Umbral Echoes Blog

This is talking about character designs in roleplaying games, and here I mean actual games where you take on and play a role, so not games like World of Warcraft.  An experience/level system does not a roleplaying game make.

Creating a character is one of the defining parts of roleplaying games, and as a player it’s the first thing that you do after acquainting yourself with the rules (or sometimes even before that!).  Your character is the extension of yourself in the game world, the one and only tool you have to interact with the story.

I think there are as many different ways of creating a character as there are players who create them, if not more.  But there are some general themes people tend to follow.  There is no best way, except the way that is best for you personally.  As for me, I tend to use many different methods, depending on how inspiration strikes.

Some people just play themselves in a game.  The character’s personality is the player’s personality.  The primary benefit is that you don’t even have to pause to think what your character would say or do in any given situation; your character reacts as you would.  There is no qualm of, “Would my character be upset by this?  Would s/he like this person?”  Especially for many people new to roleplaying, this is the easiest way to get into it.  You’re playing the role of… yourself.  On the downside, the line between in-character and 0ut-of-character is easy to blur.  Someone insults your character, it’s easy to take it as an insult to yourself.  Your character fails, it feels more like you’ve failed.  So while I might recommend this for people new to roleplaying, I’d always recommend it stressing those warnings.

Some players take inspiration from other sources when creating a character.  “I think Spike is really awesome, so I’m going to create an Exalted version of him.”  This is very common, and has a similar benefit as the “playing yourself” method of character design.  You’re already familiar with the character, so you have a better idea of how they should react when presented with any given situation.  Personally, I like melding different sources and adding a twist, to create something my own.

Some players create something entirely from scratch, or from different inspiration altogether — maybe a song, or a line from a poem.  This is probably the most challenging method of character creation.  You write the background, and you try to get inside the character’s head, but really until you’re playing the character, it’s hard to get a handle on it.  But eventually, this is where characters can take on a life of their own — where, in thinking as the character might, a thought or line comes into your head that never would have, otherwise.  Of course, sometimes people who successfully pull this off end up playing the same character over and over again, because they like their creation so much.  When you create something awesome, it’s easy to get attached to it, which runs many of the same risks as playing yourself does.

I personally tend to use a mesh of the previous two paragraphs.  I’d be interested to hear other people’s takes on how they go about it.  In my next post I’ll go into a bit more detail on some of my own methods.