I was doing some noodling recently with my various game books and I realized... possibly 'yet again'... that for any given system my 'method' of creating a character is vastly different.

The key point that set it off for me was working on a 'GURPS' character. Even with stupidly high point totals I am fully capable of going completely off the rails when picking both advantages AND skills.  So for me to make a GURPS character the process is subtractive. I wind up writing down everything I want, then slowly paring it down to what I need to make the character work.

Compare this to how I would approach, say, a WoD character (any edition, even the non-WoD WW games...) where I pick out the things I want first and then look at my left over points and decide what to add that would make the character interesting.

Compare this to D&D, where I essentially grab a race and class combo (very often the same ones) and pick whatever feats are important and I'm done... except for the invariably long winded and slightly twisted take on 'who this guy is' that has absolutely no bearing on the mechanics at all.  Then I buy equipment.

Or Palladium, where I invariably start with a concept then build the character to match as closely as possible.


The point? I dunno, I just thought I'd open up a new topic to discuss. IF there is a point its that each game design alters how I approach character creation, often in very meaningful ways.  Sometimes (as with GURPS) this can illustrate things that I view as weaknessess of the system in question, or highlight strengths.  I might suggest that they might even provide clues to my psychology, how i utterly divorce my D&D characters from the mechanics that allow them to interact with the world around them.  Maybe that is relevant.

Or I could be talking out my yellow furred ass....

Quote from: SpikeI might suggest that they might even provide clues to my psychology, how i utterly divorce my D&D characters from the mechanics that allow them to interact with the world around them. Maybe that is relevant.

Character creation is probably the biggest reason I prefer the systems I do.  I've learned to accept that I'm much more creative when my desires are divorced from the mechanics.  The characters are more interesting to me because they are not something I would actively pursue.  I'm not trying to force them into a box of my preconceived notions of archetypical roles.  Random character creation gives me the feeling of discovering who the character is.  Lifepath gives me the feeling of discovering where the character is going.  Point buy pulls out my inherent min-maxing nature or an archetypical clone.

For me it's always concepts first. and numbers later. I never start with a set of numbers, or some skill set in mind.

The system does play a little into what I do-but mostly because making a character that fits in my D&D game differs from the sort of cats that I'd use in Shadowrun. But that's more of a setting issue than a real mechanics issue.

I think it's very individual. For example, last night we began the playtest of my new system. For character generation, we had the choice of "random roll with some rearrangement" (like swaing Attributes around) or else "point-buy." The point-buy got you slightly less points than would average random rolls.

One player chose "random rolls with rearrangement", a second chose "point buy", while a third also went random, but to select skills went through the list and crossed out the ones he didn't want. This last was also the only one not to have a name and personality for his character by the end of the session (he came late, but he still had more time than the other two had taken to do everything).

It's very individual, I think.

Quote from: Spike..................
Or Palladium, where I invariably start with a concept then build the character to match as closely as possible.

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Thats funny - thats the very approach I take with most of the GURPS characters that I make - whether its an NPC or PC.  My guiding thought is usually a character concept and the phrase "Would this make sense for the character the way that I picture her (or him) ?"

Spike - try making the GURPS characters the same way you do your Palladium characters.

- Ed C.

I gotta admit, a lot of methodology to character generation depends on my whims at the time. Sometimes I have a character concept in mind and create to that idea and other times I just roll randomly and then make something that sensibly fits the die rolls.

Why do people think I'm looking for answers or help when I post stuff? :confused:

I've made GURPS characters by trying fill a concepts shoes before>  I wind up with 200 skills and 20 or 30 advantages, and potentially hundreds of points over, then I trim it down to the necessities.

I could, and probably will, launch a critical analysis of why various character creations systems work the way they do for me, at which point I would expect a critique.  

for me, points-buy ends up with very concept driven, but optimized, character types.  to use the gurps example, it would be like spike's experience.  add, add, add, whoops!  too many points.  sometimes a specific disadvantage or two would be part of the concept, but it's all very focused.

OTOH, i prefer random chargen.  i like to figure out what i can do with x set of stats (like d&d) or y career path & skills (a la traveller).  probably one of the reasons i like traveller best!  coming up with a character backstory & stuff from the usual 4 or 5 term lifepath and the wacky skillset that results is half the fun.

My group mostly use random chargen these days, so we can't have concepts before rolling the dice.  We roll, see what we have, and then work out a concept.

Thus come Tuesday I am playing a 45 year old French journalist in 1901 Paris, which was not at all the concept I came to the table with (I mistakenly thought Malefices was a point buy system and hadn't realised it was random).

I don't have a fixed approach for character creation. Sometimes it's a fancy fluffy concept of that I'm curious of how to builld and play that, sometimes it's just blunt pragmatism à "We don't have a mage yet, so just look how I can build an efficient one", sometimes it's an mechanical idea à "what about someone who's a summoner, a gang leader _and_ a rigger - that would be a shitload of mooks to throw into combat!"

Generally, I'm not very personality/background/fluff driven. I consider every character who needs more than five sentences to be described as overtly bloated and strife hard to keep it at three sentences at most.

I usualy start with a very basic concept and let the mechanics "color it in".

I'm loving Aces & Eights random/point-buy/lifepath character generation system right now.  It gives a little bit of what I like out of each system.