Hi!

I'm trying to design a system for chargen that doesn't use rules. That is, there should be as little as possible use of numbers, readily defined traits etc. In particular, there should be no attempt at balancing characters based on level of skill, ads/disads etc.

However, there should still be a system - some kind of procedure, or set of procedures, that helps players create characters that work.

"Characters that work", in this case, means characters that:
- Are fun/interesting to play
- Have a motivation to interact with each other
- Have a motivation to interact with the environment
- Have strengths to help them overcome challenges
- Have weaknesses that can challenge them
- Have subplots associated with them

"Strengths" and "weaknesses" should be tailored to and/or define the story, so that they will by necessity become a part of play; there should be no strengths/weaknesses that are never relevant to the character.

There must be heaps of techniques for this. Some of them must have been formalized. I'm even sure I've read about all this stuff a zillion times, but right now - I'm drawing blanks. Can anyone give me pointers?

The most immediate thiing that springs to mind is HeroQuests "100 words" system for character creatuion. Its bounded and formal but allows a lot of freedom. Combined with the setting exposition stuff, this does tend to produce engaged characters to anhigher degree than normal, I believe.

There are big chunks of the Over the Edge char gen that ask you questions about your character with out using rules. They just ask you to decide what your character was like in the form of "What was the worst thing your character has ever done?"

Also I think it was Niphelhime a game from europe that asked you to create a portrait of your character by answering questions like what kind of vegetable is your character?

You should also look at books on acting that give advice on how to bring the character to the actor. None of them use rules in the sense we know them.

The Pool comes to mind. You write down a 50-word description and then select from this description a number of traits that define important stuff (strenghts, weaknesses, drives, whatever) about the character.

These traits will allow the player to put enphasis on the story on those important things for the character.

It is as simple as it gets and works quite nicely (if you are into narrativist play, anyway). I've been playing it for over a year now almost every week. :-)

Andreas

Thanks for pointers & reminders, everyone!

It seems to me that HeroQuest & the Pool will work just fine, if you're the type of person that has no problem coming up with a fun concept for a character. I'm that kind of person, but not everyone is, and some people just don't know how to make a playable character.

I've seen people design Over the Edge characters with the main trait "Boring", or use freeform narrative to design characters that are in a harmonious and stable situation, with no reason to go adventuring, with players that don't want me to put their character into trouble. These players ended up frustrated because nothing happened, or frustrated because I tried to make something happen.

I guess what I'm looking for is a recipe. Something that says "to make a character, take some of this, a bit of this, and a bit of this. Don't leave out any of this stuff unless you know what you're doing!" It should help players who don't really know what kind of character they want, or how to make that character.

Thor, your advice about books on acting sounds very good. You wouldn't happen to have any titles?

I just read some threads on simming (online freeform). Does anyone know if that hobby has any techniques for chargen at all?

matthijs wrote: However, there should still be a system - some kind of procedure, or set of procedures, that helps players create characters that work.

"Characters that work", in this case, means characters that:
- Are fun/interesting to play
- Have a motivation to interact with each other
- Have a motivation to interact with the environment
- Have strengths to help them overcome challenges
- Have weaknesses that can challenge them
- Have subplots associated with them

timfire wrote: Not to be snarky, but it sounds to me like you already have your answer.

All you have to do is tell the players the setting/situation, and then ask them to answer the above questions.

You could take a page from improv theater where participants have to develop characters quickly then react to the situation in character.

Define a situation, one that would show an aspect of character development. Play the other character (or characters, or have other play the other characters) in the scene and then go...

See Storyboard. As with some of the other suggestions above, characters are lists of traits. Storyboard also handles traits of varying breadth and detail well.

While not as good as an example as some of the other things mentioned, perhaps, check out Success. In it, if you don't want a fuly detailed character, you just do a physical description, and roll from there.

The trick is to have a system that supports a develop-in-play style of chargen, as well as allowing more "up front" chargen.

I like Buggy's idea.

What I'd do is to come up with a set of questions about the character. Then I'd transform them each into a micro scene. The player's reaction becomes his answer to the question. For instance, looking at "motivation to interact with the environment, the set up could be:

Your character is at home and very bored, where does he go?

Then, during the scene have NPCs or something dig into why they went there.

