Hi everybody. Welcome back. We're still discussing character goals. We've already talked about what they are, why you should have them, and what they should be, but all that still leaves a question.
When do you pursue them?

In a MET style LARP, it's pretty easy. Almost all your goals tend to be personal, and you pursue them whenever you get the chance. In a PBP or PBeM, there may be more direction, but it's still not hard to go off by yourself and do whatever you want as long as the GM has time to deal with you. Splitting the party may not be advisable, but it's not a serious logistical problem like it might be in a tabletop game.

But my column is primarily aimed at tabletop gaming, and at the tabletop (or sprawled around the living room, in my games) having one or more characters wander off by themselves can cause some problems. Some day, if you ask nicely, I'll tell the story of the Shadow Run session that ended up having three groups and two GMs... The basic problem is that there is only one GM, who plays all the NPCs and describes the entire environment. While the PCs are all in one place, this isn't much of a problem. If the party splits up, the GM's attention is split, too. Sometimes that's unavoidable. Sometimes the GM arranges it on purpose. But other times, it can be a real pain - particularly if it's just one PC who is trying to use some downtime in the main plot to go pursue one of his sub-plots. That leaves the other characters to either just sit, or to go find things of their own to do.

Thus, either several people are bored, or the GM suddenly has multiple games to run.

So what can you do about it?

Here are several strategies that I have employed. All of them require the GM's cooperation, and that's an important issue. Everything I'm going to suggest creates some degree of extra work for the GM. As a player, you need to decide how much your character's goals are worth to you and to the rest of the group. If you start disrupting the game or burning out the GM, then it doesn't really matter if your character won the hand of the Princess, defeated the Dark Overlord, and recovered the McGuffin of Ultimate Power. You are failing.

Yes, I said you are failing. If you wreck the game, then you lose everything. I once nearly wrecked a game by focusing too much on just what I wanted. It's an easy trap to fall into - at least for a spotlight hog like me. Now you've been warned.

Ok, now that that bit of unpleasantness is out of the way, let's move on. There are several ways to carve out time for your character's goals.

In Game, With the Party

Unless your GM blows chunks, there will be situations in the main plot that relate to your character's goals from time to time. Keep an eye out for them. When you find yourself in one, play in character. Don't make the decision you think is "best." Make the decision that your character really would if he was in that situation. If you're playing Inigo Montoya, and you spot the Six-Fingered man, you're not likely to consider the fact that you're carrying an urgent message that absolutely, positively has to get there overnight. There's the guy who slaughtered your father over a sword. Go kill him. Now. And that group of twenty guards he's got with him.

Well, actually, Inigo might be smarter than that, but he'd at least consider it.

In Game, Alone

Sometimes, the group splits up. I've run sessions that never had more than two PCs in the same place at the same time. I've played in them, too. If everybody's OK with it, that's fine.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• Be considerate: Well duh. If your character goes off by himself, the GM "owes" you as much time as he's spending with any one other player. In a group of six players, that's 1/6th of the GM's time. The group gets an hour, you get ten minutes. More is nice, but all you really "deserve" is 1/6th.
• Keep track of your POV: Don't react to OOC information in your IC dealings. If the group gets in trouble because you wandered off on your own, then the survivors will be really angry with you when you get back. If you get in trouble when you wander off on your own, don't expect them to come save you if you can't call them.
• While you're out anyway...: While you run off to visit your old, ailing aunt, maybe you could also check in with one of your contacts who might have some useful information for the group. Huh?
• Be considerate: I know I already said "be considerate," but it bears repeating. Keep this behavior in check. If you only go off on you own every once in a while, it's no problem. If you're doing it for a long time, frequently, you should probably look into one of the other methods I'll discuss in a minute.

Journals and Bluebooks

"Bluebooking" emerged some time in the 90s. I'm not exactly sure where. Mentions of it cropped up in some of my game books about that time. If anybody who knows more cares to post comments, I'd love to read them. I've never Bluebooked formally, but I think I've more or less adopted the "guts" of the practice. The basic idea is that you keep a binder or something in which you write character actions. The GM reads what you wrote and writes in responses. You can presumably also do this with other PCs, too. It's a pretty good way to handle "sideline" events, though I think it would work best between sessions, since the GM probably can't stop and read your latest entry and write another one while he's doing anything else.

