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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6306877" data-attributes="member: 4937">Welcome to the boards, Bawylie.  Nice post.It took me a while to learn that the GM has to be part of the character creation process.  I'm a big believer in the GM never running the PC, but I've learned from experience that he has to approve of the PC before letting it into play.As an addendum to the quoted part above, the hard part isn't forcing players to create characters that belong in your fantasy world.  The real hard part is massaging the player's creativity until you can get characters that belong and can stay together, often despite conflicts in philosophies between the players that are starker in some ways than the conflicts between their characters.One of my players has from the beginning signaled that he has no interest in moral conflicts or ethical challenges.  Not surprisingly, he just - with a bit of prompting - moved his character on the dial to Chaotic Evil.  I always find it amusing that players think that they are going to avoid RP in that manner. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I think 'he comes from nowhere, has no family, and cares about nothing' is playable, it's just likely to be self-deception on the part of the player.   To a certain extent, I don't really care what your background is, so long as the character has a reason for risking life and limb to obtain something.  I learned that after trying to run a game where everyone had created a character with some form of crippling enochlophobia or misanthropy.  The only sort of character concept that really doesn't work is one with no reason to leave his house.  The character concept of, "He comes from nowhere, has no family, and cares about nothing.", could be a great concept if it finishes with something like, "And now something from his past is trying to kill him."  It's the motivations and desires that are most important here.  If needed, I can fill in the past.We're mostly talking about skillful DMing, but there is such a thing as skillful playing as well.  For example, you can play the loner who always goes it alone, provided you wink and play out, "But this time, he find himself entangled with...", for whatever motive you wish to create.  In other words, there is an art to playing a character who clearly has a certain personality and still animate them in a way that it seems natural for them to go against their natural inclinations.  Stories are filled with this sort of thing where one character quite against his will finds himself in a partnership, and good RPers - working together - can create that sort of dance where each of them no how this is going to work out but each also knows that the needs of the story require dancing around that end.</blockquote>

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