Do that for your critical questions, and you're good to go. Should be fun as well.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: What I'd do is to come up with a set of questions about the character. Then I'd transform them each into a micro scene. The player's reaction becomes his answer to the question. For instance, looking at "motivation to interact with the environment, the set up could be:

Your character is at home and very bored, where does he go?

Sorry I went to my library this after noon and didn't find anyhting that I could recomend. If you know any actors ask around or try a university library. You are going to be looking for something acedemic and more focused on improvisation. in the books I looked at today, I found a lot of stuff on how to make the lines come to life and little on how to become the character. Improv books might be a better guide. also I was in a smallish library and only found 5 books on acting.

Thor wrote: Sorry I went to my library this after noon and didn't find anyhting that I could recomend. If you know any actors ask around or try a university library. You are going to be looking for something acedemic and more focused on improvisation. in the books I looked at today, I found a lot of stuff on how to make the lines come to life and little on how to become the character. Improv books might be a better guide. also I was in a smallish library and only found 5 books on acting.

Panicky reaction: But but but! characters should be prepared before play starts, otherwise it's kind of impure!

Mike Holmes wrote: Just to display the difference between gaming cultures, I can't parse that sentence. I would have no idea what you mean by "impure" in that context, nor what "pure" would mean in a contrapositive case. No idea at all.

Having been mulling this myself in a mirror-opposite context (point-based chargen, where it's equally easy to get lost in the details as it is in freeform narrative chargen), I've come up with what I think are three essential questions to guide character creation:

1. What does your character do that's cool?
This can be anything from supernatural powers to martial arts skills to being an ordinary guy who sticks by his friends no matter what (e.g. Xander from Buffy); obviously it needs to be compatible with the other characters, setting, GM ideas for a story, etc. But the bottom line is, if your character can't do something cool, he/she will be boring to play.

2. What does your character do that gets him/her into trouble?
Anything from bad habits (getting drunk, getting into fights, stealing) to noble virtues (protecting the innocent, righting wrongs). Again, if your character never gets into trouble, boring.

3. Where does your character come from?
Can be as simple as "farm boy from a backwater planet who never knew his father" (hello, Luke) to a Heroquest style narrative rooted in a specific culture. Just so the character didn't pop out of nowhere -- having roots of some kind means having plot hooks, and gives some sense of what a character could logically be expected to know (how to farm, fish, survive in the desert) based on background, allowing you to flesh out the holes in the character conception as needed.

Or, in brief: Where are you from (#3)? Where are you going (#2)? How will you get there (#1)?

Multiverser and Legends of Alyria come to mind as examples of different approaches to the same core concept. The core concept is that character creation works thus: imagine the character you want to play, and then define him in game terms.

Multiverser

In character generation, the only limit to what a character can be is that the player and referee have to agree. Most people play themselves, which is what the game recommends; but there is plenty of room for the "not I" character, and character creation of such a character follows the same model: write down what it is that the character can do.

The book rules focus on getting as complete a character as you can; but the support materials we distribute have moved toward what we've called "On the Fly Character Generation". In this approach, it's assumed that the character can do far too many things to put on paper before play begins, and instead we should focus on those things the character does particularly well, and add the others when and if they're needed during play. Thus the first step is to look at the attributes and decide whether your character has remarkable levels of ability in any of these--top two percent of human ability. If so, we'll mark it down. If not, we'll figure that you might be above average or below average or near average, but whatever it is we'll worry about it if we need it.

After that, the question turns to "skills". No one can list all his skills. We can add skills later. Right now we will note

• Skills at which the character is very good, professional level or better;• Skills which themselves represent high facility in an area, such as cutting edge technology or training in acrobatics or martial arts;• Skills that are highly unusual, such as magic or psionics.

A good part of the thinking is that if you've been asked already to identify such skills, you're not going to turn around later and claim to be an expert in Kali or to have taken post graduate courses in genetic engineering or anything like that. If after a few game sessions, you say, "Well, yes, I can swim; I took a lot of YMCA classes for that", that's fine, we'll add swimming to your sheet.

So the short form is:

• Imagine what your character should be like;• Focus on his outstanding points;• Define those in game system terms.


Legends of Alyria

This time the general concept of who the character is comes from group consensus on a story map. Players will create the basic concept of the story, and then identify the characters who will be needed to bring this story to life. Gradually the characters will be fleshed out and parceled out, so that you make one of those characters your own. Again, the core concept is to figure out who this character is and define him in game system terms. In this case, there are some practical limitations on scores, such that one strong attribute prevents the other two from being as strong.

