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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 5286063" data-attributes="member: 694">I've come to despise mechanical character building, i.e. optimization.  It was one of the features that drove me away from the d20 system.  Maybe my reaction was a bit overboard, too, since I skipped over AD&D and went straight back to Classic D&D.  As far as the game rules go, it's quite enough for me to say, "roll 3d6 in order for stats, pick your class, pick your alignment, and you're ready to go."But lately, I've also been turned on to the notion of non-mechanical character building.  Slogging through back issues of Dragon, I hit upon this article for fleshing out a three-dimensional character, and now the back of my character sheet usually has a form that looks like this:Physical Description - Describe your character's appearance, manner, attireBackground - Give a quick rundown of your character's nationality and religious leanings, social class, former professions, etc.Personality Traits - two or three adjectives that sum up the character's personalityQuirk, Trigger, Fear, and Affinity - list one quirk (peculiarity that makes your character stand out), one trigger (something that makes your character angry, perhaps even angry enough to spur violence), one fear (not necessarily a phobia, but something that your character will flee from if possible), and one affinity (something that your character likes very much and would go to great, even irrational, lengths to procure or experience).Allegiance, Motivation, Goal, or Quest - list any ideals or organizations that your character feels a duty towards; at least one abstract motivation, such as justice or greed; one immediate goal; and one long-term quest.The justification behind all of this rigmarole is that even a 1st level character has a reason for being a fighter or a mage, rather than just a commoner with a workaday job.  So every character who comes into the came has to be at least partially fleshed out.  That's character-building in my B/X campaigns. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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