Two different perspectives on character concept

So lately I've really been stuck by how my idea of a character concept is completely at odds with what most people think of when they say that they have a character concept.

To give an example, if you had asked me about a character concept for one of my PC's I might have said:

"Well, I'm interested in exploring the idea of an elf with their inherent long life and view point, in the context of how the march of history can create cultural divisions. I think it is interesting how in elves, one generation might be growing up two centuries or more after another. And I'm interested in exploring the concept of 'feralness' in the context of increasing urbanity and increasing civilization. What does an elf whose ecosystem has stopped being a wild forest become flagstone, tile and slate look like? I'm also interested because this seems like a good opportunity, in exploring and trying to personify 'Chaotic Neutral' as a truly intellectual and philosophical position, rather than simply being treated as 'random' or 'zany' or 'chaotic evil lite' as I've so often seen. So put that all together, and basically I'm thinking of playing this elfish street kid, the gang member if you will, with longstanding place in a thieves guild who has seen generations of human thieves come and go, and who is now finally outgrowing being a petty criminal and wondering what more there could be to the world. He has this elfish, and highly romanticized view of crime, where he sees the goal of crime as an artistic one and he wants to transcend the bad art around him and create something beautiful and worthy of song. I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but I think ideally that we'd be looking whether he ends up a hero or a villain or somewhere in between. I'm looking to find ways where I can apply the notion of theft in abstract ways so that it has an unexpected meaning, like 'stealing a country', 'stealing memory', 'stealing truth', or 'stealing a myth' or something like that. Ideally though I'd like to be surprised by how this turns out rather than plotting it."

Now, equally I could have also said, "I'm playing a CN Elven Thief/M-U."

The two are in some sense the same, but they are in another sense completely different. I'm describing the same character and both descriptions are essential to it being the same character, but one description tells me who the character is and what sort of choices he's likely to make and the other mostly just tells me what the character can do (especially if I'm treating CN as a mechanical marker of some ability, like evading detect good/evil, etc.).

For simplicity, let's call the first "Who you are" (WYA) and the second "What can you do" (WCYD).

My observation is that increasingly players are quite sophisticated in devising WCYD concepts but increasingly less sophisticated in devising WYA concepts. Indeed, many never seem to get around to WYA at all, which seems like it ought to be all right if we are playing a dungeon crawl circa 1978 but at the same time that is happening the writer's of adventures seem to want a literary story where it ought to matter quite highly WYA. But all we are providing for the players is greater and greater depth to WCYD and almost no advice for talking the problem of WYA.

First, do you think you prioritize WCYD over WYA when you think about concept and creating a character. Secondly, discuss whether you think I'm right in observing that WCYD is dominating over WYA even in systems that seem like the designer had intended to avoid that problem (FATE and its derivatives for example). I'd cite for example Burning Wheel as a system that seemed to want to prioritize WYA but which seems like from the examples of play and how I've heard it discussed to just end up mostly making WYA color for the WCYD. Dynamically tagging your character seems to me to be highly prone to this problem, because if the player prioritizes (unconsciously) WCYD in concept, then the tags are going to prioritize WCYD. Interesting WYA tags might not even come up and the player might not even be able to imagine them.

Secondly, describe some examples of systems that you think very successfully encourage you to consider WYA in a thoughtful way. In the case of tagging systems, what systems force you to think of WYA over WCYD. What about them worked to change the way that you thought about playing the game. What sort of guidance do you think you could provide at the system level in the case of systems that weren't hard defined by their setting (which seems to be the usual method of enforcing WYA)? Speaking as a player, what is the ideal page count do you think for that sort of guidance - enough to really fire the imagination, but not so much you get bored by tedious detail that is stopping you from jumping into a game.

I can't really think about both equally. Even then, I don't think of them separately either. Maybe for a one-shot I'll do skills and powers and throw the rest to the wind. Even when I do have a character concept, sometimes motivation takes a while. Generally my structure is something like this:

1. What is my character concept?
2. How do I do that in this system?
3. Work on character.

Zhaleskra said:

I can't really think about both equally. Even then, I don't think of them separately either. Maybe for a one-shot I'll do skills and powers and throw the rest to the wind. Even when I do have a character concept, sometimes motivation takes a while. Generally my structure is something like this:

1. What is my character concept?

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My question is very much, "What do you mean when you say 'character concept'?"

By what you say next,

2. How do I do that in this system?
3. Work on character.

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I take it you always understand it first to mean, "What can this character do?"

