New players and character creation, three examples

[Frank T]

So, as a spin-off from Ron's Contenders thread, I'm replying to this:

Frank, I'm glad you provided counter-examples, because clearly the issue of character creation has yet to be discussed carefully. It may be one of the most sacred cows of role-playing. So far, we've barely scratched the surface, e.g. Vincent's System and character sole-ownership. For instance, I think ownership is crucial, although ownership of what is totally murky. I'd like to know more about what you think the new players are investing in, specifically, how well that investment seems to pay off for them, during play, and what you do in order to make sure it happens.

(For those who haven't met him, Frank is extremely inspiring at the table, a lot like Luke Crane in terms of enthusiasm and his engaging narrations, and a lot like Meg Baker in establishing an environment of mutual attention to what's going on.)

I quoted the second paragraph because I really like to be flattered. Well, thank you. You pushed the right buttons, you know.

Now for character creation. I'll go with three examples that are not so long ago, so I remember them fairly well.

No. 1 (actually long ago, but well remembered): My then-still-wife Jasmin, a remote friend of ours, Nadja, and a gamer friend of mine, Sven, joined with me to play some billiard. After we were finished, it was still early in the evening, and suddenly, both women expressed an interest in role-playing. Sven and I were thrilled, so we went home to play Vampire, but I decided to leave the dice and numbers out for the beginning and start with a little free play. I wanted to play them through their "embrace", so told them the setting was Hamburg, present day, and asked them what kind of person they'd want to play, briefly explaining the concept of "player plays character, GM plays rest".

Jasmin decided to play a beautiful french au-pair girl and was instantly getting into details of her looks, where she lives, how she dressed and so on. Nadja was paying close attention, and then after Jasmin was finished, she quite determinedly said: "I'm the exact opposite." And she described an ugly white trash girl from one of the worst areas in Hamburg, in the same detail.

I framed a starting scene where both of them met in an elevator by incident and Jasmin's character was fed on by a vampire. But they were so much into describing their character's actions that they were even mildly annoyed by me tossing in such surreal stuff. They were also not really making a distinction between character creation and play, adding details to their characters' background as they went along. Moreover, they were quite naturally assuming director stance, claiming ownership especially over elements of the fiction related to their characters.

At the time, I did not know how to respond to that and pretty much forced my vampire stuff on them, also telling them at some point that they were not "allowed" to describe this or that. Today, I would love to replay this game and see where they would have taken it without my clumsy interference.

No. 2: In my Star Wars d6 group, that has played together for ages, one of the girls recently brought her boyfriend, Ralf, a total none-gamer. She had explained how the game went in some detail to him before he joined us, but I don't think he was really grabbing it yet. Everyone was making new characters, and Ralf was paying attention. Then he said, also very determinedly: "Okay, I want to play someone like Kiefer Sutherland in 24." Like, one of those lose cannon rogue cops. You see, Ralf is a cop himself, but of course no lose cannon or anything.

So what did I do? Since I imagined he wanted his character to be competent at fighting and investigating, I helped him to match his stats with this expectation, so that the system would support him. In the game itself, I put in some stuff like his character being assigned special tasks and secret knowledge, having contact persons, people referring to his reputation and so on, so he seemed competent and tough and everything. As it was, though, and not unusual in our Star Wars group, Ralf's character provided more comic relief than coolness, which probably countered the pay-off. There wasn't much I could do about that. He went with it though, and drove for comic relief himself. He also liked combat and plotting, which of course had nothing to do with his advance investment in his character. On the other hand, my help in picking the right stats paid off, because he was quite effective in the action scenes.

No. 3: My girlfriend, Nicole, went to play "Das Schwarze Auge" with some friends of hers. She asked me to help her make a character, since everyone else was making their characters at home. She had played a little before with another character that she had not made herself, so I think this still counts as "newbie". However, as mentioned, she is a veteran of Diablo and other computer games that feature stats much like those of wargames/rpgs.

