It’s game night. You’re starting up a new game and you have your shiny new character written up. Well, you’ve got the mechanical bits put together anyway. You’re having trouble finding a way to differentiate this fighter from every other fighter that you have ever put on the table. You want them to be fun to play, and you want the other players to think he’s a fun character to play with.
We’ve all been there.
So how do you over come it?
The answer is simpler than you might realize – you play the character. You let him develop over the course of the first few sessions. You find out what works and you build off of those. You find what doesn’t work and you build off of those as well. You pay close attention to the decisions you make, quirks you affect, and beliefs that you come to possess. You also pay attention to the effect your character is having on the other players at the table, and make the necessary adjustments should you find it’s affecting other players adversely. You let the character grow organically instead of stressing and trying to come up with a complete character sketch before the first session. Within a few sessions, you have a character that feels like he is an actual person instead of just a collection of numbers with some basic beliefs stretched over the top of it.*
I am going to break the sacred rules of gaming and tell you a story about one of my most successful characters to date. He still makes appearances in other games in other systems – Forrghk (pronounced like the eating utensil). I created him for a Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 game, and he was actually my second character choice. I simply wasn’t happy with my first attempt and decided to go with the tried and true Half-Orc Barbarian. I came up with a few things before the first session so that I had at least something to go off of. He had a name. I wanted him to be different from every other Half-Orc barbarian that had been put on the table. I wanted him to be quirky. I wanted him to be fun and lovable despite a low Intelligence and Charisma. I settled on a couple of things in the days before the first session. First – he worshiped a deity known as “Great Mommy Bear,” which I decided was simply a Dire Bear he had seen after following two cubs back to their den one day. He was so convinced by the size of the beast that it was the god of bears that he took to worshiping it. He also carried a great sword that was named “Pigsticker.” I had two possibilities for the why of this. He may have heard a mercenary refer to a knife as such before and just assumed that all bladed weapons were called such, or he had literally killed a pig with it. I wasn’t quite sure yet. Armed with just those couple of pieces of information I entered the game.
During the first session I pushed him hard, treading past the breaking point several times in terms of comedy and quirkiness. A voice was developed and “refined” for him over that session. I settled into a few quirks that fit the feel of the game and would give Forrghk a different feel without trampling over the other characters. He had a childlike innocence about him, which represented the lower Intelligence and Charisma. But he also possessed a more savage cunning as shown by his higher than average Wisdom which asserted itself from time to time. He had trouble remembering names, and so came up with easy to remember nicknames for the party members. The druid was “Wolf Lady” because she had a wolf. The cleric was named “Shiny Man” because he wore full plate. Our scout was “Bow Man” named for his weapon choice. And the duskblade was “Small Man” because he was smaller than Forrghk (and nothing else about his appearance immediately suggested anything else). The dwarf military commander NPC was named “Little Daddy,” because he had a beard like Forrghk’s father did (or so he told the rest of the party). He liked people who were honorable and did not like people who lied to him or treated him as less than capable.
He also liked to take trophies from his kills, and would oftentimes find a way to turn them into useful parts of his character. For example, he was able to talk a fellow Half-Orc craftsman into turning a raptor skull into a helmet. Claws and teeth were put on a necklace. And sometimes he just kept arms and heads as hand puppets he could use to amuse himself with when the rest of the party got too deep into their conversations about things that didn’t interest him or were over his head. So brutally effective were these character quirks that nobody even thought twice about it when he claimed a magical bag from a dragon’s hoard to serve as his puppet bag.
Over the course of those first few sessions, I had gone from a collection of stats into a fully realized character at the table. This character had drive to raise himself about his natural limitations and prove himself to be a worthy friend and ally to his comrades. He developed actual relationships with the other party members (one of which helped to foster and develop an out of game relationship with the player that would become my wife**). He was a lot of fun to play, and most importantly, a lot of fun to play with. His exploits still get brought up almost ten years later.
Now, this is of course, not the only way to develop a character for a table top game, and it may not work for everyone. But oftentimes I’ve found that if I try to ascribe too much personality development to a character beforehand, it can fall flat if the character doesn’t mesh with the rest of the party. I’ve seen too many cases where this causes unnecessary friction within a group and as such, I’ve fallen into the “organic character development camp.” If something else works for you, or you simply want to tell me about your favorite character, sound off in the comments!
*This is not to say that games that encourage belief systems for their characters (such as Luke Crane’s wonderful Burning Wheel) are wrong. They are an important thing in creating a character and giving them motivations. There is simply much more to a character than motivation I have found. It’s not why your character does something, but how that will be remembered for years to come.
**Outcome not guaranteed in all cases.
Ben Erickson
Now this sounds like a fun character! Strange, but I usually only get quirky with my NPCs, I have only two such characters as a player, and don’t get a chance to play them much now at days. Great reminder to remember to “play” during role playing games!