Or to put it another way, if you were playing a Supers game, the first think you'd think about would be, "What do I want my superpower to be?", instead of, "I want to play a stranger in a strange land.", or "I want to play with the tension of being part mortal and part immortal", or "I'm interested in the tension between upholding the law and being a vigilante.", or "I want to play with the tension inherent to helping people and doing things to people.", and then later picking super powers that you think will be embody or heighten that conflict.

Celebrim said:

My question is very much, "What do you mean when you say 'character concept'?"

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Perhaps I have you at a disadvantage when one of the systems I have available, World Tree, has "regular person" as a valid adventurer concept. Though generally it's something like "regular person who's never held a sword in her life is given a sword as a present by an extended family member" deal.

I recently had to rework the very character whose name I use as my username, mostly from scratch due to hardware issues. The concept was always warrior mage, but because in World Tree characters start with a minimum of 4 spells (before advantages), I recalled that I had originally picked more combaty spells when it is more honest to choose householdy, sellable spells as your base spells. I had a better idea of what I was doing this time, and zie came out a little more warriory than magey, but does have a decent attack spell: it summons a water elemental that behaves . . . unless there are other elementals. Zie also had a 4 year tour as a guard warrior, 4 years experience selling pattern spells, and a 4 year apprenticeship as a smith and is a member of the smith's guild to this day. I also did "Self-taught Mage" again, so:

Zhalèskra is
1. a spell seller
2. a guard
3. a smith
4. a bit of a risk taker

Zi Ri aren't really built to be "fighters", but I made it work. Zhalèskra will do more damage with zir fire breath or dagger, but has a better attack bonus to zir claws & teeth. This time I picked a handedness, because I hadn't the first time: this Zhalèskra is left handed. Zie also has a few Combat Options, thanks to the Guard Warrior experience. Even with all the species penalties to brawling, zie still has a lot of positives to those actions. Of course these advantages help determine motivations: defend the city-state of Ovirucci, honor the smith's guild's bylaws (which may include charging other PCs for metal creation or working), sell spells zie can transcribe for adventurers, commoners, and nobles to graft.

I don't even consider the unaging aspect of Zi Ri to be a mechanic, because most people don't play games long enough for mortal characters to die of old age.
Yes, I've even considered how a creature that can only die by accident, combat, disease, and suicide might react to seeing their ephemeral friends fade.

By what you say next,

I take it you always understand it first to mean, "What can this character do?"

Or to put it another way, if you were playing a Supers game, the first think you'd think about would be, "What do I want my superpower to be?", instead of, "I want to play a stranger in a strange land.", or "I want to play with the tension of being part mortal and part immortal", or "I'm interested in the tension between upholding the law and being a vigilante.", or "I want to play with the tension inherent to helping people and doing things to people.", and then later picking super powers that you think will be embody or heighten that conflict.

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All right, let's take your example. I'm in a supers game. The first question is "am I gadget hero? a powered hero? or a hybrid?" I need to answer that question before I get to the "what are my powers" question. Once I've answered those questions, I answer the "what's my motivation", and "am I a team player" questions.

Perhaps that's why it took me a while to get the hang of playing as Unity in Sentinels of the Multiverse despite having already compared her to Daitokuji Biiko (B-ko) from Project A-ko. She's got a bit of Magneto too.

I will say that I am by no means entirely consistent in my approach.

Celebrim said:

First, do you think you prioritize WCYD over WYA when you think about concept and creating a character.

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Well, there is a difference between which I consider first, and which I spend more time and effort upon.

I find that, in character creation, I often suffer from option paralysis. If the GM says, "You can be *anything*," I have difficulty choosing which option to go with - in large part because I have fun with lots of different things in games, and no one thing calls to me very strongly over another. So, frequently, my first question is, "Mechanically, what does the party need?" The mechanical choice of what I can do is thus usually done first, but is simple, and pretty quick.

Then, I figure out what I need to make a character with those general mechanical properties *interesting*, as a person. I usually spend far more effort and creativity on this than the mechanical bits.

The recent notable exception to this was, oddly enough, in a FATE game (Dresden Files, to be specific) I'm playing in. Here while I knew the mechanical bent of most of the characters, the driving force behind my concept was the fact that, in a Dresden game, I saw we had no characters with a foothold in the fae aspect of the world. So, I started with "someone with fae contact" but without mechanical notions - I built upon what relationship I wanted to that power block, and what kind of person that meant he'd be, not what mechanical abilities I wanted.