So she expressed very clearly her desire to have a character adept at fighting. We discussed some stuff about the setting and the guidelines the GM had set up. She had to be from the north, but the best fighters are academy warriors from the central empires, so we made up a fitting backstory, me suggesting things to her which she considered with mild interest. She was more concerned about her fighting stats, weapons and equipment. She also insisted not to fudge any of the dice rolls in character creation. When she was done with all the stats stuff, which really takes a while, she informed me, quite determinedly, that she would need a horse and a falcon.

Her GM was not inclined to let her have a falcon, because, you know, that's not the normal starting equipment and where would that lead? Nicole, however, was so determined she needed a falcon that she did not back down and finally talked that GM, a long-time role-player with all the bad gamer habits you can imagine, into accepting it.

The game itself was awful, and since it didn't get better, they quit. But payoff would have been easy: You just would have needed to give her something to fight! Of course, there still would have been the awful combat system of DSA...

Conclusion

These three examples are really quite different, so I don't see a pattern except for the fact that gamers are mostly bad at responding to a "newbie's" interests and ideas. The one thing all three have in common is that in every case, there was this one idea about the character that really lit something in the players' eyes, that they really wanted to have.

So, um, what do you make of this? What's your own experience with "newbies" and character creation?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Frank,

With any luck, I'm not changing the thread topic by posting this ... it's a sort of theoretical breakdown of approaches to character creation and starting-play situations, not intended to be complete but enough to be a good framework for discussion. Some of the issues were brought up in the Contenders thread.

My take in Big Model terms is that, culturally, RPG development has failed to recognize that Situation is the 800-lb gorilla of the shared-imagined-space, and that Character and Setting are components of that Situation. So as a default approach, it makes most sense to play with Situation right out there in front of everyone, in one form or another, rather than to use the two main RPG-culture default approaches.

Where to start? OK, I'll describe the traditional default approaches first and then move on to talking about the diversity within the Situation-first approach.

PART ONE: CULTURALLY-DEFAULT APPROACHES TO SITUATION

1. Have Situation develop out of inspired pieces of character creation and setting creation, in an alchemical sense, over sessions of play. This is what I think was probably happening in the original Blackhawk games and most of the early RQ/Glorantha games among the core group, for instance, and it's reflected in a lot of early D&D modules (not the kill-for-points tournament ones). If I'm not mistaken, a lot of John Kim's play-experience with the Hero System is like this.

2. Keep Situation creation carefully hidden in the GM's notes and head, revealed in bits and pieces directly to "character's eye view." This can be observed in many different ways, e.g., the dungeon one encounters, room by room, but it's more widely seen in its "GM's story" manifestation (Call of Cthulhu scenarios; D&D 2nd Ed., e.g. Dragonlance; a common branch of Champions play; most White Wolf games and derivatives).

I think the former worked, and works, primarily among people who brought/bring a very-developed interest in pre-1980s fantasy, SF, and comics to the table; they know "character" and "setting" are situation-components and everyone is primed to generate situation-potential, and to seize upon it, during play. Without that sensibility, getting into their game is nigh-impossible, as the "initial goal" (make situation!) is unstated. Among people without that sensibility, who learned their fantasy from Dragonlance and their SF from Star Wars fandom, if they play this way, they will circle endlessly doing nothing, no matter how many "missions" they run.

I see the latter primarily working among people who are absolutely dead-on agreed with their Creative Agenda, and I also see it flailing wildly, often into dysfunctional play, when CA incoherence is going on. I see that a lot, actually.

PART TWO: DIVERSITY AMONG SITUATION-FIRST APPROACHES

1. One thing I've talked about for Narrativist-promoting play in the past is to begin with a big difference in prepped-detail for characters vs. setting. "Rich-sketchy, sketchy-rich," is the way I usually put it. Sorcerer typically begins with rich characters in sketchy settings, HeroQuest works best (for my purposes) with sketchy characters in its rich setting. Situation emerges very quickly, usually during character creation itself, because of the "creative vacuum," in the good sense of the term - the need to make things happen at the interface of the two unequal components. I guess this approach really isn't much more than a way of optimizing the #1 method I described in the above section.