A somewhat related method could be carried out in a character journal. I am a huge fan of character journals (and I really, really need to update the one in my D&D game). Mostly, journals just record actions that have already happened, but in my Now is the Winter game one player particularly used his to flesh out relationships and add a lot of content to the game that I never put there.

To be honest, I was a little shocked at first. I read one of his journal entries, which had a long conversation between him and an NPC - only that conversation had never occurred in game.

Once I figured out what he was doing, though, I was all for it. In fact, I do it a little myself.

Here's what he'd do:

• In Game, he'd tell me he wanted to go to such-and-such a place to talk to some NPC contact.
• I'd say "fine. You go there. What do you want to know?"
• He'd tell me.
• I'd make up an answer. For instance, if he was looking for where to find a Brujah safe house, I might say one of his Anarch contacts gave him an address warfside.
• In his journal, there would be a lengthy description of his trip to the Anarch's hangout, and a detailed conversation that covered other topics as well. For example, if the PC was shaking down an Anarch, he might mention some (made up on the spot) dirt he had on said Anarch.
• Rarely, he'd write something that, while he was unaware of it, was "wrong" for some reason, and I'd tell him what he needed to change.

None of the player's new details involved OOC information unless he'd also gained that information IC later in the game. None of the details he added were consequential to the plot. But they turned a 30 second exchange between him and me into a real, fleshed out scene.

There are some things to keep in mind with this. Obviously, you're still asking the GM for more of his time. You're also asking him to hand over the reigns of the game, at least a little bit. I like it. Some GMs won't. You pretty much have to respect your GM's wishes. You should also be sure your performance In Game is as good as your performance in your journals, or at least as good as it can be. The other players deserve to be wowed by your awesome character portrayal. The group's goals probably deserve as much attention as your private ones.

E-Mail, Chat, and IM

A step up from physical journals, which have to be passed around, is electronic messaging. To be truthful, the journal in the example above was a Word file we passed back and forth as an e-mail attachment. I don't usually keep hand-written journals. Typing is so much faster, and I'm part of the Sesame Street generation, with the attendant low attention span and desire for instant gratification.

In my last handful of games, quite a bit was done as e-mails between the players and the GM or each other. This works very similarly to journals and bluebooks, but there's some difference. Scenes are "real-time." In other words, it's less likely that a scene you do through Instant Messaging with the GM will be edited after the fact. You will also be generating new material, instead of just fleshing out old stuff. Since the GM is involved, you can cover new ground.

There are also some new things to worry about.

• Be considerate: Yeah, you knew I was going to say that. Even more than with journals, you're taking the GM's time up, because if you're using IM or chat, you're taking up specific blocks of time.
• Keep track of continuity: Scenes played this way will occasionally be set between scenes that already happened In Game. If your character didn't know the location of the McGuffin of Power during the game, he has to wait until after the game time that the last session covered before he can find out. If he only spent an hour by himself, he probably doesn't have time to drive all over town and talk to half a dozen different NPCs.
• Don't get too far ahead: If you're doing things between sessions, keep in mind that the rest of the group isn't going to want to skip two days of game time because you ran off to Reno with your mistress - even if you came back with an important clue. If you don't want to spend two days of game time playing PS2 and reading comic books, then you'd better not spend them IM-ing the GM. In a similar vein, if one player does this kind of thing, all the players should have equal opportunity. This is particularly true if two PCs have conflicting goals. That brings us back to the GM Attention ratio I mentioned earlier. If the GM has to shuffle e-mails and Instant Messages from six players, you only get 1/6th of the total volume.

As always, the key thing to keep in mind is that you're trying to make the game better. I started with a discussion of all the competing goals, and that's where I'm going to end. I've provided tools to help you pursue your character's goals, and presumably your goals. You should do that with an eye toward the goals of the rest of the group.

So that's about it. I think I'm through with goals for now. In fact, I'm not sure what next month's column will hold. I'm up for suggestions.

Till then, good gaming.

Welcome back. In this season of giving, I can think of no better topic than "getting stuff." So that's our topic for this month's column. Last time we talked about all the interconnected goals that make up a roleplaying game. This month, we'll focus on the ones that really matter: Character Goals.

Goal Setting for Fun and Profit

Let's get started with the premise that people have goals. PCs are people, ergo they have goals. First, a group of PCs usually has a goal. In a really simple game, it's probably "finish the dungeon," or something similarly short-term and liner. If that's the way you play, you probably don't need to set a whole lot of goals for your character. The rewards of the game are immediate (treasure), or intrinsic to the character (levels).

