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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6343672" data-attributes="member: 177">I will say that I am by no means entirely consistent in my approach.Well, there is a difference between which I consider first, and which I spend more time and effort upon.I find that, in character creation, I often suffer from option paralysis.  If the GM says, "You can be *anything*," I have difficulty choosing which option to go with - in large part because I have fun with lots of different things in games, and no one thing calls to me very strongly over another.  So, frequently, my first question is, "Mechanically, what does the party need?"  The mechanical choice of what I can do is thus usually done first, but is simple, and pretty quick.Then, I figure out what I need to make a character with those general mechanical properties *interesting*, as a person.  I usually spend far more effort and creativity on this than the mechanical bits.The recent notable exception to this was, oddly enough, in a FATE game (Dresden Files, to be specific) I'm playing in.  Here while I knew the mechanical bent of most of the characters, the driving force behind my concept was the fact that, in a Dresden game, I saw we had no characters with a foothold in the fae aspect of the world.  So, I started with "someone with fae contact" but without mechanical notions - I built upon what relationship I wanted to that power block, and what kind of person that meant he'd be, not what mechanical abilities I wanted.The issue you see is that even the real world tends to go with having to worry about WYCD.  Real militaries build squads around WYCD.  So, of course, people playing games that include a chance of character death want to make sure that WYCD is covered.  The only time players won't give it priority is when it honestly doesn't matter - that what the character can do is irrelevant to what happens in game.I'm thinking, like, Paranoia, and Cthulhu-mythos games - what you can do is often not relevant, because you're not expecting things to go well, even if you *are* good at something <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've played FATE games other than the Dresden Files mentioned above.  In general, I don't find WYCD dominating particularly in that game.  This is managed in part because FATE is mechanically so simple that it takes little effort to determine what you can do.  With the skill pyramid structure frequently seen, it takes maybe two minutes to choose the most important of WYCD.  The rest can follow later, even organically during play.  Systems do this a lot less effectively than GMs do, in general.  So long as the defining characteristic of the game is about system - which is usually focused on task and combat resolution - people will strongly consider WYCD.  The GM must present a game in which relationships and personality are more important than traditional task resolution for players to reliably take emphasis off WYCD.  So, as a fairly extreme example, make character death rare, or take it off the table entirely.  Being able to KillKillKill! becomes much less important if you can't die, as you don't have to focus on survival, and can instead focus on WYA.That said....FATE variants where you actually do the circle-storytelling approach to character building can help prioritize WYA, because you don't get to pick the situation in which you define much of yourself.  You are handed someone else's story, and have to define part of your character that is useful in resolving a conflict in that other person's story.  If you are trying to build a gun-bunny, for example, but you are handed a story in which armed conflict isn't a plausible resolution... well, then you define part of your character that isn't about guns!  Too bad!FATE Accelerated moves in the WYA direction, by not having a skill system, per se.  It has "approaches" (Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky).  You cannot take a "Guns" skill.  It doesn't exist!  So, you ask instead how you approach the situation.  Say you pick up a gun.  If you are making a trick shot, it is about being Clever.  If you are sniping, it is about being Sneaky.  If you are trying to put down suppressive fire to intimidate, it may be about being "Flashy".  And so on - it isn't about what you know how to do, but how you go about doing it.  If you are a Clever person, you'll succeed at being Clever, whatever it is your are trying to do.  If you aren't Flashy, then you won't do as well when you do anything Flashy.Another game that steps away from focusing on WYCD is Nobilis.  You do't play a normal mortal person.  You were one, but now you are a "Soverign Power", the personification of some abstract ideal, like Time, Death, or Cars.  In one game I played, we had "Walls", "Christmas", and "Tomorrow".  Your character has absurd amounts of power in their own realm.  So, how they think and apply that - the abstract being broad - becomes more important than many other things.</blockquote>

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