Typecasting or Character Players.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Hmm.  Maybe we are talking about different things here?  Your analogy suggests something that is both undesired and inferior.  An analogy for what I was talking about would be a chef who always cooks gourmet Szechuan chinese food.  She may try branching out to say French cooking, but it comes out wrong and she whips up some reliably-delicious kung pao chicken instead.

That's a better analogy. Yes. Noting about inferior or undesired should be implied here. It's more about going back to what you know because it's comfortable.

[Tomas HVM]

One of my friends always plays an elven thief. Even in the circumstances where he's not allowed to play either elf nor thief, he ends up playing something very close to it.

I myself have an affinity for dwarven characters.

I've seen the pattern in a lot of other players too, so the question at hand is real.

I'm at a loss how to take this into consideration though, when making characters, in any other sense than letting the players themselves craft their roles. How to make observations on their personality, and issue characters due to this, is beyond me.

When it comes to matching a group, I prefer to make the framework first, and ask the players to make characters suited to the frame. The frame may be the shared goals of the characters, a mutual background, some group they belong to (being soldiers, a bards group, travelling traders, witches in a covenant, etc.). This is a technique I often use in my design too, making a whole game within the "confines" of such a frame.

Many players are skeptical to such fictional framework. This is often true for traditional players; the old D&D-buggers (many of my RPG-friends are such buggers). However: when play commence they often discovers new ways to play their old archetypes (due to their ability to play it anyhow, in spite of the hindrances), and greatly enjoys it.

The rate of success in such an endeavour, may be due to the qualities of the game. A good game makes it easy to accept new ways. A bad game makes it difficult, and tends to put the player out of character a lot more. So we have to make good games (!). It may be that "good" games in this context is the game that fascilitate the play of a variety of human personalities, in such a way that the players may easily spot and create character profiles corresponding to their chosen archetypes.

That is: my friend the "elfen thief", may create a human character within the "confines" of my game Fabula (no elves, no thiefs), and still play his chosen role (I've seen it happen, and smiled at it). This is due to his preferred archetype not being "elven" or "thief", but something more subtle (don't ask me what it may be), and he instinctively finds it in a quality game.

It may be that players respond with skepticism due to the fact that they want "free choice" in characters, only to choose their favourite type once more. The player like to typecast himself.

And it may be that this archetype is what the player "need" to be in a roleplaying game, to feel good about it, or to make the game a meaningful complement to his own life and personality...

[M. J. Young]

Go watch The Usual Suspects. Again.

I tell my Multiverser players that they start as themselves, but they can make themselves anything they want to be; and I recommend that they watch this movie, because the central villain of the story doesn't exist really as himself--he only exists as the image he projects. He spins his own mythology; he invents himself, and gets people to believe him.

That's what playing a character really is all about: inventing someone and projecting it to others such that they believe it. You are whoever you can get people to believe you are. In the end, we know nothing about the main villain of that film except what he wants us to believe about himself. That's how you create a character.

You can recreate yourself any time you have a new audience. They know nothing about you, and therefore only know what you tell them.

If you start a new character, you should start from the same perspective: no one knows this character, and all anyone will ever know is what I tell them.

--M. J. Young