In a more complex game, it could be both more complicated, and longer-term. For instance, in a very strange futuristic occult game I played, our group goal was "defend our clan from another clan." We had lots of short-term goals like "repel the invasion," "figure out where the ninjas hid the bomb before they blow up our house," and "blow up the other guy's house." All of those fed into the larger goal in one way or another. A few others didn't, early on.

Within the group, individuals have goals. One PC in the aforementioned game was a kind of adopted member of the clan who wanted full membership status. Another one wasn't really family at all, and only hung out with us because our enemy was his enemy. My character, just to contemplate matters, was in love with a member of the enemy clan.

A single individual can also have contradictory goals. Megan, my character in that game, wanted to find her missing brother - the only member of her original family left alive. When it turned out that he'd been involved in killing all the others and had been working for the main bad guy all along, there was a bit of conflict there. Megan could never bring herself to kill him. Eventually he killed himself to spare her the choice (or else there was just some kind of kill spell on him. I was never completely clear on what happened). Love makes people do strange things.

Choose Your Battles

The trick with setting goals is to set goals you will actually be able to pursue during the game. I'll stick with Megan as an example, so first I'll have to give you some quick background. Megan was a member of a race of dragon shapeshifters. Before the game began, her family was killed. She was the only survivor besides her brother, Michael, who had run away from home years before. She lived with her aunt and her aunt's new family (also dragon-people). Megan was a little weird because she'd learned to take her dragon shape about five years early. In her culture, that made her a full adult even though she was only a sophomore in high school (home-schooled once the faculty found out she could turn into a 10' long, fire-breathing lizard). She was also a magical prodigy, with a mastery of spells that would usually take decades.

She lived in a sort of over-the top, anime cyberpunk world. Take Shadowrun and make it weirder, and you're most of the way there.

I could have set a lot of goals for Megan. In fact, I did, and discarded several as the game shaped up. The ones I considered were:

• "Find out who killed my family"
• "Become a master of the mystic arts"
• "Lead as normal a life as possible"
• "Rebuild my father's mercenary unit"

Of those four, the first was the only one that was really practical. The person who killed Megan's family turned out to be the main bad guy, acting through Michael. Out of character, I pretty much knew that going in. If you hand a GM a plot hook that big, of course he's going to use it. In character, Megan figured it out fairly quickly, which made her even more determined to beat the bad guy. She promised him she'd eat his heart while he was still alive - and at the end of the game she did.

Mastering the arts of magic was going to take longer, even for Megan, than the game was going to run. Besides, she was usually to busy running for her life to study much. She regretted it, but had to mostly put aside gaining much more magical proficency.

Similarly, there was not much chance of her leading a normal life. She tried whenever she got the chance, though. She had a boyfriend (who happened to be the son of a major enemy), went shopping, and liked motorcycles.

She never got the chance to rebuild her father's merc unit. I eventually discarded that goal because it wasn't adding anything to the game. That came down to the fact that the GM didn't think our group really needed a merc unit mucking up his Romeo & Juliet style feud story. I decided, on reflection, that it wouldn't have really been in character for Megan anyway. Leading a merc unit wasn't what she wanted to do. She might have tried, but wouldn't have stuck with it for long - which is pretty much what happened in the game anyway.

The lesson in all this is that you need to pick goals that are within the scope of the GM's game, or at least not too far out of it. The GM should, of course, also be ready to work with you, but you need to keep in mind that he has other characters to consider. He has less room for compromise than you do because there are more demands on his attention. If the GM wants to run a modern crime game where you take down a ring of Triad heroin dealers, then your FBI guy should probably not decide he wants Fox Mulder's job. At the least, he could keep his UFO hunting a little in the background.

Don't Bite Off More than You can Chew

A big, overarching goal like "become Emperor" might not be a great choice for some games. If the game has nothing to do with being Emperor, and your character is never going to so much as go to the Imperial Palace, it's going to be good more for flavor than actual play.

One of Megan's goals, becoming a major sorceress, was just going to take too long. The fact she wanted to do it meant I spent every experience point I could spare on magical stuff, and by the end of the game she was pretty good, but she still had a long way to go. Fortunately, it wasn't a huge goal for me (the player).