The problem with this method is that, although it's gold for role-players (many of whom have suffered under rich-rich and sketchy-sketchy), it does absolutely nothing for the non-role-player.

2. Something a lot of us have done recently is basically write the character about 90% of the way, specifically "genre" or "image," without story in place but a strong implication that it's already under way. The character's personality generally gets established mainly in the first couple of scenes of play. I modestly take credit for pushing this very hard with my games, especially Trollbabe, but in truth, real credit probably ought to go to Prince Valiant, and for my thoughts on "why bother much with personality until they're in motion?", credit goes directly to Zero. It may seem pretty normal now for folks who are really into Forge-ish games and their predecessors, but I still recall cries of objections from my gamer-pals when I was first developing Sorcerer - what? They're all the same class? That's bullshit, man, bullshit!

Games that go with this approach are now very common, with the most obvious being Dogs in the Vineyard. But don't miss Best Friends! It's more like this than it might seem at first glance.

Games like 1001 Nights, Bacchanal, The Shab al-Hiri Roach, Polaris, or Perfect take this idea really far, starting not only with who the characters basically are in relation to the setting, but where they are, and what they're doing, and at a general level, why. You have to do a little work to provide Color and choose some options before play, but it's not intended to take more than a few minutes. Contenders would fall somewhere between these and Trollbabe, to give you an idea of the spectrum I'm talking about.

3. Another approach, which I think is probably exemplified by My Life with Master is a big group buy-in to creating the setting's details, with a fundamental Situation built-into it no matter what the details, and character creation is fairly fast and slotted pretty neatly into that. I think Primitive probably weighs in somewhere around here, with the Tribe being more like the Master (structurally, not thematically). Or maybe not, I need to play it more to see. I think Universalis can work like this, but doesn't have to; it totally depends on what's done with the Tenets phase. Since le mon mouri is probably the primary parent of My Life With Master, I'm not surprised to check back in my memory and find it working that way too.

That paragraph makes me think that I should play Extreme Vengeance with a strong shared-Situation-first approach, rather than expecting people to play characters as they try to guess what sort of action movie it is.

4. And yet another is to hand over a bunch of named & numbered characters, to be played as such or to be chosen from in some way. What keeps this from being imaginative dress-up (see sheet, read sheet, do what's on sheet) is a dynamic system which provides tremendous potential for changes in relationships and perhaps even fundamental signifiers. Carry and The Dictionary of Mu both do this.

5+. Oh, probably a bunch of others that I haven't thought of as I muddle through composing this post. Probably a hell of a lot, actually. And I should be clear that none of the above are intended to be exclusive, highly discrete categories, just clusters and tendencies on one or more spectrums.*

I should also mention that an early attempt to fix all this hassle was suggesting in media res play, in which play started in the middle of a fight or something like that. I thought it was a great idea when I first heard about it ~15 years ago, but in practice and from multiple observations of others, it doesn't work very well after all. I mean, it can, but only in conjunction with other factors that promote Situation-first. It is not, in and of itself, really Situation-first, and the usual response from players is to turtle up and follow GM cues as minimally as possible, so that their characters won't get reamed.

DETAIL: FIRST VS. THIRD PERSON

I think narration in first/third person is a red herring issue. Or partly, anyway.

The part that does seem like an issue or at least a tell, is that newcomers to gaming are wary of speaking in first person or using in-character voice for dialogue. Because if that's the point of play, then omigod, they're stuck in Acting 101 and they really, really, really wanted to be done with that forever after that experience in high school or college. "Feel your characterrrr ..." no thanks!

But once buy-in is achieved, which for the moment I'll define as [Situation in action/motion via the System and reinforced by the Reward], then I think first/third person narration is strictly a catch-as-catch-can affair, with no particular implication or importance.
---

So! I'd like to see some responses to Frank's questions and points to see how any or all of this fits into what I wrote here.

Best, Ron

* Yeah, I know, "spectra." Eat me. Too many years playing Champions has made me allergic to terms which get over-used for superhero RPG characters' names.

