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

Ron wrote:
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.)

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.

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.

Malcolm wrote:

Clyde wrote:
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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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?

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

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

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'

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.

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:

Ricky Donato wrote: and #2) teaching new players how to role-play

Ricky wrote:

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?

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

Frank wrote:
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.

- Frank

I think the statement that the character design is part of the game is correct and explains why new players struggle; it IS part of the game, and they do not know the rules of the game yet, and hence they have no idea what anything means.  I think going through the process of character design is essentially pointless and even harmful for new players.  If the purpose is to expose them to gaming, all they need is a piece to move, they do not have to have any engagement with it to start with, because the purpose is simply to get them to follow the form.  They should simply be given characters, or prompted to describe characters loosely and have them written by someone else.  Then after they heave learned to ride the bicycle, as it were, you can approach them about if they wish to alter or exchange the character or whatever.  This shouldn't need saying, but any local conventions you have about the introduction of new characters should be ignored for this purpose.

For people unused to RPG, the idea that you play, as in act, a particular given character is not alien, but in fact more familiar due to TV and film than the particular RPG device that you create and identify with a fictional character.  The question "who am I meant to be" comes easily, they have no reason to expect the GM to ask them who they want to be, they have no idea yet. 

As to funny accents and speaking in character more generally, I think it is very simply the case that this behaviour is potentially silly and embarrassing.  The best way to get people doing this is to let them see other people doing it, and that no-one is going to laugh or hold their words against them.  Once it becomes clear that this is an unremarkable element of play, if indeed it is so in your group, they will probably adopt it themselves.  Sometimes after a while I might ask someone to restate something in the characters voice if I felt they had seen enough to know what I meant and would be comfortable doing so.

Hi Gareth,

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Best, Ron

This is where I totally agree.  Character creation becomes so boring to me, because it is often done in a vacuum, without situation.  For char-gen to be interesting to me, I need to know why my character is important.  What is the story being told?  Why should I care about scene and character?

Hi, Gareth,

I'm in complete agreement with you. I found an article on teaching board games to new players. I see a lot of parallels between that article and what we've been discussing.

Here are some important passages:

When your approach for teaching the rules is ill devised, you degrade and sometimes ruin the experience for those playing with you. For this reason I suggest that everyone treat teaching the rules as a skill worthy of practice.

Using an incremental approach, you start at the top and work your way to the bottom very quickly covering only the basics, not the details—very much like an outline. Once you've explained the basics, you work your way through again fleshing out the "finer points". Most people don't have the patience to hear out or the ability to absorb a detailed, chronological approach from top to bottom.

Always set up the board and all its components first; you'll be using them extensively. Pay attention to how you organize the components. The way that the components are initially organized can improve the clarity of your explanation.
In Princes of Florence, for example, placing all of the bits used in the auction phase to the left of the scoreboard and all of the bits used in the action phase to the right makes it easier to grasp the structure of the game. This will become especially apparent when you mention that, "All of these items (showing the bits on the left) are bid on during the auction phase," and that, "All of these items (showing the bits on the right) are purchased during the action phase."

Using only a few sentences, boil the game down to a how and a why. In an article about teaching new games to new players Mike Petty calls the how, "what I do on my turn", and the why, "the scoring." In other words, the how and why are, respectively, the "fundamentals of game play" and "their relationship to winning".

The general objective, the means of attaining it, the scoring, and the game-ending conditions are key aspects of the rules for all games. As such, they are worthy of repetition. Cover them with a progressive layer of depth as you drill down into your explanation.

Be flexible, allowing inexperienced players to take back their moves when you determine that they're clearly not aware of a certain rule. Don't argue about whether or not you've already explained the rule, simply explain it now and allow them to take back their move. In general, I allow them to take back their move up to the point where the next player begins his turn.

Alright guys,

I'm with Gareth and Emily!

