{"id":29500,"date":"2015-11-21T04:57:30","date_gmt":"2015-11-21T09:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29500"},"modified":"2015-11-21T04:57:30","modified_gmt":"2015-11-21T09:57:30","slug":"rutskarns-rpg-tales-neat-characters-are-easier-than-youd-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=29500","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn’s RPG Tales: Neat Characters Are Easier Than You’d Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

In part because Fallout 4’s thrown my perspective for a loop, I’m still tinkering with some of my arguments about Skyrim<\/em>, so Altered Scrolls<\/em> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s absolutely no reason to be anxious about getting into tabletop games\u00e2\u20ac"I say this as a man whose first major, campaign-running dungeon master was a scabrous miscreant<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac"but most new players are anyway. Everyone has a pretty identical fear-portfolio:<\/p>\n

“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.<\/i>” 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.<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

That said, a common fear I run into with new players that isn’t <\/i>just a confabulation of general unreasoning social anxiety\u00e2\u20ac"that is to say, a fear that can be handled directly rather than just dulled through exposure–regards playing one’s character well.<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

a.) Like X, But Y<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let’s take the pressure off for a first character. There’s zero shame in drawing inspiration\u00e2\u20ac"even heavy inspiration\u00e2\u20ac"from an existing book, videogame, or movie character. But there is <\/i>a catch.<\/p>\n

You shouldn’t actually be <\/i>that character. Just like <\/i>that character.<\/p>\n

Even if you’re thematically identical, change the name and appearance and backstory a little. Riffs on the same concept are fine\u00e2\u20ac"a mustache instead of a beard, a shipwreck instead of a house fire, a doctorate instead of a knighthood\u00e2\u20ac"but there should be small, firm lines of separation between the inspiration and your take on it. Why bother? Well, a lot of subtle reasons\u00e2\u20ac"not the least of which being that your friends, who are probably playing characters with unfamiliar and untested names, might be less than enthusiastic to find they’re sharing their quest with The Doctor. But the most important reason is that pinning your character visibly to another doesn’t make things easier for you. You don’t want to cross the line of can be <\/i>like an established character to must be <\/i>like an established character; that’s not a player aid, that’s baggage.<\/p>\n

Sooner or later you’ll be in the middle of a game and you’ll get an idea for something really cool\u00e2\u20ac"some interesting action for you to take, some shocker in your backstory, some intriguing relationship\u00e2\u20ac"and you’re going to want to have room to follow that idea wherever it goes without you and your fellow players getting tripped up with, “Wait, Kratos wouldn’t adopt a shelter dog” or whatever. Saddling yourself with an existing name and appearance is kind of like getting your favorite band in high school tattooed on your forehead: the sentiment is genuine, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel like you can move on and explore new things.<\/p>\n

You may even discover a few key points of deviation through:<\/p>\n

b.) Pregaming<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a good one if you’ve never done any kind of roleplaying or improvisation before. When you get right down it, any RPG session is just question-and-answer. The question is, “when this <\/i>happens, what does your character do?” Your answer is, well, whatever your character does. What you might be anxious about is that you’ll get to one of these questions and you won’t know the answer\u00e2\u20ac"or at least, you won’t be able to decide what the answer is as smoothly and gracefully as you’d like (real talk: even really good roleplayers need to step back sometimes and think, shit, what WOULD my character do here?<\/i>). Alternately, people worry that the sum of their decisions made on the fly won’t amount to one cohesive character, a not-unreasonable (if overstated in terms of consequences) concern for newbies. It’s a pretty straightforward anxiety, and there’s a pretty straightforward solution: pregaming.<\/p>\n

Write up or find a list of hypothetical choices and figure out, ahead of time, how your character feels about or would respond to each. Take your time, write down your answers, revise them if you come to another question and change your mind. Think of these situations as something like an animator’s keyframes: you can use them as reference points to extrapolate responses to a very wide range of scenarios once you’re actually playing. The questions don’t need to be particularly relevant to the setting the game takes place in; in fact, putting your character in a completely alien environment can be a good way to highlight interesting and non-obvious quirks of personality, and facing your characters with choices similar to those you personally face might help you get a handle on them.<\/p>\n

Here are some good sample questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Would your character enter into a relationship if they knew it wouldn’t go anywhere long-term? What’s the smallest thing that could get them to end<\/em> a relationship?<\/li>\n
  2. Does your character choose the fastest, the easiest, or the most precise solution?<\/li>\n
  3. Dog or cat?<\/li>\n
  4. Better to arrive half an hour late or half an hour early to a party?<\/li>\n
  5. Cook, microwave, order out? What would be in your character’s shopping cart at a modern grocery store<\/li>\n
  6. Would they plead innocent to a crime if they thought they could get away with it? What if it was only a very slim chance?<\/li>\n
  7. What sin is your character most proud of not <\/em>having?<\/li>\n
  8. Your character comes to a gambling table. What’s the most they’d bet?<\/li>\n
  9. Who would your character vote for in your region’s next election?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    c.) Get Serious<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In his memoir Kitchen Confidential<\/i>, author and chef Anthony Bourdain goes to some lengths to capture a real person referred to as Adam Last-Name-Unknown. ALNU is just about every distasteful and disreputable trait rolled into one poxy cook: a louche, lazy, larcenous, lecherous, ill-tempered boor prone to not-so-petty swindles and antisocial behavior. He’s a backstabbing weasel, a pathological liar, and an opportunistic criminal unable to hold down prolonged enough employment to break up his essentially uninterrupted lifelong bender. You can extrapolate pretty much everything about who this guy is and what he gets up to from these points of data, with one solitary exception: he is obsessed with making bread. He may constantly flake out on work in an industry where that’s viewed as the worst kind of depravity, but he’ll sure as hell call in to make sure somebody feeds his starter. And his finished product? It tastes delicious. <\/i>The best bread the author’s ever tasted.<\/p>\n