[Ricky Donato]

Hi, all,

There's a lot of meat to digest here, so I'm going to start by reposting what I said in the Contenders thread, because it is a very general point which fits this thread better. I will respond specifically to Frank and Ron tomorrow, when I have more time.

I wonder if creating people whole-cloth is a uniquely roleplaying thing? Do many authors work this way or do their characters grow more naturally?

I think this is a fundamentally excellent question, Clyde.

From my own experience creating characters for games and writing (a bit of) fiction, it certainly seems to me that games (of certain kinds) promote the creation of "whole cloth" characters here and now, rather than the "organic" devlopment I've seen in fiction writing. I'm not sure if it is uniquely a roleplaying thing, but it is certainly a prominent aspect of the experience.

Perhaps, and this is merely musing on my part, the way that 'traditional' play has grown from the early days has moulded the consciousness of many participants into the view that adding significant character detail that is not actually created by an in-game situation, is wrong and therefore one must formulate as much detail prior to play starting as possible.

I'm totally with Malcolm and Clyde on this. And I have a theory as to why. It's because character creation is basically a big set of decisions that happen really early in the game that will have a dramatic impact on the rest of the game. If you make the wrong choices, you will end up playing a game you don't enjoy because of a mistake you made early on. People are generally worried about making the wrong choices (in gaming and everything else), so if they are presented with a decision to make without any context in which to make that decision, they feel uncomfortable and don't enjoy the experience.

If Joe sits down to play Monopoly, for example, and he's never played Monopoly, the first decision he makes is to choose which piece to play. From the context, Joe sees that his decision cannot screw him later, because the decision is one of Color purely. So he can make this decision without worrying. Then Joe rolls and lands on, say, Baltimore Avenue, and he has to decide to buy it for $60 or not. Suppose Joe looks at his starting money of $1500 and says, "Sure," because he feels the amount of money to spend is inconsequential to the amount he has.

Note that from the POV of whether Joe enjoys the game, it doesn't actually matter what Joe decides or what criteria he uses to decide. All that actually matters to ensure that Joe enjoys himself is that Joe feels that it is safe to make that decision in that context.

Now let's suppose Joe plays D&D3E, which he has never played before. Joe is presented with a massive list of choices: what race? what class? where to allocate skill points? The biggest obstacle to Joe's enjoyment of this is that Joe has no criteria to guide him. If Tommy the experienced gamer tells Joe, "Just play what you want", Joe is left with the worrying feeling of "How do I know what I want?"

Does all that make sense?

[Gordon C. Landis]

Hi all,

To be clear, I'm assuming we're talking about Narrativist/story-creation focused play here, and not *necessarily* any other creative agenda.  My recent experience with newbie's and character creation is not extensive (yet), and is all with SNAP, my generic build-a-story system.  SNAP begins by talking about the story before we create characters, in that the group will agree on a set of scene descriptions before characters are created (note: this ain't necessarily Situation in the sense Ron is looking for, and I'm not sure I want it to be, though the 800 lb gorilla probably needs more respect in prep than SNAP currently gives it).  So - at least baby-steps in the direction this thread seems to point.

To the degree that game play corresponds to story-creation in general, here's what I believe to be true: play can't begin until all explorative elements are at least minimally established.  And too-minimally can definitely be a problem for situation.  To narrow it down to the three specifically mentioned in the thread: just as a writer can't actually start without some notion of character(s), situation(s) and setting(s), neither can play.  The philosophy in SNAP is that you can touch on any and all of these multiple times in prep, but you *finish* "scene types" (setting and situation?) before you finish (in the sense of sufficient-to-start, not necessarily done-for-all-time) character.  Sometimes the author of a story begins with an idea about character, sometimes with a situation, sometimes a setting  . . .  but actual writing doesn't begin until all three are present.  I'm wanting the same to be true, potentially, in a Nar game; though certainly we've got lots of examples of how picking a solid situation really works for getting folks aligned as they do the rest of prep.

