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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1646164" data-attributes="member: 16936">I'd say that in nearly every game we play now, this is the way we go.  It ends up working out really well for us.It's sort of like what Mac Callum says above, except we don't necessarily write bios for everyone.  It's more of a "hey, in the next few weeks I want to start this game, let's schedule some time to all sit down and talk about it" kind of thing.Generally we'll devote at least one full gaming session to just talking about what the setting is going to be, what kind of stuff the GM wants to do in it, what kinds of things the players want to do, and so on.  Then we bat around some character concepts, an overall party concept, work out fun things like how different characters know each other, and run it all past the GM to make sure there aren't any objections.  Usually there's a part in there where the people who are particularly good with the system sit with the people who aren't and answer questions about character creation or point out important things that might otherwise be missed.The process continues via conversations during the week or through e-mail, and at some point before the game begins everyone has a pretty good idea of what everyone else is going to be playing.  That way, on the day that we're actually going to start playing, we're all ready to go; we've all got characters, complete with motives and personalities and friends and enemies, plus character sheets for them, and all the GM has to do is start running the actual game.What's funny is that we do this even in games where the basic concept is that the characters don't know each other initially (like "you're all escaped prisoners on a Leviathan transport" or "you're all superpowered criminals being offered pardons if you participate in a black ops suicide squad").  It's just that instead of talking about how characters met in their past, we work on making characters that have common interests and reasons to want to stick close to the others.  Sometimes players will even make agreements about things that their characters will do together later on in the game before we're even done creating the characters.I guess you don't have much incentive to stop collaborating during character generation once you decide that gaming is more fun when you don't have to work so hard to keep the party together.  <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=";)" />--we have 5 regular players, so doing this lets more people get to actually playryan</blockquote>

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