Goals you can achieve are fun. In one of the first Pendragon games I played, my character, the not terribly creatively named Sir Daffyd, wanted to win enough land for his huge family. That was, I thought, going to be pretty tough. In fact, since the GM ran the invasion of Rome, he ended up with more than enough land, but most of his male relatives died off in the fighting. The irony just added to the savor.

Follow the Bouncing Ball

This one is the bane of players everywhere, and I feel like a GM shill for bringing it up. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to choose goals that fit within the GM's plot. The GM has a lot to do. He has (if he's good) invested a lot of time in the game, and made a lot of plans for where it's going and what's going to happen. He's made up locations, events and NPCs with whom your character will interact.

Unless you decide to have your character go in the opposite direction at every opportunity. I used to play with a guy who did that, and the one time I GMed for him, it drove me nuts. (kind of sad, really) However, if you pick a course of action that at least makes you hang out in the general neighborhood the GM picked out, the game will run much better for everyone.

If you find that your goal isn't practical, maybe your character will change his priorities. Finding the Seven Cities of Gold is all well and good, but if you just got information that evil Templar agents are going to summon an elder-god in London, maybe now's not the best time to leave for the New World. (Later, after the hellfire, damnation, and waking nightmare begins... that would be a good time to leave.)

A classic example comes from my accursed Fantasy campaign. I call it accursed because every time I try to run it, something bad happens. Neverhtheless, I really like the world, so I keep trying. In this particular attempt, which was cut short by two players having to quit partway in, I had one player who was playing an exiled nobleman. His family had lost a civil war a few years back and fled to the campaign city. His big goal was to go back home and retake his lands. That was actually cool, but unfortunately the player didn't seem to care about anything else. I dropped plot hooks all over the place, but if they didn't involve an invasion of this other country, he didn't care.

Of course, the game got cut short after only a few sessions. Maybe he would have perked up after a while. If so, that would have been fine. I really had plans for his big goal, just not right at the beginning of the game.

Keep Your Friends Close...

Unless you're in a fairly unusual situation, there are some other players. If they've been reading this article, they might have some goals, too. (If not, feel free to show it to them) The game will be better if you decide how your character reacts to those goals. Helping is good, but sometimes so is hindering. Think about what another PC's goal means to your PC. A noble, honest Paladin might not want his Wizard friend to obtain the Staff of Bones if his religious training tells him that the Staff is evil and anyone who wields it is invariably corrupted. That could lead to some interesting intra-party conflict. As long as everyone is mature about it, that's really fun.

The other PCs can also help you with your goals, or might want to get in your way. Look for opportunities to involve other PCs in your plots. Presumably, the group hangs out together. They should take some interest in each other's lives.

In my Now is the Winter game (which I'm sure you're bored of hearing about now), Catlin the Ravanos stripper had a blood disease that she wanted cured so she could feed freely. Dr. Zhou the Tremere offered to help her. While he was doing it, he conned her out of a couple of traits of her blood more than what he needed for his research. He almost used that blood when the bad guys offered him something he really wanted in return for it. If he hadn't bothered to help Catlin, that subplot could never have happened.

In Conclusion

I don't really have a lot of concluding thoughts for this one. Setting and pursuing goals for your character is a great way, possibly the best way, to flesh him out and make him more than the sum of his stats and equipment. On the other hand, it's also a good way to disrupt the game, so you should keep a handle on it.

So, that's it for this month. Next time, we'll talk about how to pursue these lofty goals of yours.

See you then.

Hello again. We've spent a long time talking about all the work you do leading up to a group, so now I figured it was about time to start talking about some playing. Let's talk about goals. Put simply, we've talked about who you are. Now what do you want? (oohhh. B5 Reference. I'm a geek)

What are the goals of an RPG?

The over-simple answer is "To have fun." Everybody leads off with that one. I don't really know why, but who am I to defy tradition. Actually, it's kind of good to mention it. I've played in games that weren't fun. A sort of social inertia builds up, an unpleasant cycle that's not easy to break out of. Discussing the goals further down the pyramid is a good way to make sure that the big goal at the top is met.

So what are the other goals? Basically, I see three.

• The GM's Goals
• The Players' Goals
• The Characters' Goals

The GM's Goals

The GM bought the book. He makes up the campaign. He probably has to clean up his living room (or needs to) so everyone will have a place to sit. Obviously, he has something invested in the game. The GM could have lots of goals, like "kill all the PCs" or "get laid by the cute gamer chick." For our purposes, I'm going to ignore most of those and state the GM's basic goal as "guide the PCs through the story." Even that isn't perfect, but it's a lot more elegant than the three paragraphs it would take me to cover all the nit-picky variables.

