Creating PC's with Personality

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

Having started a new playtest just last night for OMEN, I asked all of my players to define their characters with three core concepts (preferably one or two words) and write them on a sheet of paper.

I gave them the sheet and told them to put it on top of their character sheet, writing down the three core words in a row with some space in between. As they began to flesh out their characters more and more, I encouraged them to write down more specific traits and personality aspects beneath the larger core concept word.

For example, one of my good friends and long term playtesters wrote this:

Honorable, Militant, Creative.

After about an hour, he had several things beneath honorable: protect the innocent, complete duty, maintain honesty, show respect.

He had a few under militant: moves with purpose, speaks with cadence, affection for weapons, honors and respects warriors of all kinds, has a high yield/respect to authority figures, wants order and appreciates law.

After creativity: resolve problems efficiently, avoid combat when possible, appreciate music, find beauty in simple natural things.

It grew from a pretty simple core concept and evolved into more and more complex character attributes. I only let them look at their character sheets when they needed to reference soemthing mechanical, such as a bonus. I always referred to their character's name and not their real name, and I would occasionally ask someone how an action would relate to one of their three core traits.

In just a few hours all five of my playtesters had a good 20-30 traits for their characters and all were roleplaying beautifully (even some brand new guys who have no rp experience.)

I was so pleased with the result I might actually draft up a character personality sheet and include it in the final version of the OMEN book. Hope that might help situations like the OP asked about.

 

[Yora]

d20 Modern has an optional rule called Allegiance, which barely gets paid any attention, as it has almost no mechanical effects, but I think it's an invaluable tool for creating both PCs and NPCs, and to help players seeing events from the characters perspective while tuning out their personal views and believes.

Basically, a character has up to three Allegiances, which are believe in and loyalty to an ideology, religion, group, person, cause, or whatever you can think of. In theory, when a PC encounters an NPC which whom he shares an allegiance, he recieves a more welcoming and helpful reaction than normally in that situation. Make that a +2 to Charisma checks, a starting attatitude of one level higher, or whatever system you want to use.

But most importantly it's a very easy way to define what oppinions a character has on certain issues, whom he will want to ally with, whom he considers an enemy, and his moral believes.
Just being a member of a group does not automatically constitute an allegiance. A good cop in a corrupt police force may have the Allegiance "Crimefighting", but would not have the allegiance "Police". Or a forced coscript would not have the allegiance "army". A soldier in a unit that defects to fight its evil government would have allegiance to the unit or its leader, but would not be loyal to the state.

When you make a character, think of two or three ideologies or groups with which the character shares the most believes and which he would never abandon. That's quite easily done and does not actually require a lot of thought. But once you have them written down, every time you ask yourself "what would the character do now?", just take a look at the note and very often the answer will be quite obvious.

 

[Janx]

I advise always having a table rule that PCs must be built to be acceptable to the rest of the party because the Player will be accepted into the party automatically, to avoid abuse of this auto-matic approval effect.

For making PCs with personality, I have 2 approaches. The first, like the Mechanic example, is I define my PC to be like an existing fictional character, but different. The initial difference starts off with name, background story that has similar elements, but befits the setting and copyright law.

What I'm usually looking for is manner of speaking, attitude, and reactional behavior.

One of my last PCs was a half-orc barbarian in an arctic setting based on Sabretooth from the 1st X-Men movie. My PC didn't work for anybody, have a healing factor and wasn't part of a human weapons program.

What I took from it was the winter fight scene, wearing furs, gruff attitude, lethal anger problem, and less verbose manner of speaking.

He was big, the strongest PC in the party, a bully (we had some discussions on how to handle that so I could 'act' mean, but still go along with the party), had an urge to kill things that seemed suspicious (rightly so as it turned out), and was not the party negotiator.

The goal, wasn't to replay the source material's life. Simply to give the player a sense of how to react to whatever happens in the game. Do you get mad when an NPC wrongs you? How do you talk to other people? How do you go about getting what you want?

This leads in to the other method I use. Which is to answer questions like I previously mentioned. What bad situation would anger your PC? What bad situation would your PC keep his cool? What is the speaking style of your PC (formal, gruff, causal, etc)? What would your PC protect? What does your PC not care about?

the list of questions could be endless. I always try to find a way to differentiate my PC from other PCs I've played in some distinctive fashion. I've had a PC who only whispered, and his Raven familar did most of the talking, I've had a PC who sneaky and sly, like Batman. I've had a PC who wasn't dumb, but had no concern for strategy or planning, and was gruff and direct.

The way I see it, if you can define your PC's behavior in such a way that others notice that this PC is not the same person as the player, and not the same person as the last PC he played, you're doing something right and you are defining a memorable personality.