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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 4799561" data-attributes="member: 18832">I'm a "develop in play" kind of person. I've not seen the game yet where whatever the players imagined their characters would be like by themselves before the game began "survived contact with the enemy" - no matter how much information you have about the world your GM has set the game in, you'll always run into something you invented which doesn't really fit. Even if it doesn't explicitly clash with something in the world, backstory elements you figured would come up often almost never rear their heads, NPCs you established a close relationship with turn out to be unimportant, whatever.I start with a rough idea of the person I want to play, both in terms of personality and mechanics, and let the course of the game shape that rough character sketch into a full-blown portrait of this fictional person. For instance, I just joined a new D&D game last night - at the table, I discovered that the other three players were playing nonhuman PCs with strong prejudices against humans, which made my human invoker a rough fit with the group. In response to that, I established with the DM that my character was a traveller from an exotic land beyond the borders of the crumbling empire in which the game takes place. So I'm a human, and there's comedy prejudice directed towards me from the other PCs, but I'm also an outsider among the humans of the local setting. To get another angle on their anti-human prejudice, I established my character as a mildly patronising chauvinist about his own culture - he considers the idea of a monarchy "barbaric", for instance.Right now, I don't exactly know which deity this guy worships or which religious philosophy he follows, except that his prayers's effects have visual elements of stars and moonlight and that "charity is one of the Nine Virtues" - a phrase I came up with on the spot as a deliberately clueless commentary on seeing the dwarf in our party exchange all the money he had on his person for a seemingly-worthless carved pipe (an ancient and priceless dwarven artifact) owned by a dying man.It's fun to riff off things in play and establish things about the character on the spot - and the end result can be a really detailed, real-feeling character that started as just a character sheet and a name. The flipside of this is that, if my guy Yolamira here bites the dust in six sessions' time, I'm not the sort of person to get attached; it's fun while it lasts and as long as it continues to be fun to play him, but even if he dies through random happenstance, well, that's his story, right? Not every story has a neat, satisfying ending, and at least I now have the fun of creating a whole new character in play all over again.Perhaps the key is that I find the process of developing a PC in play to be inherently enjoyable, and I don't get emotionally invested or immersed or anything like that. I don't care if my PCs succeed or fail, live or die, become heroes or villains, as long as their story is interesting to play out.</blockquote>

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