Creating characters as relationships

[sirogit]

I'm considering using this technique during my next character creation session.

Give players the details of what is expected of their individual characters(Combat readiness, likability, protagonist-material), but tell them to not design individual characters. Instead, think of intereasting relationships between two characters.(A juvenile deliquent and his parole officer, mad scientist and monster, mentor and ambitious youth), and than, think of a few of the relationships you can string together plausibily, the players choose which characters to play and develop them further, presto.

I think this would make for PC groups that are alot more coherent. Has anyone tried something like this to success?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Alyria comes to mind; its storymap method is essentially what you're talking about here, on a sort of recursive scale. (That is, think of groups that interact interestingly, think of members of those groups that interact interestingly, etc., until you reach the level of the individual.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

After reading and playing Legends of Alyria, I've adopted the storymap technique for many game preps. The most recent example is our current Hidden Legacy game. It works wonderfully, although it is not suited for all sorts of play.

Sirogit, given your three criteria for your players, it's clear that you're prepping for Sorcerer or at least are being influenced by that text. I suggest that the full storymap method (in which a great deal of the situation/scenario is pre-authored by the group) would perhaps be going too far ... and that your proposed "a few relationships" method is a great compromise between as-written Sorcerer and the full-storymap method.

So yes, I think you are really onto something, and would like to know how it flies in actual play, when the time comes.

Best,
Ron

[neelk]

I'm considering using this technique during my next character creation session.

Give players the details of what is expected of their individual characters(Combat readiness, likability, protagonist-material), but tell them to not design individual characters. Instead, think of intereasting relationships between two characters.(A juvenile deliquent and his parole officer, mad scientist and monster, mentor and ambitious youth), and than, think of a few of the relationships you can string together plausibily, the players choose which characters to play and develop them further, presto.

I think this would make for PC groups that are alot more coherent. Has anyone tried something like this to success?

Yes, and it works *amazingly* well. Collaboratively figuring out which character plays foil to which other makes for a much richer dynamic. There was a thread on this recently, actually: Creating Your Team the Scooby Way. If you want your game to be "about" something, these relationships are extremely  important: an unexpected foil-relationship will mean the game is about something unexpected, pretty much, since PC-PC dynamics  are more important than PC-NPC dynamics.

[sirogit]

Ron- Yep, you're right on both accounts. I pretty much use that as a guideline to most any game I run(Unless combat isn't covered much).

While I would love to use the storymap method in a game soon, I don't think it's very fitting with the game I'm thinking of.

What I'd planning for, is an extremely coherent team of Demon Cops. What I mean by extremely coherent, is that there are intereasting and present issues between the characters that are very ready to be explored in play. Not nessecarily long-standing relationships, they could be morever idealogies or personal situations that contrast or are similar in intereasting ways. They are not just: A powerfull mage, a plucky elf that believes in women's issues, a barbarian that listens to classical music.

But the situation, I want to vary more session to session. My ideal would be, every session the cops are investigating a specific circumstance that has some degree of personal involvement, but also has involvement on part of the PCs for the simple fact that they're heroic, and there's moral crimes going on, and they can do something about it.

So each session has it's own independant relationship map, even if there may be recurring characters. But the PCs, excluding the possibility of death or replacemenets, are consistant, and their interactions are the long-term, work-in-progress relationships of the game.

There are many reasons that the technique seems very attractive to me. One in paticular is, "A wealthy, upperclass sociolite buisnessman" is by itself, not at all very intereasting. "A wealthy, upperclass sociolite buisnessman and his wise but embiterred blue-collar employee" is intereasting. Oh, now I can see what the fact he's upperclass means, he goes home to idle luxury, can afford to send the kids to some distant boarding school and send the wife on a vacation to france, while his employee struggles to keep his family togethor in a two-income low-rent apartment.