I think that's enough background.  Now, what did the newbies do with this?  I had the same group run through prep and a quick scene twice in a single evening.  The group was me, Mark and Mary, a couple in their mid-30's, and Christine, who I think is just a year older.  Unfortunately for testing that SNAP philosophy, I had one very specific and one somewhat-specific situation prepared for these two mini-sessions, but in terms of this thread, there was one interesting issue I noticed.

The first session I "led" the prep, but the story called for exactly three players (a couple on a 3 Day Weekend that would make or break the relationship, and an "Adversary" who - via an actual character in the story or not - must put stress on the relationship), so I was just a rules guide.  They jumped directly to talking about the characters, and I had to pull 'em back (and maybe I was a little too quick to do so) into picking a (just one, in this case) scene description first.  Formal character creation involves asking the question "what does he/she do in that kind of scene?" so until you have the scene, there're no Traits and etc. to write down.

The second session Mark wanted to lead (I was hoping for Mary or Christine, but it wasn't to be).  This one was a ghost story, with the ghosts bound in their in-between state by some secret that they themselves did not know, but that one of the other players did.  In this case, where the situation is just a bit more generic, prep discussion focused first upon the scenes.  Now, that might just have been what I trained them to do in the previous session, but my suspicion is it would have happened anyway.  There needed to be a little more meat on the situation, and the main tool (good or bad) for that in SNAP is the scene description process, so that's where they went.

I guess my experience, looked at in the context of this thread, is that newbie instincts for these things are quite good, and even with imperfect tools they'll poke at the right places.  (BTW, we'll be playing more of the ghost story once Mark gets a break at work, but the 3 Day Weekend characters were labeled as "too silly" to warrant revisiting).

Two asides: one, "fill-in during play" is a tool that should be used and developed further (I know of at least a few designs in progress that will do so).  Two, responding to Ricky's quite valid (I'd say) point (and using some of what I've heard Ron saying about "what defines an RPG character?"): while there's nothing wrong with attaching significance to choices made during character creation, I think that for Nar play, that significance should mostly be about things like color and positioning (?), NOT the general effectiveness of the character and/or the essential resources made available to the player.  Or at least, variance in effectiveness and resource are an important issue the designer had better be aware of when building the character creation system.  In the case of D&D 3.x, I believe it has been publicly acknowledged that allowing for "mastery", whereby experience with and knowledge of the rules lets you be "better", was a design goal of the team.  I suspect the reasons for that had to do with helping to "lock" players (as consumers) into a system they'd mastered, but it turns out (IMO) to also be a pretty cool thing for Gamist play.  Not so much for Nar, though.

Wow, long - hope it's useful,

Gordon

[Frank T]

Ron,

Among people without that sensibility, who learned their fantasy from Dragonlance and their SF from Star Wars fandom, if they play this way, they will circle endlessly doing nothing, no matter how many "missions" they run.

Yeah, I've experienced this exact thing in my Star Wars group.

Your assessment about third person/first person also fits with my experience, though I'm not sure how the bit about reward system fits with my example No. 1, or any freeform or near-freeform game.

Ricky,

Totally, how can I expect you to make choices when you have no idea what the consequences are? I'm not so sure if this problem is automatically fixed with an "as you go" approach, though. You might still find yourself at a point where something new comes up and you go: "Well, if I had known that, I would have decided differently!"

The real difference between Monopoly and many RPGs is that you can explain Monopoly as a whole before play starts: The goal, the procedure, all the rules. Then it's easy to make a decision. Most RPGs are too complex to explain them whole in advance (even if you get past the "goal" hurdle), without losing your audience very quickly. There is some exceptions, like PtA for example, where you can actually explain everything the player needs to know for character creation in a few sentences.

- Frank

[Frank T]

Gordon,

That's a good point about "mastery" in D&D, but talking about new players, we probably all agree that the strengths of D&D 3.x may lie in various fields, but not in easy accessibility to new players.

I think that for Nar play, that significance should mostly be about things like color and positioning (?), NOT the general effectiveness of the character and/or the essential resources made available to the player.

I would rather leave GNS issues out at this point, and I don't think this issue should be considered strictly through GNS glasses. Personally, when I played MLwM, I was quite annoyed by not understanding the significance of the stats and how they relate to endgame/epilogue.

