Character Creation and You
September 20th, 2010
Hello and welcome once again to Dark Designs. As those of you who specialized in divination already know, this is the first day of Character Creation Week, the week that, surprisingly, is devoted to character creation, of all things. I thought I’d take a closer look at character creation from the perspective of both a designer and a DM.
Character creation is arguably the most important part of your game. For one thing, your method of character creation goes a long way towards setting the tone of your campaign. The easiest example of this comes with the point-buy system, where they specifically have different “levels” of point-buy based on the tone you want to set for your campaign. Want the PCs to be super-bad-ass? Better go with 32 points. Looking to make the PCs the underdog in every fight? Cut those points way down, and make your players see that even having a single 14 makes them lucky (by which I mean specialized—point-buy obviously has no luck involved).
But it goes deeper than that, as well. If you roll dice, rather than use point-buy, it’s a signal to your players that this game is going to be a come-what-may sort of affair, and they shouldn’t be expecting you to fudge too many rolls. If they die, they’re dead, and if they don’t like their character, tough. It implies that the game will tend more towards “realism” (excepting the obvious wizards, dragons, and the like) rather than narrativism.
Using my own tarot-based character creation (in The Book of Beginnings, for those of you who haven’t downloaded it and taken a look yet), especially if you go all-out with the flavorful ‘tarot reading’ aspect of the creation system, indicates that the game is going to be highly narrative, and will probably derive a lot of its plot-points and story arcs from your characters’ back-stories, goals, dreams, contacts, etc., etc., etc.
You can get a similar result with our Choose-Your-Own-Adventure character creation (also conveniently located in The Book of Beginnings), if you have the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure section filled with potential plot-hooks and other information exploitable by the DM as a storytelling device. Alternatively, the DM can send a very strong signal about what his campaign is going to be like if he makes a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure adventure which forces the PCs to deal with one or more major plot elements of your campaign. For example, suppose your campaign’s tone is grim and dark, and your plot is about a bloody war that seems like it has no end in sight. By having a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure character creation which sticks players in the middle of that war, and shows how it’s been raging around them their entire lives, you’re going to send a pretty strong message about what may be going on in the campaign.
Obviously these are all very strong generalizations. For one thing, a DM might not know of any character creation method besides dice rolling, or he or she may not consider the potential messages he or she is sending with their choice of character creation. Really, though, the examples aren’t meant so much as a way of reading into your DM’s campaign through his or her choice of character creation method. The point in calling all of these to your attention was to show DMs (and prospective DMs) the way in which they can use their choice of character creation method as a tool to enhance the story and flavor of their game.
Now, I’m not a big Hollywood writer type. I haven’t studied all the fancy terms and principles for writing (and telling) a good story. But I do read Mark Rosewater’s column, and, as anyone who’s read an article of his knows, he’s a big Hollywood writer type who knows all those fancy terms and principles, and occasionally shares some of them with his readers. Besides, this one’s a little intuitive (though, in my experience, something few DMs really spend much time thinking about). Basically, everything in your adventure (or movie, or book, or short story, or webcomic, or whatever) should contribute to the kind of story you want to tell. Anything that runs counter to your intended goal, or just kind of wanders off in its own direction, is serving to distract your players from the themes and stories that you want to explore.
Now, I have a lot of caveats and corollaries to that in particular paragraph, so give me a sec before you start firing up the ol’ e-mail inboxes, okay? Firstly, I understand that sometimes you specifically want to have a secondary storyline interspersed with the first in order to distract the audience and keep them from getting “burned out” on the main storyline (by the way, if you weren’t aware of that practice, and suddenly start to notice it on basically every TV show you watch, I’m sorry. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be unseen. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t ruin the magic too much for you). Games can have this too, having “filler” or “side” adventures which don’t connect to the main plot of the campaign, especially in campaigns that are designed to be more “intense” (particularly dark, particularly ‘epic,’ that sort of thing) and players are in more danger of becoming resistant to the kind of tension and energy that you’re trying to create.
Additionally, to those of you who are still furrowing your brows in displeasure at my use of the phrase “distract your players from the themes and stories that you want to explore,” I get where you’re coming from, just give me a second to explain. No—will—will you please just—seriously—YES, I understand that only a few weeks ago I specifically said that any DM who talks about having a story to tell should set alarm bells off in your head. Let me explain why the two aren’t as at-odds as they appear.
Really, what it comes down to is that I misspoke back in that article about pre-mades. Or perhaps just over-generalized. When you get right down to it, DMs with a story to tell tend to be either the best DMs or the worst ones, without much room in between. The bad ones railroad, put the spotlight on NPCs (or the oft-maligned DMPCs), and essentially use their position as DM to hold the party as a captive audience while engaging in the storytelling equivalent of self-gratification: telling the story he or she wants to tell, without regard to what the players want. By contrast, the good DMs who want to tell a story keep the spotlight on the PCs (and enhance that spotlight by working in elements of each player’s character into the story in question), and focus their storytelling efforts on evoking feelings and emotions in their players. Further, this latter group’s form of “storytelling” is far more open-ended, and can only loosely be called storytelling anyway. While the former plans whole stories beginning to end, with only marginal wiggle-room for the PCs to deviate from the script, the latter really only plans situations, and then prepares for various ways the PCs might choose to deal with those situations.
Getting back to the point I had before I got side-tracked defending the use of storytelling as a DM will find that character creation is an excellent tool for setting the mood (against myself from last month, no less), DMs who want to share a story with their players (that reminds me, as an aside, if you’re a DM interested in sharing a story with your group, be sure that your players are actually interested in the kind of story you want to tell. Let them know the tone and some of the major themes in advance, either directly, by just saying “the tone will be this, and the themes will be these” or indirectly, with some sort of teaser statement, like you might get from a movie trailer. If your players don’t get excited by your pitch, you should probably look for a different story to tell, because unless your players are engaged your storytelling will be kind of wasted).