approaches to creating characters

[Green]

When it comes to creating and playing campaigns, there are a lot of resources about setting, mechanics, and player dynamics, but relatively few dedicated to what is supposed to be the focus of the campaign: characters. I suppose it's because so much of what's offered in gaming materials is so elementary. The things that are not remedial and pedantic tend to be too academic to be useful in actual play. What I'd like to do here is develop tools and techniques to expand and enrich player and GM understanding and portraying characters.

The general trend I noticed is that character creation methods in most RPGs mirrors the method of world creation known as bottom-up. You figure out all the little details (stats, history, personality, etc.) of your character and then try to determine what the true essence of the character is.  Here I define "true essence" as the desires, significant past, and emotions driving the character's actions.

On this thread I bring up an idea that is more like the top-down approach to world creation. First determine what really makes a character tick and develop everything else from there. One of the things I found that players and GMs can do to make this clear is to answer three questions for their characters: What, How, and Why. What does the character want? How did this desire come into being? Why does the character feel s/he needs the thing sought? Figuring out these things provides the following: a goal, essential backstory, and emotional stakes.

Rather than trying to discuss the merits of this method, I'm interested in talking about how different methods of character creation affect the portrayal of characters. Specifically, I'm intrigued by the possibilities of character creation methods to form strategies of character portrayal. What are some of the non-traditional methods have you used to create characters?  How do specific approaches to character creation affect the way you portray characters?  How does this differ in short-term and long-term play from doing things the standard way?  In what way did using another method affect your general roleplaying experiences?

[M. J. Young]

Legends of Alyria creates a character almost entirely out of determination of what things are important about that character--called traits, but they're closer to values than anything else.

Multiverser says to imagine the character that you want, and then decide what scores and skills are necessary to achieve that; minor things can be filled in later.

We've had some other threads about designing characters; I recall one example about Flash Gordon and Dr. Zarkoff and company. The gist of that idea was for each player to write a verbal description of who his character is and what he can do, and then pass that description to another player whose job would be to put the mechanics to that character to make it work as described.

--M. J. Young

[Danny_K]

My personal chargen method is pretty similar to Method acting -- I try to get into the head of a character who would be interesting for that setting and situation.  I usually do a better job if I know something about the premise of the game and who the other characters are.  

Once I've got a mental image of how this person thinks, talks, moves, dresses (which comes to me all at once, as a gestalt), then and only then do I try to stat them up as an RPG character.  Often they get modified in response to the particular chargen system I'm using.  

This is one big reason I hardly ever play "crunchy" games -- the leap from method acting "this dude who's only a fighter because his friends double-dared him" to writing up lists of feats is too far for me.  

On the other hand, a game like Unknown Armies or Dogs in the Vineyard, where you pretty much create your own stats and skills following a standard format, is perfect for me.  It actually strengthens and refines my character concepts.  

In some games (mostly online games with a strong team ethic), we've also done a go-round where everybody posts a brief description of what their guy thinks of everyone else.  This can be really powerful, because it gives you direct input on how others are perceiving your character, and it can lead to a sort of positive feedback loop where their perception reinforces your character concept which further intensifies the character concept.  

I've never seen this round-robin method described in any RPG (I think the person who introduced it to me was basing it off the "clan sterotypes" in Vampire), but it's interesting.  It might help get past My-Guy syndrome, by letting the characters become communal property, at least for a moment.