Over in Actual Play, Wilhelm said:

After everybody arrived and we navigated through the usual social chat, John handed us some character sheets and said "you should make some characters". And it was dead silence as people started scratching away. This despite the fact that John had explicitly written in the game text "generate characters collaboratively".

Yes, I should have lead the discussion of characters before the actual writing-stuff-down part. That's definitely going into the Director techniques section. I also admit that I was curious to see what would happen if I just passed out the sheets and stayed quiet. Fortunately, Wilhelm took the lead and got everyone talking.

On the one hand, I already knew exactly what character I was going to play, so I didn't feel like I had anything to discuss beyond telling the others about my character, which I'd do after writing him down on the sheet. On the other hand, if we'd discussed character ideas more extensively beforehand, I might've had some specific motivations or goals in mind when we started playing, which would've helped engage my character in the story more. On the third hand, it was useful for playtest purposes to have a character with no particular goals or motivations to see what happens.

Quite so, Phil.

And it turned out that "what happens" is, you pile up a ton of story material for session two. Your character is at the heart of the action now, with all kinds of juicy directions to go. How badly does he want to be a human? Will he serve the Witch no matter what? I can't wait to find out.

philaros wrote: On the third hand, it was useful for playtest purposes to have a character with no particular goals or motivations to see what happens.