What if We Got Rid of Character Creation?

[MGibster]

Free character creation isn't always easy on GMs either: how do you write a (good) campaign and plot hooks without knowing who are the stars of the show? Or: I was very happy with myself for killing off Fred's annoying-frickin'-bard, but I still have a session to run and he won't stop asking me questions about his starting spell book!

Strictly speaking, I don't know if I have free character creation in every game I run. I usually start out by pitching a game concept. For example: I'd like to run a Trail of Cthulhu game set in the 1930s, and I need for all of your characters to have some connection to the NYPD. You could be a detective, a beat officer, a motorcycle cop, or maybe you're a reporter who covers the crime beat, a psychologist who consults with the department, an attorney with the DA, or maybe something else you think of. It is my expectation that players will create a character designed to fit the campaign. And for the most part this works out just fine.

On rare occasions in the past, I've had players who just weren't interested in getting with the program and insisted on characters that just didn't fit into the parameters of the campaign as related to them by the GM. My go to example is probably always going to be the dude who insists on creating a werewolf character for our Vampire chronicle. I'm playing in a Night's Black Agents campaign right now, and the GM wanted to know what government agency (MI-6, Mossad, CIA, etc., etc.) each of our characters worked for prior to the campaign. One of the players absolutely refused to pick a specific agency for his character stating he was a private consultant who worked for many agencies over the years. It just added some needless complications for the poor GM.

I do find the idea of not making characters to be intriguing. That's pretty much how it works for one shot adventures, but I think a lot of people are married to the idea of making their own characters for regular campaigns. It could be a lot of fun to be handed a character and playing someone I probably wouldn't have chosen to play on my own.

 

[Arilyn]

I love making characters. It's never a chore.

 

[payn]

Strictly speaking, I don't know if I have free character creation in every game I run. I usually start out by pitching a game concept. For example: I'd like to run a Trail of Cthulhu game set in the 1930s, and I need for all of your characters to have some connection to the NYPD. You could be a detective, a beat officer, a motorcycle cop, or maybe you're a reporter who covers the crime beat, a psychologist who consults with the department, an attorney with the DA, or maybe something else you think of. It is my expectation that players will create a character designed to fit the campaign. And for the most part this works out just fine.

I think session zero and/or players guides are HUGE for kicking off games. They give players an idea of the game, set a few parameters, and help guide both players and GM into a solid game. I vastly prefer this method to simplified templates that allow a GM to plan for any combination or contingency.

 

[overgeeked]

Ah, character creation: it takes the whole first session, there are too many options, how to multiclass, how to optimize, what should my backstory be, I just died so now I can't play again until I make a new character . . .

Free character creation isn't always easy on GMs either: how do you write a (good) campaign and plot hooks without knowing who are the stars of the show? Or: I was very happy with myself for killing off Fred's annoying-frickin'-bard, but I still have a session to run and he won't stop asking me questions about his starting spell book!

Don’t write a campaign. Write a world filled with monsters, people, factions, and adventures. Fill out a hex map and let the PCs explore. Write scenario hooks for your world and let the players pick and choose their way through them. If the player writes a good backstory, it will have built-in scenario hooks for you to use. Bad backstories are OC fan fiction. If they’re a good player, they will always bite those hooks. Bad players write backstories without hooks or refuse to bite the hooks they wrote into their character’s backstory.

What if we just threw it out?

That’s easy enough. Purely random generation with no backstory or a random backstory and/or scenario hook.

What if your RPG had 10 (20?) characters to choose from, and when a PC dies and there's no replacement, the game's over?

That would really suck.

Each character has built-in backstory, level progression, a starting kit. Or, the Final Fantasy method: you can be Cecil, Kain, Rosa, Rydia, Edge, Cid, Tellah, Yang, Palom, or Porom.

Pre-gens, nothing but pre-gens…

That would eliminate:

• the character creation session
• characters without relationships or motivations
• chapters on skills, spells, or dare I say...universal combat rules? (You can do what's on your sheet.)
• players without backup characters
• min-maxing, dump stats, dead levels
• "useless" characters
• death cones (because there's a new character at the bottom of the cone, making it a...um...death turnip?)

...but critically:

- some player freedom. The horror!

You could eliminate the same list of stuff with purely random creation and bringing back player skill.

