RPG Character Creation: Case Studies

I've recently started an interesting campaign with my brother. It's interesting because I'm the GM and he's the only PC. I've never done a one-on-one before, and I think it has a lot of potential, especially if the PC is up to the task of, say, playing more than one character, or playing the both the hero and the anti-hero at the same time. Unfortunately, my brother wasn't up for that and wanted to keep it simple. In fact, the reason we decided on this structure was for educational purposes only: he wanted to get an up-close view of how I master a game, right from working with the PCs during character creation, to pulling together all the wild loose ends of a story into an epic conclusion.

Here, I'm going to tell you about the character creation process we went through as further elaboration on the subject matter of my post about creating complex and compelling characters entitled "RPG Character Creation: Depth".

It must be decided, before any detailed character creation begins, in which genre and setting the campaign takes place. Why? Well, it might be a topic for another post… but, while basic character concepts can fit into any setting, just like basic plots can fit into any genre, suffice it to say that the finer details and flavour aspects of the character inform decisions on the basic level. In roleplaying games, there’s a big difference between a character who wields a sword versus a bow versus a magic wand or staff.  Envisioning your character as using a lightsaber or a greatsword changes how your character concept fits the visage.

We chose to do a Sci-Fi campaign in the Halo setting as per my brother's request. Pretty cool! It has potential - more so than I first thought, once I read through the Halopedia.

He also decided he wanted to play an ODST, and wanted a straight forward military-style campaign. I had misgivings about a bland mission-after-mission kind of campaign, so assured him that we'd do what he wanted while secretly planning for intrigue and plot twists. I had further misgivings that the characters in a modern army would be all too same-same and equally as bland, kinda like... if every PC in your D&D campaign decided to play a Paladin? So I had to start asking questions, probing for complexity and consequence.

I asked about relationships first. My go-to. He decided he didn’t have any siblings and that his parents were dead. And he didn’t have any friends in school, no wife or girlfriend, and no children, and didn’t mention anything about mentors, or aunts or uncles. Well! If you read my last post about character creation, you can see how he was heading straight for a ‘vacuum’ character here.

Here’s how I think as a GM: I want material to create a story with, just like how a painter wants colours to create mood with, a journalist wants facts and interviews to create articles with, or a composer wants melodies and lyrics to create songs with. The material in roleplaying games consists of the character backstories, the plot and setting, and the genre conventions. The former is the responsibility of the players, the second largely the GM, and the latter a result of the combined creativity of the history of fiction in that genre.

So, it’s problematic when I work with characters that are composed of less material rather than more. I only have control over the GM piece, and none of us have control over how stories have evolved over the millennia of human existence. I need my PCs to play along and provide some tall tales and awesome anecdotes.

Let me give you an example… If your character doesn’t have any loved ones, how am I supposed to create a scene that signifies the end of the saga, where, after a long period of traumatic events in distant lands, you finally come home and embrace your family and friends? [The Odyssey and LotR] If you don’t have any loved ones, how am I supposed to create a scene that propels the story forward and strikes at the heart of the character and reader alike, where you come home only to find that danger has followed you and your house and loved ones have been destroyed? [Gladiator, Star Wars: A New Hope] How are either of us supposed to create scenes that portray our humanity and instill a sense of pathos if we have nothing in which to invest regarding that aspect?

So I had to start asking more questions of my brother, searching for something that made more sense, or an underlying factor that constituted a theme for development of his character. It went a little something like this. My thoughts in italics.

Often times the way in which things happen gives a clue as to how me may have reacted or felt...

Q: How come you didn’t have any friends in school?

A: I was just a loner. Not interesting, but fair.

Q: How does that affect your performance in the military right now?

A: I still keep to myself, but in some ways it helps me focus on doing my job. I follow orders extremely well. Great. So not only do you have no friends from your childhood, you don’t have any friend in adulthood either!

Q: Why did you join the military anyway?

A: It just seemed like a good choice after school.

Q: No… family history of military participation? Or like… a terrible thing that happened that made you want to protect people?

A: No, I don’t think so. Okay....

Q: How would your character react if you were ordered to do something terrible?

At this point, we delved into a larger discussion about morality and how it manifests in characters. I was under the impression that most character are not ‘Manchurian candidates’ and will question when something heinous is happening around them. My brother argued the opposite, that a character could be like that and you could still make a story out of it, but then admitted he was playing devil’s advocate. We agreed, then, that his character did indeed have a moderate sense of morality. While that would be good for me to pose interesting decisions for his character later on, I still wasn’t satisfied with the rest of it, having no theme. I tried one last avenue.

Q: How did your parents die?

A: Freak accident.

Well! What I thought might have been an opportunity to develop some motivations, not unlike the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents, or anything interesting at all, not unlike Harry Potter’s parents, became another dead end. Not much to say about a freak accident other than that you were sad about it. But then it hit me.

Chaos.

The totally unexpected and uncontrollable manner of the death of his parents constituted chaos, and he had come to fear it and hate it. And what’s the cure for fear of chaos? Order. Military precision, organization, and regimentation. THAT’S why he joined the military, and that’s why he’s so good at following orders or otherwise doing a stellar job of being the UNSC’s pawn.

What a great theme, interesting and unique (I’d say)! But the point is that there’s a theme there for development, like a trunk waiting to grow branches. Now we can ask a whole series of questions regarding theme and figure out how that manifests itself in the character’s behaviour, and that will give us clues as to how the character will react to certain circumstances, which will give me, the GM, an idea of how to create excellent scenes and stories! 

That's the Fiction Life.