Secondly, discuss whether you think I'm right in observing that WCYD is dominating over WYA even in systems that seem like the designer had intended to avoid that problem (FATE and its derivatives for example).

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The issue you see is that even the real world tends to go with having to worry about WYCD. Real militaries build squads around WYCD. So, of course, people playing games that include a chance of character death want to make sure that WYCD is covered. The only time players won't give it priority is when it honestly doesn't matter - that what the character can do is irrelevant to what happens in game.

I'm thinking, like, Paranoia, and Cthulhu-mythos games - what you can do is often not relevant, because you're not expecting things to go well, even if you *are* good at something

I've played FATE games other than the Dresden Files mentioned above. In general, I don't find WYCD dominating particularly in that game. This is managed in part because FATE is mechanically so simple that it takes little effort to determine what you can do. With the skill pyramid structure frequently seen, it takes maybe two minutes to choose the most important of WYCD. The rest can follow later, even organically during play.

Secondly, describe some examples of systems that you think very successfully encourage you to consider WYA in a thoughtful way. In the case of tagging systems, what systems force you to think of WYA over WCYD.

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Systems do this a lot less effectively than GMs do, in general. So long as the defining characteristic of the game is about system - which is usually focused on task and combat resolution - people will strongly consider WYCD. The GM must present a game in which relationships and personality are more important than traditional task resolution for players to reliably take emphasis off WYCD.

So, as a fairly extreme example, make character death rare, or take it off the table entirely. Being able to KillKillKill! becomes much less important if you can't die, as you don't have to focus on survival, and can instead focus on WYA.

That said....

FATE variants where you actually do the circle-storytelling approach to character building can help prioritize WYA, because you don't get to pick the situation in which you define much of yourself. You are handed someone else's story, and have to define part of your character that is useful in resolving a conflict in that other person's story. If you are trying to build a gun-bunny, for example, but you are handed a story in which armed conflict isn't a plausible resolution... well, then you define part of your character that isn't about guns! Too bad!

FATE Accelerated moves in the WYA direction, by not having a skill system, per se. It has "approaches" (Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky). You cannot take a "Guns" skill. It doesn't exist! So, you ask instead how you approach the situation. Say you pick up a gun. If you are making a trick shot, it is about being Clever. If you are sniping, it is about being Sneaky. If you are trying to put down suppressive fire to intimidate, it may be about being "Flashy". And so on - it isn't about what you know how to do, but how you go about doing it. If you are a Clever person, you'll succeed at being Clever, whatever it is your are trying to do. If you aren't Flashy, then you won't do as well when you do anything Flashy.

Another game that steps away from focusing on WYCD is Nobilis. You do't play a normal mortal person. You were one, but now you are a "Soverign Power", the personification of some abstract ideal, like Time, Death, or Cars. In one game I played, we had "Walls", "Christmas", and "Tomorrow". Your character has absurd amounts of power in their own realm. So, how they think and apply that - the abstract being broad - becomes more important than many other things.

For me, it strongly depends on the game in question.


In games with mostly freeform character creation (points to distribute, self-defined traits, few if any mechanical interactions between various parts of the character) I start with the story side (themes or relations I want to explore, setting elements I'm interested in, my character's style and looks). I think about who my character is, in reasonable details. After I have a clear idea, I make the mechanical side to fit the concept.
Games that allow me to mechanically represent relations, goals, ideals and personality traits are especially fun here.


On the other hand, if character creation requires choosing many things from lists and if the various pieces interact in a nontrivial way, I start with mechanics. I get inspired by a specific mechanical piece and build a character around it, or I decide what my character should be able to do and optimize to do it efficiently. Story side comes later; it's not ignored, but it has to follow the mechanics, not the other way around.


The reason for this divide is simple. With freeform character creation, I'm sure that each concept that fits the setting and genre may be well represented mechanically. On the other hand, the mechanical side is not very interesting by itself. Thus, it makes sense to focus on story first and then choose the mechanics. In games with stiffer mechanical structure some story concepts, while fitting, may be significantly suboptimal - but mechanical parts of the system are interesting and fun by themselves, so it makes sense to focus on them first.

For me, it depends on what caused me to come up with the character concept in the first place.

