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<blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 6872407" data-attributes="member: 12377">re: Job-first character creation:I've found that with of open-ended (classless) character creation people are more likely to define their character in terms of capabilities rather than personality. When a player spends a lot of time picking what special abilities they get they often start to focus on that aspect of the character and expect things like niche protection and ability-centric game play.One advantage of cookie-cutter class-based character creation is that it kind of forces you to differentiate your characters by personality. It takes about 30 seconds to come up with &quot;I'm a human fighter, soldier background, probably gonna go battlemaster at 3rd level.&quot; But what makes one Generic Human Soldier Battlemaster Fighter different from another? It's not mechanics (they are likely pretty similar), it's personality. Maybe one is an old drunk and the other is a young firebrand and a third is a steamy seductress and a fourth is a philosopher and warrior-poet and a fifth is the village idiot.As an extreme example, imagine an RPG where every PC has the exact same stats. (Maybe you are members of an elite government SpecOps team, so you're all badass in exactly the same way.) The only way to distinguish your character in such a game would be personality. The paucity of mechanical character-creation options moves the focus away from mechanics, to an extent.I tend to create D&amp;D characters in this order:Class -&gt; Personality -&gt; Race -&gt; Ability Scores -&gt; Background -&gt; Subclass.To me, class (what you call job, but I think of as just an archetype) informs game-ish activities, and personality informs role-playing. So I sort those out first and then everything else sort of follows from those two decisions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="77IM, post: 6872407, member: 12377"] re: Job-first character creation: I've found that with of open-ended (classless) character creation people are [I]more[/I] likely to define their character in terms of capabilities rather than personality. When a player spends a lot of time picking what special abilities they get they often start to focus on that aspect of the character and expect things like niche protection and ability-centric game play. One advantage of cookie-cutter class-based character creation is that it kind of [I]forces[/I] you to differentiate your characters by personality. It takes about 30 seconds to come up with "I'm a human fighter, soldier background, probably gonna go battlemaster at 3rd level." But what makes one Generic Human Soldier Battlemaster Fighter different from another? It's not mechanics (they are likely pretty similar), it's personality. Maybe one is an old drunk and the other is a young firebrand and a third is a steamy seductress and a fourth is a philosopher and warrior-poet and a fifth is the village idiot. As an extreme example, imagine an RPG where every PC has the exact same stats. (Maybe you are members of an elite government SpecOps team, so you're all badass in exactly the same way.) The only way to distinguish your character in such a game would be personality. The paucity of mechanical character-creation options moves the focus away from mechanics, to an extent. I tend to create D&D characters in this order: Class -> Personality -> Race -> Ability Scores -> Background -> Subclass. To me, class (what you call job, but I think of as just an archetype) informs game-ish activities, and personality informs role-playing. So I sort those out first and then everything else sort of follows from those two decisions. [/QUOTE]

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