I think character creation can be a rewarding and fun experience for new players. If done well, it encourages players to invest in their characters and the game. However, new (all) players are keen to get on with the game and actually start playing. Alongside character creation, the players need an idea of the game's situation.

I think this is where Frank's Vampire game ran into problems, World of Darkness games are very situation oriented, especially Vampire where you need to know about the masquerade, camarilla, clans etc - before even getting to the mechanics. Without knowing this, your players created character with no links to the situation - mortal PCs in the WoD. It's a steep fluff learning curve. Accompanied by a steep crunch learning curve...

Pre-gens seem the obvious solution. Although I'm prejudiced generally against them. Pre-gens let you skip character creation and jump straight into play. It was really interesting to see which demos at the Gen Con Forge booth used pre-gens and which didn't. Of those I played, most used pre-gens (TMW, Cold City, Contenders, Perfect, 1001 Nights, Mob Justice, Covenant, Death's Door, the Roach). But some did not (Best Friends, Breaking The Ice, It was a Mutual Decision, Sorcerer). For me, I invested more in the demos in which I created the character and had fun doing so, but they did take longer to get going (Indeed I bought Breaking the Ice and IWAMD and I'm moving to Scotland to best  Gregor in a haggis hunt to win a free copy of BF). I think this is relevant because in demos, you have to assume whoever you're demoing for hasn't role-played before and still get the essence of the game across. So when character creation is fun, simple and quick it adds to the play experience. Yet pre-gens can be geared to exactly showcase the situation and/or mechanics for that first game. Then character creation makes much more sense.

Ricky's article on boardgames is useful up to a point as it helps convey how to run a boardgame, explain the rules, be organised and not boring. However, RPGs are not games in the sense that competition is the sole factor driving play. A game needs a win condition (and reward mechanics). RPGs also need a situation, a stronger social contract and some appreciation of narrative.  Explaining verbal boundaries is a lot more difficult than pointing to squares on a board.

I think where a lot of traditional RPGs fall down in character creation, as far as new players are concerned, is the number of choices and the fluff or crunch learning curve. Compare:
"Ok, you can be a warrior a rogue or a magic-user."
"You could be a fighter - best warrior, a barbarian - like a fighter but  more savage, a ranger - wilderness warrior type, a paladin a holy warrior a bit like a priest but your alignment has to be lawful-good, a monk...

"You're undead monsters living in the modern world."
"You're Vampires, you belong to one of seven clans, possibly a different offshoot clan but probably not, there's this group called the Camarilla who are vampires who secretly rule the world, apart from the stuff they don't rule which is generally ruled by other supernatural beasts such as...."

So I think character creation can be good for new players, but pre-gens for the first session are a good idea - especially with the proviso that players can make characters later if they like the game.

This was supposed to be a short post. Ah well.

Cheers,
Joe

I have a friend called Sean who has been roleplaying for years. Sean has an unerring capability of understanding how to make his character extremely effective within whatever ruleset we are playing. And by effective, I mean good at generating the rewards that the game offers.

However the downside of this is that whenever we play a new game, Sean takes ages to create a character and quite often will make two or three before he's happy with one. The rest of us tend to go with a PC who talks to us in terms of the background/premise.

In games where there is no clear connection between the background/premise and the rewards this makes it difficult for our group to function because Sean is generating lots of rewards whilst the rest of us are trying to do something else.

I think for character generation to be effective it needs to signal to the players what is important in terms of having an effect on the game. For example in My Life with Master, never start with weariness 3 because you'll find it rather hard to get anywhere, but putting 3 in self-loathing means you're likely to have horror revealed scenes. However making detailed references to the mechanics is not so good so it's best to constrain character generation so that players get characters of equal effectiveness. With MLwM you could even toss a coin to choose between 1 and 2 self-loathing.

Hi Ricky!

A poor first game can turn people off to having a second game; I'm sure we've all seen that happen. You didn't say explicitly whether that happened in your example, but the possibility was certainly there.