will ask for stat levels that are
unrealistic, and the GM will have to refuse. The player and GM should
go through all the primary stats, and all the skills that seem relevant,
and for each one decide what level it should be.
POINTS ALLOCATION
Many games have character creation done by
allocating points. The player starts with a set number of points,
and gets to buy stats with those points. There are several things I
don't like about this.
First, it creates a situation where the player’s aim
is to get his stats as high as possible, and the purpose of the character
creation system is to limit how high he can get them. This is wrong.
The purpose of character creation should not be to create a set of stats
as high as possible, but to create a set of stats which accurately
describe a person’s abilities.
Second, any such system is open to abuse. The first problem is that
people have a choice between spreading points out amongst a lot of skills
so that they get a character who's like a normal person, or ignoring
all the skills except the ones in which they want their character to
excel. Thus sensible players go off and create fairly normal characters,
while bad players create foul combat-beasts which have no other abilities
but killing. The second problem is that in any but the simplest rules
systems, flaws in the rules can be found whereby certain specific
combinations of abilities result in unusually great powers, and
points-based design systems allow players to exploit these (see
rule 3).
Third, many games like this have 'character flaws' or
'disadvantages'. Players can take these to gain more points to make
their character hard. As a result, people tend to search for flaws
which will cause them the fewest problems while giving them the
most points back. This leads to player characters being freaks,
such as one-eyed sadists with no sense of smell.
CHARACTER TEMPLATES
By 'character templates' I mean any system which gives a list of
what abilities should have developed during the period of a character's
life that's covered by character creation, ie. from birth to the start
of play. These are used in many games, often to good effect. They're a
great idea, but like most ideas they can be done well or badly.
To my mind, the best way to do it is to have a templates for
a variety of different careers ('career' is rather a loose term here,
which could take in more than simply employment). Probably there will
be separate templates for youth and adulthood. So a character might
get one template for his youth, then a template on top of that for every
career he's been through since.
This has two main advantages to recommend it. First, it gives a
clear indication of what level of skill someone will develop if
they do a certain job or live a certain lifestyle. Second, it takes
the player through the character's life, giving him instant background.
Another advantage can be that it gives people culturally determined
skills, which injects a certain amount of cultural background
straight into the makeup of the character right from the word go.
For instance, the Middle Earth game MERP has a certain number of
Primary Skills which are listed on every character's sheet.
There is a list of racial/cultural backgrounds from which a character
may come. The Adolescence Skill Rank Table shows, for each
background, how many skill ranks the character develops in each
Primary Skill during adolescence.
GM-PLAYER COOPERATION IN CHARACTER CREATION
A lot of players do character creation by going away with the
rulebook and coming up with a character by themselves, then saying to
the GM, 'Here's the character I've created.' I'm not at all keen on this.
In almost any campaign, the GM should be giving the players a certain
amount of guidance about what sort of characters they should be playing.
GROUP CREATION
Often it is useful to create a group of characters who
will work well together. This is particularly important if there is a
number of abilities which the group must possess in order to function
properly. For instance, imagine that a group of players is creating
five characters to be the crew of a starship. The GM gives them a list
of specialities, saying that at least one crewmember must possess each
speciality. This list might include piloting, astrogation, engineering,
medicine, communications, weapons operation, starport bureaucracy,
underworld contacts, computer hacking, and accountancy. There should be
at least one person on the ship who is good at each of these, and if
there is more than one person, so much the better. The players then
divide these specialities up among them themselves, and create
their characters with this in mind.
I did this once in my
Thorsen Islands
game and I thought it went rather well.
RANDOMLY GENERATED STATS
Randomly generated stats can give the player some starting ideas
to build on, if he can’t think of a character idea. It can also be
refreshing sometimes to just take what the numbers give you. This can
stop you from always playing the same type of character.
Sometimes the dice can give sets of numbers which don’t make much
sense together. The classic case in games like AD&D, Cthulhu and
Runequest is characters with high Strength and low Endurance, or vice
versa. These are hard to justify with any physical type.
DEFINITION OF LEVELS
A major weakness to my mind of the character creation systems of
many games is their failure to describe what level of ability a
certain numeric value represents (see
Character Stat Levels).