Include relationship and motivations as part of random generation.

As long as each level gives the PC something, it’s not a dead level. Optimizers tend to call levels without huge jumps in power “dead” when they still get things like hit points, to-hit bonuses, spell slots, etc. when they’re no such thing.

The “useless” character is a function of relying too much on the game’s mechanics to handle everything and not enough on player skill. A character without huge bonuses is considered “useless,” when it’s just lack of player skill and imagination. I’ve seen (and played a few) so-called “useless” characters who left the rest of the party in the dust just because the player simply decided to actually try instead of just throwing up their hands and giving up on the “useless” character.

 

[HectorsNemesis]

Dungeon Crawl Classics pretty much does this with its 0-level random character funnels.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Feng Shui famously had customizable archetypes where the player didn't have to do a lot of work.

Also, Lady Blackbird - all pregens.

It's totally a viable approach.

 

[MGibster]

Free League's Alien scenarios come with pre-generated characters. These characters have their own individual goals to achieve during each act of the scenario and they even have other characters they like or dislike. It's interesting because you don't really know what you're getting until you read over the character. i.e. You don't get to know the goals until you've committed to playing that character.

When I ran the scenario Chariots of the Gods, one of the characters main motivation for exploring a derilect vessel was because failure to do so would mean he and his entire crew would forfeit all pay for their current mission. The player had a hard time with this goal, and actually failed it, because she thought it made her character a money grubbing jerk and refused to take steps to ensure the characters explored the ship. I had a different interpretation, and it was that as regular working class people, forefeiting months worth of pay has a negative effect on them and their families. You got a mortgage or rent? Your kids need food and clothes? None of them can afford to forfeit a few months of pay.

But this is only a one shot scenario, not a full campaign. For a lot of people, not people able to make their character would be a tough sell. I'd try it just for funsies, but it's not for everyone.

 

[Blue Orange]

There definitely are games where you use pregens only--Talislanta had a list of archetypes to pick from for many of its incarnations. I think character creation is a big part of the game for many people, as others have said, and many people enjoy coming up with the weirdest character they can and trying to play them...tiefling paladin, tortle monk, etc.

Final Fantasy is an elaborate computer program, so they are necessarily limited to previously designed content. And the difference between having a few well-developed characters you build a story around and a blank slate generated by the player is usually cited as one of the biggest differences between Eastern and Western-style computer RPGs. People are very used to making up their own tabletop characters and the freeform nature is one of the biggest draws of the tabletop over the computer or console RPG, I think.

 

[numtini]

If you made a RPG without character creation, the rulebook would end up partially burned, embedded in lucite, passed around to various RPG luminaries, and eventually lost in the mail...

I think the "cinematic" scenarios for Alien work well with a premade cast of characters who are intended to intersect through the story. However, for most people, part of the enjoyment is creating characters. For games like PF or D&D, monkeying about with character options is a really popular part of the game, effectively an entire game played alone between sessions. So I think for the type of games you seem to be thinking about, what you don't like is actually a huge reason those games are so popular.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Then there's the middle ground that I quite like for low-complexity games like For the Queen or Magical Fury - chargen is part of play.

In For the Queen, once the players have read the rule cards (a dozen sentences), they start drawing cards, and each drawn card is a prompt that asks them to establish a fact about their character and their relationship with the Queen. Each player immediately starts telling us who is on this vital mission with the Queen - a handmaiden, a royal guard, a vizier? And the cards help players add twists and turns as we gradually learn more about them and the Queen.

A For The Queen Review

One of the hardest parts of getting people into role playing games is the paperwork. Pitching friends on a game of Let’s Pretend is easy compared to then sitting down and filling out character sheets for an hour or two. For years, designers have tried a lot of different ways to speed up this...

www.enworld.org

Magical Fury is a PbtA Magical Girl game in a 34-page booklet - the first scene is literally our protagonists in their mundane lives, like the first episode of Sailor Moon or what have you. The players figure out who they are as mundanes, then the bad guys attack the city and the characters' (short-circuited) magical girl origins occur, launching into their magical transformations and what is effectively the first combat tutorial - all with a bunch of random generation tables if you cannot decide details about your girl. It's all quite quick and action-packed. Straight into battle.

Play proceeds from there.

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