Your character creation process

[EricVulgaris]

If you’re playing a longer form game that requires characters for players, I’d like to hear how your group does character creation.

Do you do it together at session 0 or 1? As a player do you have a few ideas floating around and just pick one when you hear the campaign pitch? If its different, what do you ideally prefer to do? Together? Separate? Do you prefer to wait and hear others concepts so you can introduce a complementary one?

Also, from a streaming/audience perspective is there value to doing chargen live?

[Mikel_Matthews]

The games I run are very much created through what the players decide for their characters. I haven’t run a game where players making characters on their own and just showing up would make sense for a long time.

Discussion on what the characters want, how they came together, how they see themselves and each other is a vital part of character creation for me.

[Mathias]

I find this is very game dependent but as a rule of thumb I subscribe to the idea that character creation is play, so best done together as a group.

I tend to come to a game with some high concepts that I might find interesting to explore but I hold off and keep it vague and only make the decision which concept to go for through the conversation with the group.

Ideally I want input from other players (and gm)—like mentioned in the other thread about what makes a good player: being a fan of the other player characters! And this is much easier if we share and collaborate and are not “precious with our toys” but invite others to invest in them, as well!

To come back to how this is dependent on the game: if we play Apocalypse World (or most PbtA), we are meant to slip into scenes in the session in which we also create our characters, so a lot is vague and will be found out in play.

Then, in Forged in the Dark games it’s actually super important to just start with a very rough concept? There are so many mechanics in that game that are about, even as a player, discovering things you did not know about your character. It’s a huge part of the fun of those games, I feel.

While when we start a campaign of Burning Wheel that’s going to go 20-30 sessions, the involved character and world creation means two sessions of 3h each can be completely justified… and need to be done together, even if we at times are each pouring over the book and flipping back and forth.

Regarding streaming: Yes, I absolutely find value in watching character creation live! Here is a secret, when I watch an Actual Play, I am not just watching these characters go on a journey through the fiction; I am also watching the players go through an arc.
If character creation is completely withheld, I miss out on an important part of that and I think it is an important quality of APs to let the viewer take part in the play, not just the performance.

[Jmstar]

We are typically playing five or so two hour sessions, and building characters usually takes up part of the first session as we toss ideas around and form connections.

Next chance I get I want to reverse this and try a more larp-y approach, as discussed in this thread:

LARP techniques for creating characters (also applicable to TTRPG One Shots)

This is a video of a talk by a really good friend of mine, Mo Holkar. He talks about the middle ground between characters entirely created by players and characters entirely created by the Larpwright. It is interesting in and of itself but I think there is some really good stuff in here for prepping one shot TTRPGs. Especially where you want to create or partially create characters ahead of time, or if you are presented with a partially created character at a convention game.

[BeckyA]

Very interesting. I’d love to hear how that goes if you don’t mind reporting back.

[Humza_K]

To me, these questions depends entirely on the game and its baseline assumptions. The OSR campaigns I tend to go for wind up keeping chargen siloed individually, with a bit of shared discovery-at-the-table once we start up. For something like Traveller, particularly editions like MgT which have the potential for shared connections in chargen, it makes sense to generate together in a Session Zero.

As regarding character concepts - I tend to prefer randomized rolls to get me out of my comfort zone regarding certain types of PCs. So if we’re going for a randomized campaign, I’ll roll first and then determine a PC based on that.

As regarding streaming - again, it depends on the game type. If you were going to be playing something like D&D 3.5 or GURPS or some other system with a strong char build component, I would veer away from streaming chargen, because then you’ve got players feeling pressured to just take whatever in order to speed chargen AND viewers getting bored as folks pore over character options. If you’re doing something much more strongly directed, like a PbtA playbook, then I can potentially see streamed chargen as a way to help get the audience on board.

[jamesdbr]

I’ll always push for group character creation in a Session 0 in part because it helps make sure (again, most of my experience is in D&D) every niche is filled. The biggest benefit I’ve found with group character creation is that it gives everyone a chance to figure out how the party knows each other and eases people into the roleplay aspect of the game.

[sleypy]

It depends on the group and the type of game. If it is less than five session we generally don’t do character creation together. Will discuss the type of game over email and bounce around ideas over discord. Anything longer than that generally has a session 0.

When I’m a player, I generally don’t bring any ideas to the table because I want to learn about the setting and scope of the campaign. That usually gives me some ideas and I’ll have some questions for the GM. Once those are answer, I usually have a high concept in my mind and I look for ways to connect with other peoples character ideas. I wouldn’t go so far as say complementary, more like entangled.

I personally think it depends if I want to sit through the entire chargen process. When people are floundering trying to make decisions it’s no fun. A smooth conversation talking through the process and putting on the finishing touches can be interesting. I do like background stories, physical descriptions, flash back scenes, short asides, etc for learning about the characters.

[Stentor_Danielson]

I’m a big proponent of doing chargen and worldbuilding together in session 0. I often have some ideas of things I’d like to try kicking around in my head (e.g. I had the idea of wanting to use “Ibrahim” as a character name, which I grabbed for a game of Trophy last week), but I don’t put it all together into a character until I see what everyone else in the group is doing. I’ve had bad experiences of GMs asking me to make a character in advance, then my character ends up poorly suited to the game we’re playing, or I find I’ve invested a lot in coming up with aspects of the character that don’t get any use. My best characters arise out of seeing how they connect to other characters.

(The Asians Represent podcast has a great example of how a session 0 can be fun both to play and to observe with the first episode of their Masks campaign.)