Character generation includes defining certain traits which are akin to character values in many ways. These can be used for and against the character in play.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

Sydney Freedberg wrote: 1. What does your character do that's cool?

2. What does your character do that gets him/her into trouble?

3. Where does your character come from?

M. J. Young wrote: The core concept is that character creation works thus: imagine the character you want to play, and then define him in game terms.

In this approach, it's assumed that the character can do far too many things to put on paper before play begins, and instead we should focus on those things the character does particularly well, and add the others when and if they're needed during play.

Legends of Alyria

Nice to see someone else appreciates Kieth Johnstone's book 'impro'.

Just how to integrate it into an approach for building and developing characters in rpgs is at first sight quite hard. The key factor is that under his approach to impro (which works, I discovered his book while studying drama and he has a lot of very deep insights into the nature of roles and characters) his central assumption is that characters build themselves. That is that they have an essential 'identity' of their own seperate from the actor/player which anyone can tap into. In effect they are archetypes (in the true jungian sense, not the rather lame way it is often used to suggest concepts such as character classes in some rpgs). The trick is to find ways that players can 'tap into' these pre-existing characters-in Impro Keith uses masks, which can be startlingly effective, but are probably not much help in an rpg game (and many people find the whole approach of trance mask work rather scary).

My suggestion would be to focus on mannerisms instead. This ties in with a lot of physical drama theory-that if we let our body express a character then everything else will follow-in effect the whole body becomes a mask. (for anyone reading this who has NOT read Impro, this will probably not be making much sense-sorry about that). Elsewhere in these forums I suggested that observing people in a busy setting like a mall or a club can help build a stock series of mannerisms and imaginary stories about people that could form a resource for character creation later, and it would be pretty essential to make the physical drama approach work.

Watch people-make up stories about them (fun, sad, dramatic, hilarious, etc) and keep some notes later of how they stand, how they use their hands, how they use their gaze and so on. These can form the basis of a physical/emotional 'map' for a character. Try replicating some of the mannerisms, holding their story briefly to mind perhaps (ok-so thats introducing a bit of method acting, but it helps). You should find that many players start to get deeper into character once they do this. Some may be too inhibited, as Keith suggests it is rather common a problem, so you might find some of the drama games he mentions handy. Then again-maybe thats all too much work for some people?

Anyway-it does work-its a method I use as a GM and have done for years with great success, and those players who have used it seem to find it can work too. The biggest problem is getting people to try.

Rather than just being a method of playing a character, you will probably find it actually helps to create caharcters too-forget skills, abilities and so on-it throws the 'stats' approach right out of the window. Instead you will find that it builds personalities, issues, relationships and stories.
For example, physical 'maps' that close off the body to the outside world (looking down/averting your gaze, holding hands close into the body, usually clasped, hunching shoulders and so on) will create shy, fearfull characters very rapidly. Put two such characters together and you might find they share secrets-but one with a ohysically aggressive map (intruding into personal space, staring at people, glaring, making fists and so on) and you have a power relationship centering around bullying. Similar effects can be had using voice pitch/volume and accents (though many people have a lot of trouble with this).

As a method of creating characters its biggest drawback is always going to be the timidity/disbelief factor-people are afraid to try, fearing it will reveal their own inability to do it, or their inner own feelings rather than a characters. Others just dont see how it can work. If these can be overcome it does provide an effective and dynamic technique for creating and playing characters that doesnt involve any sort of 'hard rule' or random generation/stats based approach. Just build the character from an emtional level first and let them tell their own stories from there.

I hope this has been of some use to you re Keith's book and characters in rpgs.

Peter,

I'm not sure how to work these things into a tabletop RPG. I'm going to dodge the whole issue of whether or not most players are willing to actually get up from their chairs and do physical portrayals. It might be possible, but right now I'm not in a situation where I can actually try it out. So aside from that:

Starting with emotion sounds like a really good idea. Instead of trying to build relationships and traits that will generate some kind of emotional resonance between player and character, you can go for the main point right away. "How do you feel about... character X?" "I hate him!" "And about... NPC Y?" "I distrust her, but am very curious about her." Then, later, you can add reasons: "Why do you hate X?" "He killed my father!" "What's up with you and Y?" "I saw her steal something from the store the other day, and she looked straight at me and walked out."

Mannerisms can also work. I'm a bit skeptical, though, because people can easily overact, leading to behaviour that's annoying to others, and that they themselves aren't able to keep up for long.