I guess my experience, looked at in the context of this thread, is that newbie instincts for these things are quite good, and even with imperfect tools they'll poke at the right places.

Absolutely. We can learn a big deal by just watching newbies approach role-playing.

- Frank

[Frank T]

To get back to my initial examples, and contrasted with Rons example in the Contenders thread, I think it's all about when it clicks (if it clicks). So role-playing is this strange activity of creating fictional stuff together. Most people I introduced it to were interested, but somewhat sceptical. Hesitant to contribute.

Hopefully, sooner or later, something would catch their interest. They would focus on something that they wanted to see in the created fiction. Something they liked, something they felt attached to. An Irish-American boxer guy. A French au-pair and her life. An ugly white trash girl and her life. A lose cannon rogue cop, no matter his life. A falcon. Anything.

This may happen during character creation or only when you get down to situation. It may, for that matter, happen during setting creation if setting creation is part of your game. In fact, I've seen that happen, too. You could well call it claiming ownership over a part of the SIS.

Now, why does it sometimes "click" already during character creation, and sometimes not? I think it may click during character creation if the players get an idea of what the SIS will be like, and how whatever they just made up fits in. Like, a second ago, I was just trying to put pieces together, but now I have an image and want the others to see it, too. There is this white trash girl and her father beats her and she lives on this block and she's so hopeless. I've got a falcon on my fist and a fucking big sword on my back and nobody messes with me.
   
So, as long as the system supports the desired creative input, experienced players should easily enjoy character creation, because they can already imagine how it will turn out in play, right? Because they understand how they are already making a component for situation, right? Well, right for me, yes. Not right for everyone, as it seems, regarding the comments in the Contenders thread.

- Frank

[Ricky Donato]

Hi, Frank,

It seems that this thread is waffling between two topics: #1) the interaction between new players and character creation, and #2) teaching new players how to role-play. Because character creation is typically the first step in an RPG, #2 is typically a superset of #1, which explains the waffling. Do you want to focus on character creation, or is the more general topic what you're looking for?

[Gordon C. Landis]

Frank, I was thinking about MLwM in saying it's important to at least consider the issue(s) raised by variance (in effectiveness etc.), as I'm pretty sure Paul did.  Making those issues transparent to the players . . . hm.  I can see design reasons to just let people learn about that in play (which perhaps was the choice Paul made), but for new players, maybe that's an added complication with more perils than benefits.

In general, I think a step towards "finding what clicks" (I dislike "ownership" as a term, so I'll stick with the vague "click") is made when we acknowledge three things: 1) There will be multiple clicks, of varying type and intensity, for each individual player; 2) Those clicks can and should occur in both prep and actual play (some click should happen in prep, but maybe it's OK if there's nothing big until sometime fairly early in play); and 3) That prep (for everyone, not just any GM-type that there might be) really ought to be seen as more than just character creation (Ron says "giant ape named Situation, not Kong or Character!", and as far as completing prep goes, that certainly sounds right to me).

I guess that's my answer to Ricky's two topics: 1 (character creation, by new players or not) ought to be a subset of 2 (how to play this particular game, for new players or not) instead of vice-versa.  Especially for new players!  So if we were to focus on 1 without talking about 2 to some degree, we'd be doing everyone, particularly (again) new players, a disservice.  And it is also a disservice to ignore the impact of situation on the click-factor.

Your answer may, of course, vary, so feel free to tell me to back off this line if it's not where you want the thread to go,

Gordon

[Frank T]

Hi everyone,

I suggest that character creation is not game prep, like distributing money, picking a color and setting up your car in Monopoly. Rather, it is already part of the game, because you are already beginning to form the SIS (to a degree depending on the game you are playing). Yeah, situation is the big deal, but character ties into that.

So Ricky, I think there is no waffling. Your 1 and 2 are both subjects that need to be considered in order to understand the whole issue. Obviously, there are different approaches to character creation, as detailed by Ron. It's fun to some and boring to others. Even some long time gamers find character generation boring, but to make something of that, you would probably have to take a closer look at the game played, the group's creative agenda and how the rules for character creastion do or do not provide means for situation set-up that supports the CA.