The GM has a story to tell. If he's a good GM it's either very flexible or so compelling and well constructed that it never occurs to the players to deviate from it. Still, there are characters the GM wants to use, events he wants to unfold, and possibly themes he wants to explore. For example, in my Now is the Winter Chronicle, I had a bunch of NPCs, primarily the St. Croix family, the brood of Dr. Killian, and some Faeries who were playing out their own conflict. I knew that what would happen eventually was that someone would open a Fairy Mound on the edge of the city and unleash the old god who was bound up there, along with the dark entities who had been trapped with him.

The GM's goals are the most pervasive in the game, since he does more work than anyone else to shape the world. (Though that's not always true. There are some modern games that spread the GM's role out to other players, and even in "old school" games there are variations.)

The Players' Goals

The Players are the prime movers in the game. If the GM doesn't have players, then his story is not going to happen. In my opinion, if any game was produced as a TV series, the PCs should be the people in the opening credits sequence. If someone else would be in the opening credits, then those characters should be the PCs.

The Players' basic goal could be fairly well stated as "to use their characters to overcome obstacles and defeat adversaries." Once again, you could argue the details, but that's the basic. Players may have individual goals for their characters, like "to get to 20th level," or "to become Primogen of Clan Brujah." Those goals may or may not be what the Characters want for themselves.

The Characters' Goals

There are, of course, two broad sets of characters. There are PCs and NPCs. Many and complex are the possible relationships between them. The characters have goals. The "Bad Guys" probably want to destroy the world or do something similarly antisocial. The "Good Guys" probably want to stop them. ("That's where I keep all my stuff!") Further, there are individual goals: rivalries, aspirations, romances.

Baring some fairly deep bits of psychology, the Characters don't really have any goals that the various players don't give them, but in a way they can. Good roleplayers will often realize that the "right" thing for a character to do isn't necessaraly the smartest thing. In fact, a well-fleshed out character can be downright stubborn.

But what does it all mean?

So, we have three, or two and a half, perhaps, sets of goals. Fortunately, they're not mutually exclusive. They do take some care, though. The GM has the largest responsibility. He's likely to do the most work, and what he does has more potential than just about anybody to make the game fail. The GM should really try to make sure the story he wants to tell is one the Players want to participate in. He needs to tailor it to the characters they want to play (though there's quite a bit of give-and-take in that).

The Players also have some responsibilities. I've already talked about picking characters who will fit into the group and into the story. My Now is the Winter game was a mix of political maneuverings and supernatural action. No matter how interesting he was, a character who was only interested questing for Golconda and avoiding political entanglements would have been hard to work with. However, it could have worked if the Player wanted his misbegotten vampire to be continually frustrated in his goals and drawn into Vampire politics and violence.

Beyond just fitting in, it's good if the Players will pursue goals that advance the game. In an old-school D&D dungeon crawl, the PCs don't really need any goals beyond "kill monsters and take their stuff." "Save innocent peasants from evil humanoids" is a nice addition, but not strictly necessary. In more character-driven games, it's nice if the characters have some goals of their own, though. For example (since I love these), let's look at Now is the Winter again.

• O'Neil wanted to serve the Prince. He believed that Prince Marcel held his un-life in his hands, and he'd do just about anything the big guy said. This made him really easy to manage from my perspective. In fact, I occasionally felt like I was railroading his Player. He also had some secondary goals, though, and we got a lot of drama out of the way those goals conflicted with his loyalty.
• Zhou wanted to increase his own power. He was on the way to developing his own Path of Thumaturgy. This was a goal that was much interrupted, but fortunately it wasn't a major goal of the Player.
• Catlin wanted to be safe. She was always trying to find someone to protect her. Unfortunately, "Player Character" is rarely a safe occupation. Catlin's player told me she enjoyed the game, so I suppose she didn't mind.
• Jason wanted to be more powerful. I gotta say that his goal was incredibly disruptive to the rest of the game. His Player didn't really seem to care about my plot or about intraparty relations at all. Everybody was at his throat after a while. Eventually, I found a way to
• Miles wanted to win the love of Moira Pendragon, the Tremere Regent. I was kind of disappointed with Miles' romantic subplots. I tried hard to paint Moira as not being worthy of Miles, but his Player never got the picture. Not even when I threw in a cute Toreador chick to woo him. Still, it was fun. Miles kept involving himself with the Tremere even though he tended to get in trouble for it.

