The Creation of a Character

I was browsing though youtube today, and I found this video about basic character types in a story.

Most of the video, about Mary Sues and the Everyman is fairly standard stuff you can find all over the internet; I want to focus on what he said towards the end of the video.

"Characters don't exist like in a vacuum. You don't like design a character, like here's the character! And that's something that a lot of amateurs do, is they like write down all their character traits or something like that. No, characters only exhibit themselves through a story, through a plot, through the execution of events that's going on in your story. Because they only exhibit themselves through that, those events have to have an impact on them and they have to have an impact on the events, so it's a mistake to design a character outside of the plot. You have to think about how a character is going to grow through a plot; the plot is going to affect the character intimately."

I see this as more relevant to the creation of a character for D&D than for a novel; yes, it still applies to writing novels and such, but it rings still truer for RPGs in general. He describes exactly what everyone is doing with their RPG characters (whether PC or NPC), writing down a list of traits and calling that a character. This is what character backgrounds are at their core; they "design a character outside of the plot." 

I recently started playing in a group where we are using the Cypher system, and character creation that should have taken 20 minutes, based on the pure mechanics, took over an hour because we needed to have an idea of our character before making it. I have trouble creating a new character concept before play because I just don't have any new ideas that are significantly different than any of the 30+ D&D characters and at least a dozen characters from other game systems. Sure I can make a character mechanically different,  but to come up with a character with a different personality and motivations? That's difficult! Especially trying to do it before even starting to play in a setting/campaign/with a new group; also most of my previous characters were developed organically through play, and not all at once before starting a game. When creating new characters, I tend to come up with something and then analyze the character I just made, and think that this character is essentially the same as another character I already have, so why not just transfer my old character to the new campaign? Except that any DM I have met that started DMing after the year 2000 (3.0D&D) doesn't allow character transfers.

Back on topic. Characters in any RPG are not created at character creation, or as I prefer to call it: character generation, but that's another topic. The PC is not a character before play starts, you could even say they aren't a character until the end of the 1st session. At character creation they are just numbers on paper, a list of traits. There is nothing that grounds those numbers in the players mind and imagination. It's all abstract ideas. When the PC is played by a person, they make decisions for that character as if they are that character, when there is some interaction between the character and the audience(in this case the players), that character becomes real. The character is revealed though play. It doesn't matter if the player wrote a 26 page long backstory; there is no character. It's not until the character acts in the context of the game that the character emerges, and more than likely the character being played is drastically different than the one in the 26 page backstory. It is through the events of the game, interacting with obstacles presented by the DM that we learn who the character is.

I could probably go on, but I think I'd only belabor the point.

The Right Way to Play

Recently JB at B/X Blackrazor wrote this,

"I've written in the past (more than once, I'm sure) that "there's more than one way to play D&D." But folks inferring some sort of non-judgmental, egalitarian declaration should note that I'm NOT saying there exists more than one RIGHT way to play D&D. Truth is, I secretly believe that many of the multiple ways in which folks run the game of D&D are wrong, some of them dead wrong."

And Alexis wrote some commentary on it, basically saying that the right way of play lies in the deconstruction and design of the game.

I completely agree with him; I have abandoned my previous efforts to make my own game system for precisely these reasons. I determined that the method in which I designed my game was faulty. My design philosophy has undergone a complete 180 in the past year. As Alexis says, how is what you are designing better? What is the purpose of this difference in design as opposed to all the other game designs that have already been made? I now think that it is paramount to understand your purpose and what exactly you want to accomplish  before even beginning to look at the design of a thing.

Relating to my post from the other day, this is the same problem with every map made for RPGs. Cartographers(if you dare call them that) just start drawing and make maps haphazardly without looking at the purpose of the map. Examine your purpose before laying pen to paper. This is why I'm finding it so hard to actually know how I want to change the maps I make for RPGs. What is the purpose of a map in an RPG? The answer is so varied and vague, that I am beginning to think one map will not be able to accommodate all that is needed. Maybe I should start making multiple maps of the same area for different uses? I really don't know.

Getting back to playing the game wrong, there is one big offense that I see throughout the hobby, among all age groups, in stores and among the games hosted at someone's home. The prevalence of dms or groups to tell others that they are full and aren't looking for new players. Not everyone does this, but in my experience a large majority of gamers behave like this. The idea that you can't dm a group larger than 5 players, or that someone can't join the campaign after the first session, or that they can't play with you because they're not your personal friend is completely wrong. In a hobby as small and niche as ours, it's a tragedy when someone doesn't have a chance to try a game and has a bad opinion of RPGs  because they weren't given the chance. So for those few, who actually read this blog, please just never turn away a prospective player!

Update

Even though I haven't been working on any maps, I have still been working on some game related stuff. I have been busy transferring all the information on the Federation of Dargunn from Obsidian Portal to this blog. Once I finish that I will also write copy down all my notes from various other D&D games I have played. I'm also working on a spreadsheet of all the BECMI monsters.

Mapping Problems

I haven't been working on any maps recently because I wanted to put it aside temporarily to give myself time to think. In general most RPG maps are lacking in actual usefulness. I'm not just talking about wilderness or hex maps, but also dungeon and cave maps. The big issue with most maps published for RPGs, I guess this includes fan-made maps too, is that the DM has to constantly flip between the actual map and the descriptions of what is on the map. There are almost no maps that can just be referenced during the game without looking in a module for more detail once a group reaches a certain location. Every other type of map(navigational, Choropleth, dot density, political, etc)  doesn't have this problem; Each map serves a purpose and everything you to know is on the map(or at least the same poster).  I don't mean to say that those detailed descriptions shouldn't exist, but rather that the map should have some way of symbolizing that detail to remind the DM what they previously read in the module.

So how to make a map for an RPG with optimized usefulness for the DM?

I'm not really sure. If you can't tell by the subject of my senior thesis, I think a huge part of it is the interactivity made available by modern web maps. Yet that's not the end all, be all to the perfect rpg map. This really just allows easier access to the data, it doesn't resolve the underlying issue: PRESENTATION. How to present that data in a visual form so the map reader instantly knows what they are looking at and doesn't have to go hunting for the exact details of that location?

One element I am dedicated to is the Hex grid. It is extremely useful for quickly measuring distance. Though the hexes don't have to be filled with a symbol like in most of the maps for Mystara; there can just be an overlying grid to show scale and distance. For every other useful thing a DM might want from a map, I'm just not sure what's best. I have some ideas, but some of those depend on a hex map, and some depend on not having hexes, so yeah . . .