In part because Fallout 4’s thrown my perspective for a loop, I’m still tinkering with some of my arguments about Skyrim, so Altered Scrolls is on hold for a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be running a few tabletop-roleplaying-related posts. Below: tips for new players on making interesting character.
There’s absolutely no reason to be anxious about getting into tabletop gamesâ€"I say this as a man whose first major, campaign-running dungeon master was a scabrous miscreantâ€"but most new players are anyway. Everyone has a pretty identical fear-portfolio:
“The experienced players are going to be frustrated with me. I’ll look silly playing my over-the-top character. I’ll look boring playing my conservative character. People are going to laugh at me and then Jack Chick is going to jump out of a broom closet and kill me with a chainsaw.” These are rarely true, particularly if you follow my golden rule of tabletop gaming, which is: it’s almost always smarter to get your existing friends to play with you and all fumble around together than it is to put yourself in the hands of strangers. That evits about 99% of most peoples’ horror stories. The remaining 1% have to do with Jack Chick and chainsaws, but we live in an imperfect world.
That said, a common fear I run into with new players that isn’t just a confabulation of general unreasoning social anxietyâ€"that is to say, a fear that can be handled directly rather than just dulled through exposure–regards playing one’s character well. The idea of creating a fictional person and playing them as a kind of performance scares a lot of people. It especially scares them when they know they’re going to be playing with people who’ve been doing this for a while and have gotten pretty good at it. It doesn’t take long for these new players to learn it’s not as hard as it looks, but there’s definitely a hump to get over.
Here’s some advice I’ve picked up and formulated over the years about how to create your first fun, interesting RPG character. I’ve aimed this advice at D&D players, but with a little imagination you can adapt it to just about any kind of game or system.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s RPG Tales: Neat Characters Are Easier Than You’d Think”
Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.
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