I agree that its hard to do full body activities in a table top game-I rarely do when GM'ing myself-though on occassion I have done such things as reach over to touch a player (in fact, white wolfs Giovanni Chronicles I uses this as an active techinque to create dislike of an NPC-they encourage the storyteller to keep pawing at people and getting too close-even licking one players hand). This is rare in how I employ the technique-mostly its a sit down affair from start to finish. Otherwise it tends to lapse into performance/drama more than rpg...
Most of your body language can be used sitting down anyway-head movement and hand movement being two of the biggest factors in non verbal communication, and just how you look at people (or not) being very powerfull.
If you want to look at two different (both both highly valid imo) drama techniques I would suggest checking out Meyerhold (biomechanics) vs Stanislavsky-the physical as starting point vs the emotional as starting point.
As I said earlier-the biggest stumbling block is that its hard to get people involved. Over dramatatic use is not really a big problem-its often a step towards toning it down later, but yes subtle use is more effective in the long run. I don't think that 'as is' there is a workable approach overall for non actors here-it would require more thought and experimentation I would think. I suggested it because (when used) it works, and because it does demonstrate the possible beginnings of a technique of character creation and play that is systemless and draws on Keith's impro work.
In practice for every person who tries the approach out, a dozen are either afraid or feel its too much acting and not enough like playing an rpg, so how much practical use one can get from it Im not sure. To do it well you also need to draw on levels of experience and practice I suspect most gamers are simply not interested in developing.

You could make the whole first session into a story about discovering who everyone is. Not only each characters discovering who the other characters are, but also each player discovering who his character really is. Put them players, with no characters (or more exactly "blank" characters ie, noone knows nothing about them) into a situation where they must socialize, and something happens, like someone dies, or a big red head locks the castle and says something threatening, or whatever your references are.
As they mix and match between them and with the NPCs, the characters will have to answer questions and therefore define themselves a little more. As each situation will require skills or techniques to solve, we'll discover that so and so is actually a rocket scientist. Or a king with a passion for locksmithing.

Make sure the situation you create will require strengths and skills later needed in your overall story, though.

Should be fun ;)

Perhaps the best way to get a handle on what is a Storymap in Alyria is to see how one is put together. I think that the thread Young Playtest Group First Storymap probably will give you a pretty solid idea of how we did it. I'm told that they're not terribly different from Sorcerer's relationship maps, of which I have read much but not yet had experience, but an essential difference (to my mind) is that with Alyria there is a single map for all the player characters, while my recollection of Sorcerer is that each character has his own map.

--M. J. Young

HeroWQuest offers a variation on the question/answer technique in the Clan Generation system, orriginaly from the computer game King of Dragon Pass. Assuming you'e going to play a clan based game, the GM takes the players through a history quiz defining the mythology of the clan, for example -

"During the civil war did your clan: A) Side with the previous king; B) Support the challenging prince; C) Remain neutral."

The answers to all these questions influence the current status, beliefs and customs of the clan.


Simon Hibbs

Simon,

that sounds like it could be integrated into a history-heavy game. Having a series of key historical events and asking how the character related to them as they occurred. This would also be a good way to teach the players about the background without having to give them "homework" to do - they would experience it more or less in character.

Wow, this thread is full of great ideas!

matthijs wrote: ...Having a series of key historical events and asking how the character related to them as they occurred. This would also be a good way to teach the players about the background without having to give them "homework" to do - they would experience it more or less in character.

Sydney:
I find it funny that you consider that a "downside". Actually, what you describe as the characters' ( and players') attachment to preserving stability within the Empire follows remarkably closely some examples of social/political movements in real-world history.
Robert

komradebob wrote: Sydney: I find it funny that you consider that a "downside". ....

Sydney,

interesting points on how immersion in the setting can create unexpected results. I'm running one game where I was envisioning some sort of alternative political history being created (it's set in Norway, where I live, during a key period of our history). However, the players are more interested in the supernatural part of the setting, and have written that into their characters, giving the campaign a very different focus.

The conclusion for chargen would be that the group should be very clear on what they're trying to achieve when using a setting focused pre-gaming process. Some groups might like to use Author stance, leading their group in a specific direction (so that they end up with the "proper" motivation at the start of the game); others might want to go immersionist and let the campaign premise be decided by the pre-game actions of the characters.