Character Creation

Character Creation

It took me a long, long time to sort of own up to it. It's a hard thing to admit, actually. But I hate character creation in rpgs.

I'm not a big fan of origin tales and the beginnings of stories anyway. I like to get right into the action. So I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that I was predisposed to dislike character creation. But there are other, more concrete reasons I don't like it, at least the way it is traditionally handled.

1. I don't like making decisions based on nothing. I don't like deciding that my character is this great diplomat before I even get a chance to see what the adventure or campaign is going to be like. Maybe it would have been better to devote myself to arcane knowledge or trapmaking. I don't know yet. And it's frustrating to have to decide ahead of time. It's like when someone invites you to one of those formal dinners where you have to choose from three entres ahead of time. I don't know what I'm going to want to eat some night four months from now. Similarly, I don't know what kinds of things I'm going to want to be doing three sessions from now. Or ten. Or whatever.

2. I don't like spending a lot of time making a lot of decisions at once. I remember, once, in a 3rd Edition game I was running, I introduced a new player to the game. After a lot of careful consideration, she decided she would play an elf rogue. At that point, I could tell that she felt like she was mostly done. So I could really feel her pain as I watched her face take on a look of horror as another player slid a pile of books, full of choices, at her. To the experienced player, the decision to be an elf rogue simply keyed to a number (dozens, really) of other choices she could now make. But she had thought she was mostly done. (I took her aside later, and advised her to ignore all those optional books and whatnot, and we made the character creation process as painless as possible.)

3. I don't like spending a lot of time on decisions that have little importance. It's kind of crazy, if you think about it, that the decision that my newbie friend had already made--race and class--were the "easy" choices, and then she had to go through and make a bunch of "harder" choices--skills, feats, weapon selection--that ultimately would affect her character a lot less. In other words, the choices that would define her most clearly were the ones that took the least time, and the ones that only barely mattered (should I put 2 points or 3 points into Move Silently) were far more laborious. 

That's why any game I create from here on out will, if at all possible, feature the following:

1. Lots of pregenerated characters. When I got started in the rpg field twenty plus years ago, it was common wisdom that "real" gamers wanted to make their own charactesr, and thus hated pregens. Pretty much the only games that offered them were games for brand new players. It's sadly taken me a long time to shake that preconception. But I'm a real gamer, and I love pregens. If you're throwing together a new game this Friday, I'd much rather sit down with a stack of pregens to choose from than pull out my dice and a stack of books to create my own. Pretty much every time. If I don't know the system, this makes things go much faster. And if I do, even better because I then likely know how to make a couple of minor tweaks to the character to make it my own. Does this make me less creative? I don't think so. What it really means is, I get my joy from the game in different ways. It also means that I have created a gazillion characters over the years, and I don't need to have the experience of creating a haughty, scholarly guy (or any other cliche) or a sneaky dwarf (or any other goes-against-the-stereotype guy), or the paladin with a drinking problem (or any other character with "issues"). Those are all great characters, and I'd happily play any of them, but I've created them all already, so I don't need to do it again. Ideally, these characters would be either right in the core rulebook or available as free downloads.

2. Fast character generation options. There's great research out there that discusses how many choices people are comfortable with in a given situation, and the numbers are much smaller than pretty much any "mainstream" game's character gen system. I want to create a game where you can make three or four important decisions and have a cool character ready to go. Ideally, it would be configurable enough so that the people who do want a bazillion options, and want to tinker with every tiny aspect of their character can do so as well. And everyone in between can be happy too. To make this work properly, the affect of the choice should always be commensurate with the time and mental energy required to make it. In other words, if deciding between wookiee and blogon really is going to affect your character forever, there should be a lot to that choice. If the decision between the 4.5 crescent wrench and the 5.5 crescent wrench is not going to matter, then there shouldn't probably be a whole crescent wrench subsystem in the game.

3. Choices that are not entirely front loaded. A lot of people want to be able to shape their whole character to fit their character concept right out of the gate, I get that. But others don't want to have to make decisions way ahead of time. In real life, and even in (good) fiction, people change over time. They develop. I'd like to create a game that embraced that idea. Where not all your character defining choices had to be made before the first adventure even started. (When I was a kid, I had a friend who refused to name his character until he had played for a while, to get a "feel" for him. That's a bit silly and extreme, but the sentiment means a lot to me.) This would mean, potentially, that the game would grow as the characters grew. There might be rules that didn't come into play at the beginning of the game. Imagine (just as an example) a game where political affiliation--monarchist, populist, or anarchist--actually affected your character abilities. Now imagine that the game was set up so that you didn't have to make that choice until you'd played three or four sessions. The issues just wouldn't come up until then. Then, after you've got to know your character, you are presented with those choices, right when they are going to affect the flow of the game. That might be kind of cool, and possibly quite preferable to having to make those choices at the beginning, based on little or no information.

Sure, there are games out there that go down these avenues already. But I think there's room for further exploration.