Celebrim said:

My observation is that increasingly players are quite sophisticated in devising WCYD concepts but increasingly less sophisticated in devising WYA concepts. Indeed, many never seem to get around to WYA at all, which seems like it ought to be all right if we are playing a dungeon crawl circa 1978 but at the same time that is happening the writer's of adventures seem to want a literary story where it ought to matter quite highly WYA. But all we are providing for the players is greater and greater depth to WCYD and almost no advice for talking the problem of WYA.

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I think this is a side effect of the way conventional RPGs are designed. Where, say WYA and WCYD are linked through things like classes, clans, etc. Additionally, piles of little fiddly-bit mechanics end up emphasizing WYCD, simply because there's a limited amount of mental energy a player can devote to a game and fiddly bits can soak that up fairly quickly.

Celebrim said:

First, do you think you prioritize WCYD over WYA when you think about concept and creating a character. Secondly, discuss whether you think I'm right in observing that WCYD is dominating over WYA even in systems that seem like the designer had intended to avoid that problem (FATE and its derivatives for example). I'd cite for example Burning Wheel as a system that seemed to want to prioritize WYA but which seems like from the examples of play and how I've heard it discussed to just end up mostly making WYA color for the WCYD. Dynamically tagging your character seems to me to be highly prone to this problem, because if the player prioritizes (unconsciously) WCYD in concept, then the tags are going to prioritize WCYD. Interesting WYA tags might not even come up and the player might not even be able to imagine them.

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IME, this is more a matter of "deprogramming" us from D&D like games. Fate, in particular, doesn't have to land on the "combat comes first" field, and I've run several games where the combat machine would be woefully out of place. Additionally, the way aspects function makes WYA and WYCD kinda the same thing. (I'm not very familiar with Burning Wheel, but I tend to not see it as all that splendiferous, mechanically. So you may be right about that one.)

Additionally, if you're playing one of the looser games likes Fate, world-building is part of play. Which, I think muddies the issue as players help determine the field from which to draw character concepts.

Celebrim said:

Secondly, describe some examples of systems that you think very successfully encourage you to consider WYA in a thoughtful way. In the case of tagging systems, what systems force you to think of WYA over WCYD.

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Hmm...that's tough to answer because it can depend a lot on circumstances at the table, as well as system. In general, though, simpler free-descriptor systems with few fiddly bits allow WYA-first thinking, whereas tons of fiddly bits force you to focus on WYCD. This applies, IMO, even to systems like 4e, where the WYA choice is tied tightly with the slate of powers you will have to choose from.

Celebrim said:

First, do you think you prioritize WCYD over WYA when you think about concept and creating a character. Secondly, discuss whether you think I'm right in observing that WCYD is dominating over WYA even in systems that seem like the designer had intended to avoid that problem (FATE and its derivatives for example).

Secondly, describe some examples of systems that you think very successfully encourage you to consider WYA in a thoughtful way. In the case of tagging systems, what systems force you to think of WYA over WCYD. What about them worked to change the way that you thought about playing the game. What sort of guidance do you think you could provide at the system level in the case of systems that weren't hard defined by their setting (which seems to be the usual method of enforcing WYA)? Speaking as a player, what is the ideal page count do you think for that sort of guidance - enough to really fire the imagination, but not so much you get bored by tedious detail that is stopping you from jumping into a game.

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First things first: define "character." For some people, a character is a character. For others, it's a list of bonuses to die rolls, and cool rules to use.

Secondly, I put WYA first. It guides the WCYD that comes later.

Secondly, I really don't have the viewpoint to address if WCYD is dominating in such systems.

Secondly, in an RPG that tries to address this, character creation text first addresses WYA. Then, it provides in-game bonuses for roleplaying WYA. And perhaps most important, it leaves a certain amount of ambiguity to the character features - which means a player can define those features based on WYA. For example, a "movement" skill could be running for one character, mountain-climbing for another, or mud-skipping for still another.

The player in me doesn't need a specific page-count; it's how the rules are written. Is there a chart of all weapons and their characteristics? Worse, is there a chart for each weapon, and each special-move that can be performed with each weapon? An author could emphasize WYA over WCYD by saying all attacks deal 1 wound. The lethality (or gentle brushing) of the attack depends on how the player describes the attack.

DMMike said:

Secondly, in an RPG that tries to address this...

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DMMike - I dunno if passive-aggressive approaches make good marketing, especially when links on the internet are involved. Unknown links are "stranger-danger!" Why don't you tell them what it is, and who wrote it?