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<blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5408297" data-attributes="member: 3820">I forget who said it, but the phrase was a good one: &quot;A character sheet is a list of things that players may or may not want to see in a game.&quot; The idea is that every choice that players make in putting together their characters emphasizes what they are interested in. Now, admittedly sometimes you have to read between the lines: a very high Will may mean that the player's interested in playing a strong-willed character with a lot of purpose, but it also may mean that the player hates having a character be mind-controlled and will do whatever it takes to avoid that. For my part, I find that most of the initial hooks come out of discussing a new campaign in the first place. If the players want to do a D&amp;D game inspired by classic old-school dungeons, everyone expects the old goal of &quot;get rich or die trying&quot; to be near-universal. But if they're voting for a swashbuckler in the vein of Brust's Phoenix Guards and Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, then more romantic motivations for PCs may be coming into play. Meaning &quot;romantic&quot; in the general sense, not necessarily in the relationship sense, mind; a vendetta, for instance, is classic romantic swashbuckling.This process has gotten more important over time. I play with people from a wide variety of gaming backgrounds, as one would expect at a game company, so right now there's not even close to a dominant expectation of what, say, a D&amp;D game might be like. When you add in variables like some players being in meetings all day and more in the mood to have me actively throw plots at them than to seek them out, it's impossible to have a single method that will work in all cases. So that initial discussion really helps me figure out what any given group's going to do on their own, and what they'd like as active content they can react to.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Barastrondo, post: 5408297, member: 3820"] I forget who said it, but the phrase was a good one: "A character sheet is a list of things that players may or may not want to see in a game." The idea is that every choice that players make in putting together their characters emphasizes what they are interested in. Now, admittedly sometimes you have to read between the lines: a very high Will may mean that the player's interested in playing a strong-willed character with a lot of purpose, but it also may mean that the player [I]hates[/I] having a character be mind-controlled and will do whatever it takes to avoid that. For my part, I find that most of the initial hooks come out of discussing a new campaign in the first place. If the players want to do a D&D game inspired by classic old-school dungeons, everyone expects the old goal of "get rich or die trying" to be near-universal. But if they're voting for a swashbuckler in the vein of Brust's [I]Phoenix Guards[/I] and Lynch's [I]The Lies of Locke Lamora[/I], then more romantic motivations for PCs may be coming into play. Meaning "romantic" in the general sense, not necessarily in the relationship sense, mind; a vendetta, for instance, is classic romantic swashbuckling. This process has gotten more important over time. I play with people from a wide variety of gaming backgrounds, as one would expect at a game company, so right now there's not even [I]close[/I] to a dominant expectation of what, say, a D&D game might be like. When you add in variables like some players being in meetings all day and more in the mood to have me actively throw plots at them than to seek them out, it's impossible to have a single method that will work in all cases. So that initial discussion really helps me figure out what any given group's going to do on their own, and what they'd like as active content they can react to. [/QUOTE]

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