From the above example, you can kind of see where GM, Player, and Character goals overlap and conflict. Jason's Player was so focused on his goals that he drove me nuts sometimes. I finally managed to work his pursuit of political power into my apocalyptic plot, but it took some work. Then the guy had to move to San Antonio for a new job. I hate it when Real Life gets in the way of my gaming. By playing Sire Miles' infatuation for Moira, Cathy ran some pretty heavy risks. Just about everybody at one time or another did something that annoyed the other Players. They were a really dysfunctional little group.

So, what does it all mean?

It means that a good game is going to involve some compromises. Unless he's incredibly talented, the GM is not going to get to tell exactly the story he envisioned when he was planning the game. Important NPCs will get killed before they get around to delivering key clues. PCs will become obsessed with "vital clues" that the GM only threw in to add a little flavor. Players will have their own preferences, which the GM needs to take into account.

The Players also need to be ready to compromise, both with the GM and with each other. While the PCs may all hate each other, the real people involved need to be cooperating on the shared goal of "having fun."

It's easy to forget that the other people in the game aren't there for your entertainment. You should be trying to have fun, but when your fun stomps on someone else's, you should consider pulling back. If you really want to do a lot of investigation and interaction, and the rest of the group just wants to kill monsters, maybe you can work on a timeshare system. Maybe you can PBeM with the GM between sessions where your character goes off and investigates things, then comes back and tells the group where the monsters they want to kill are hiding. After a while, the other Players might get interested in what you're doing.

If all you care about is fighting and the rest of the group wants to play a soap opera, then you should probably just take the Narcolepsy disadvantage and play Diablo between combats. Your utter lack of knowledge of what happened while your character was unconscious will seem like good roleplaying.

(More seriously, there are limits to how far compromise will go. Some people shouldn't play with some other people. That's just life.)

So, I've talked about what Players should do a little bit. The GM is beyond the scope of this column. I haven't really hit on the Characters too much. The complex relationship between Character and Player deserves its own column, which, not coincidentally, is what we're going to discuss next.

Till then, have fun.

Welcome back. Thanks for stopping by. Last time we discussed how your group got together. This time we'll discuss who should be in the group. A group of PCs is generally a task force of some kind. They're adventurers who will be presented with a variety of challenges and obstacles. They need skills relevant to the tasks at hand, and some means of coordinating their actions.

I've had to revise my thoughts on this topic quite a bit since I realized that not everybody has me or one of my friends as a GM. The optimum spread of character abilities that work in my games may not be very useful for yours.

So lets start with the basics.

Play Style:

The type of game you're playing will heavily influence the makeup of your group. If you're playing in a good, old fashioned dungeon crawl then you can focus on combat abilities, worrying only a little about non-combat skills. If you're more interested in playing average people in extraordinary circumstances, your characters will have a wide range of skills, many of which won't be particularly relevant to the tasks at hand. If you're playing a "Feeble Mortals Against the Mighty Old Ones" game like Call of Cthulhu then you'll need a range of social and investigative skills. Combat prowess will be of limited use.

Personal preference is important, too. The group I'm in now likes tight, well-rendered stories -- similar to what you might see in an hour-long TV drama. There are subplots and side trips, but mostly everything relates to the main plot. That may change as the game grows, of course. I've played in a couple of groups where we spent as much time on the characters' personal lives as we did pursuing "adventure goals." I've also seen groups where combat is the main focus. Social interaction was limited, and frequently abbreviated so we could get on to the next fight scene. In a game like that, a bookish, social character is probably not going to have much to do.

Most of my experience has been in games with a mix of challenges where a wide range of skills was required. Even if combat was the primary focus, other activities took up a good share of time, and characters that were only useful in combat could sometimes be left out. Since I only have my experience to draw upon, and since I figure that kind of group is the best example for the purposes of this article, I'm going to talk about building groups with a range of skills, rather than just fighters or just occult dabbling antiques dealers. This is probably the most common situation, and it's easy to adapt to styles of play with different expectations.

So, let's move on.

Group Construction:

I have never encountered a group of players who sat down with the GM, having no personal expectations, and asked, "So, what kind of game is it?" then negotiated with each other to make sure they had all the needed roles filled. I'd like to try it some time, but I doubt I ever will. When a potential GM pitches a game for me, the first thing that usually pops into my head is a character concept.