    Everyone out there is serious about something. <\/i><\/p>\n

    Remember the next time you play a bard that to your character, music probably isn’t just a tool<\/i>, good for greasing the occasional orc brouhaha and helping the thief concentrate on lock-picking. Your character didn’t become a musician by writing a number on a character sheet, they became a musician through countless hours of finger-bleeding spine-cramping practice with an instrument probably worth a considerable percentage of their family’s yearly income. Music is important <\/i>to them. They take it seriously, and in your own way, you should too. That doesn’t mean you need to research your character’s instrument and musical pedigree\u00e2\u20ac"although that’s not a bad idea, if you’ve got the time and wifi\u00e2\u20ac"but you should at least think about it the way your character would.<\/p>\n

    What kind of music do they like? What kind of music do they hate<\/i>? Where were they when they heard the song that changed their life and who played it\u00e2\u20ac"a local minstrel? A relative? An exhausted-but-obliging troubadour? What opportunities did they pass by to play music, and do they ever have second thoughts?<\/p>\n

    Obviously, bards are just a convenient example. Figure out whatever your character can’t stop thinking about\u00e2\u20ac"chances are it will be whatever your character’s good at, but not necessarily. If you can get to the point where you can articulate or at least bullshit a strong opinion about it, your character will be that much more believable.<\/p>\n

    d.) Zigs and Zags<\/strong><\/p>\n

    A truism of writing is that mistakes can be valuable\u00e2\u20ac"mistakes are the one things you can’t plan for, so that’s when inspiration really starts flowing. A similar principle in roleplaying is to create characters who have one totally die-roll random, obviously incongruous, or mechanically underwhelming aspect to them; all three force you to eschew cliches by putting you on something besides the most obvious path.<\/p>\n

    Example: a player in a D&D campaign rolls a random name from a table\u00e2\u20ac"not realizing that it would roll names from all <\/i>racial groups. As a result, the name suggested for an elf sorceress is more appropriate for a dwarf fighter. Rather than try again, the player thinks, well, wait a minute\u00e2\u20ac"what kind of elf would have a dwarf’s name? That’s weird. That demands explanation. Soon the player has a backstory and even a few related personality traits they would never have simply invented, but that follow logically and memorably from their new background.<\/p>\n

    Another example: imagine you were playing a Western game and rolled a a gunfighter with two good stats and one bad one. The logical thing to do is to put the good stats into aim and toughness and the bad stat into something like knowledge or social skills. Doing so would give you about a thousand cowboys from a hundred movies. The most illogical thing\u00e2\u20ac"putting the bad stat into aim\u00e2\u20ac"would give you the Kid from Unforgiven. <\/i>The second most poorly optimized\u00e2\u20ac"putting the bad stat into toughness\u00e2\u20ac"would give you Doc Holliday. <\/i>In a game that lets you choose to be ideal, choosing not to be immediately puts you in exciting and unusual territory.<\/p>\n

    e.) The Outsider Principle<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Broadly speaking, drawing from historical examples, any given community is going to be disrupted by a full-grown adult wandering off and leaving forever. Particularly when half a family’s next generation dies before 17, every able-bodied worker and potential breeding partner is precious. There is going to be a lot of social pressure directed not at any one person in particular, but at everyone<\/i>, invisibly, all the time, to stay put. People who don’t stay put are going to be labeled as vagrants, bandits, perverts\u00e2\u20ac"just generally people you don’t want to be<\/i>. This won’t need to be explicitly communicated to anybody; it will be a fact of life.<\/p>\n

    Even so, your character apparently didn’t listen. You left your community and you probably aren’t looking for another one. You’ve eschewed a socially favored and probably comfortable position in favor of constant danger and uncertain reward. Not many people do this. Why would you?<\/p>\n

    Probably because you’re weird.<\/i><\/p>\n

    Maybe you’ve got strong, iconoclastic opinions that made you butt heads with your people. Maybe you changed religions or alignments or got corrupted by outside influences. Maybe you’re just the kind of person who prefers silent weeks of marching with other antisocial camping mercenaries to yet another interminable fucking sewing circle. Maybe you like being in nature. Maybe\u00e2\u20ac"perhaps even probably, given the abundance of historical and modern examples\u00e2\u20ac"you struggle with some mental health issue your community doesn’t understand. It’s worth remembering that among adventurers, “normal” people are just about the least normal and abundant quantity.<\/p>\n

    When I’m setting out to create a new D&D character my rule of thumb is this: if I can figure out why this person couldn’t just marry somebody nice, work a field, raise a family, pay taxes, and hop into a humble grave, I’ll have a pretty good start on figuring out everything else.<\/p>\n

    All this should give you something to think about. Now settle down for this next piece of advice, because it’s important:<\/p>\n

    f.) Relax<\/strong><\/p>\n

    You don’t have to do any of this stuff. You may have more fun and feel less nervous if you prepare first, but you don’t have to. You know why?<\/p>\n

    Because roleplaying games are fun and they are safe<\/i>. Worrying about not looking cool while playing D&D with your friends is, well, you won’t<\/i>. That’s not what you sat down for. So when you’ve done all your preparation, whatever seemed appropriate or you had time for, and you’re getting ready to play\u00e2\u20ac"just remember to take it easy on yourself and do what comes naturally. That this will probably improve your roleplaying is beside the point.<\/p>\n

    Next time: Turns Out Running Games Is Also Easy.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}