As for newbies, it's about them understanding, not necessarily about someone teaching them. It's about them going: "Ah, I see, this is what I do in the game, and now I've got an idea that I'm attached to and want it to be in the SIS." When that happens in character creation, that may make them enjoy character creation, regardless of whether their understanding is correct and whether their idea will work in play as imagined. That's what Ron meant with pay-off. Look at my example No. 3: Nicole was jazzed about her character, but in play, it did not work out in any way for her.

- Frank

[Cabbagetom]

Agreed.  A new player has to engage in character creation and be excited by it, otherwise its going to be a long night of awkward silences.  Giving some one the opportunity to be creative and to get their imagination flowing helps them to take ownership of some part of the story, and ultimately enjoy the game.  To this end I'm actually in favour of encouraging players to flesh out as much of their back story/personality etc before we've started playing, making sure that we can do a bit of free forming on the way to add colour.  Of course in the first session they can re adjust elements, thats what creative engagement is all about.

Conversely, I recently ran a session of Prime Time Adventures with a group of players who had never played a collective narrative story based game, and to my surprise what they felt dissatisfied with was the fact that they only got play one character each.  I took this to mean that in the  brainstorming session that starts PTA, they had grown attached to all of our creations, but also that they had taken to the idea of collective storytelling easier than I had anticipated.

In short I think that new players should be taken through character creation in the same way that experienced players should - by allowing them to take ownership of not just the character but also part of the world of the game and the story itself.  It means being very adaptable as a GM but also guarantees that no one is going to be sitting in the kitchen thinking 'why did I come tonight?  I've had no involvement in this game whatsoever'

[Judd]

This reminds me a bit of this thread:

Character Concept Brainstorm with my Girlfriend

It might be my favorite thing I've ever posted here.

[Moreno R.]

Excuse me if I am saying something you already said and I am misunderstanding the last few posts in this thread, but I think that Ricky when wrote this:

and #2) teaching new players how to role-play

took the question posed in this thread backwards.

I think that the question is NOT "how to teach new players how to role-play". I think that all the people I know could role-play, if they wanted it. It's natural.  The problem is that most people DON'T WANT to role-play (at least in a "role-playing game")

The real question should be "how to write a role-playing game that make people WANT to play it?". Or, "how to write a people-friendly role-playing game"

(my use of the word "people" to indicate not-gamers at large should not be seen as a insult to gamers. I am a gamer and I know that we are people, too. But English is not my native language and I were not able to find a word that means "all the people of the world that would like to play a role-playing game, if it was written for them, and not for people who already play these games" so I had to settle for the, I admit, rather simplicistic question written above)

[eruditus]

Now let's suppose Joe plays D&D3E, which he has never played before. Joe is presented with a massive list of choices: what race? what class? where to allocate skill points? The biggest obstacle to Joe's enjoyment of this is that Joe has no criteria to guide him. If Tommy the experienced gamer tells Joe, "Just play what you want", Joe is left with the worrying feeling of "How do I know what I want?"

Does all that make sense?

This makes a whole lot of sense to me.  This example is exacerbated by issues where we are trained to think that certain things matter... context, knowledge/information, and a broader understanding of certain topics.  However in many games, especially games like D&D these are antithetical to game play.  I was sitting and waiting to run my Artesia game (consequently a very "historicentric" game) when I heard some RPGA guys helping a fellow make a character for D&D, which he had never played before.  What do I hear from one such player is "oh, and don't bother with something like Knowledge: History.  It's pretty much useless."  And then the choir of them gave a resounding agreement.  My head nearly exploded.  I find it difficult (and I imagine many others do as well) to approach a game where your making a fictional character that you can relate to in a real way yet that character's make-up is built on principles without real world relavance, instead substituting gaminess/mechanical advantages.

[Frank T]

Yeah, newbies don't normally understand mechanics at first glance. That comes only as the game is played. The first *click* needs to come from the fictional content.

- Frank