Several of my friends, and I, particularly enjoy the act of character creation. There is a tendency to like it more for crunchier systems, which I suppose isn't all that surprising. Often a game book will be bought, torn apart (figuratively) have something like 30 or 40 PCs generated, and only played as an afterthought.. Is this a typical behavior that any of you are familiar with?

At a very surface level it appears to be a Gamiest., and sure enough the first few generations of PC turned out always tend to be something along the lines of "look! I managed to get this guy up to an average damage roll of 78!". The thing is it usually keeps going from there to things like "look, I built a mermaid/werewolf/being-of-pure-light". This sort of system stretching exercise strikes me as being the heart of isolationism. The catch is that its not being done in game, its happening on a personal, individual level..

I'm hoping that someone a little more familiar with the GNS theory can help me nail this down, so I can understand my style of play a little bit better.

Generally speaking, there are tons of reasons why someone would like character creation. There is no direct coorelation between liking chargen and GNS.

Now, if the question is why you like chargen... that's kinda hard to decipher over the 'net. Saying "look! I managed to get this guy up to an average damage roll of 78!" or "look, I built a mermaid/werewolf/being-of-pure-light" sounds like Gam, but again, it's hard to tell over the 'net.

GNS only applies to actual instances of play (usually over time). I do not know if character creation qualifies as "play". Consider, would the above RPG-related scenario not be like a person who likes carving chess pieces trying to figure out what type of chess player he is based on that?

Hello,

There is no real point to picking any and every aspect of role-playing, especially in isolation from a reward system, and saying "G, N, or S?"

I recommend examining the Big Model, without any particular reference to diversity within the Creative Agenda category, and asking yourselves questions about how character creation is used in that context, for your group.

People who do this will discover that Vincent Baker and I fully agree on every aspect of role-playing that we've written or spoken about, respectively.

Best,
Ron

It sounds to me like you've made a game out of character creation.

It's not actually a role playing game at that point, and so the application of creative agendum would be different. However, it appears to some degree to be gamist--you're showing off how well you were able to manipulate the system in producing something new and different.

That's not to say that everyone who makes a game out of character creation would be doing it to show off what they can do. I'd say there's insufficient data for that at this point.

--M. J. Young

I'm not sure why people are looking at character generation as if it's a before play activity. For something like D&D, it's just one long act of character generation, earning your way to level 20. For other systems which use a similar process, its the same. And it's all play.

I'd be interested to know if the giblfiz's group sits down as a group to make PC's. Certainly that's what our group used to do...the talking as we did so no different really from planning out how to assault a base, for example, in actual play. We were all working together on resources.

Even if they didn't sit down together, I'd be interested to hear more about that "Look what I made!" moment. I don't clasify a GM writing up notes all by himself before a session as non play, once it hits that moment of sharing. Plenty of games require prep during the session, before you can show "what you made" to the group. Even dice rolls and adding bonuses count as that sort of prep.