Most group construction takes place after some or all of the players have chosen concepts. Usually the more flexible players, or the ones who just showed up late, modify their concepts to fill needed roles. That generally works out just fine, since there really aren't that many roles to fill. Unless your GM is just an obstructionist, he's probably not going to make your ex-Marine, former cop, school Librarian, and town dog catcher go on a geological survey mission to Madagascar. (Well, he might, but he's probably going to take into account the fact that none of the characters know anything about geology -- work with me here.)

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2^nd ed. divided up the roles very neatly: Warrior, Rogue, Magic User, and Cleric. Warriors were primarily combatants. Rogues primarily snuck around. Magic Users primarily threw spells. Clerics also primarily threw spells, but they were different spells. Honest.

Seriously, that wasn't a bad spread. Warriors were useful for defeating adversaries. Rouges were able to circumvent physical barriers. Magic Users wielded a lot of different abilities, potentially able to substitute for just about any other party member. Clerics were good for support roles, mostly healing injured companions. Some of the secondary classes provided redundancy, which I'll talk about presently.

You don't have to have a class system to have specialists. Most game systems reward specialization to one degree or another, since a character who's specialized in one area has better skills than one who spreads his points evenly. Even games where all the characters are similar, for instance Ars Magica, Amber, or just about any superhero game offer opportunities for specialization.

So, why bother to specialize? Some games make you specialize (Dungeons and Dragons, Cyberpunk 2020). Some games just reward specialization (in Fading Suns a starting character can pretty much be good at one thing). Other games leave the field open, but it's a good idea to specialize anyway. A group of specialists is more capable than a group of generalists at a similar level of experience. Look at The Princess Bride. Wesley is superhuman. If he was a PC, then his player was probably the GM's Significant Other or drug supplier. The other main characters, though, were not unusual in and of themselves. Visini was small and stunted, so he developed his intellect. Fezik was incredibly strong, but not really smart enough to manage on his own. Inigo was totally dedicated to swordplay, and pretty helpless in any other arena. If he'd been a better investigator, he might have found Count Rougan. All three of them together are roughly as "powerful" as Wesley, who would have had a vastly higher experience level or character point total.

Group Composition:

So we've established that specialists are useful. Now, what kind of specialists do we need? Ultimately, that depends on your game. CoC Investigators need significantly different abilities than D&D treasure hunters. These are some general roles, along with some explanation of what each role is good for.

Warriors: Role-playing games are mostly about combat. Even games where combat isn't the focus frequently include episodes of violence. Warriors are focused on various means of harming others. For my purposes, a swordsman, a Shao Lin monk, and a pyrokenetic teenager are all Warriors. The Warrior's job is to eliminate threats and protect his companions. In a combat heavy game, you probably want most of your characters to be primarily Warriors, but several might have secondary specialties. In a game focusing on social interaction or investigation, you might turn it around so that most of your characters have other primary specialties, but some or all also have some skills in combat.

Scouts: Scouts are adept at moving around without attracting notice. Where the Warriors blow thorough obstacles, the Scouts generally work around them. Used carefully, a Scout is more effective than a Warrior in some situations. Stealth and guile can get you past difficulties that brute force can't defeat. Scouts almost always have a secondary specialty, since it doesn't do much good to get past all the obstacles if you can't do anything useful when you get there. A Scout who is also a Warrior can be particularly nasty. Most people call them Ninjas...

Investigator: Knowing where to go is as important as being able to get there, and knowing who to hit is sometimes more important than knowing how to hit them. Investigators can be magicians with scrying spells, astrally projecting psychics, or good old-fashioned gumshoes. Investigators almost always have secondary specialties, frequently social skills. Lots of gamers overlook the value of investigation. Careful gathering of information can help you avoid a lot of trouble later on, though.

Talkers: I couldn't really think of a better name for Talkers. The AD&D Bard is the classic Talker. A Cyberpunk Fixer is a good example, too. Talkers are good at dealing with people. Their role overlaps with the role of Investigator quiet a bit since one of the most common uses for their skills is to convince people to tell them things. Talkers usually split their skills between social and investigative skills since they overlap so much to begin with. Talkers who are better at giving orders are frequently also Warriors. The ones who specialize in convincing people of things that might not strictly be true find the skills of a Scout to be handy for those times that they can't fool all the people.

Healer: Healers are adept at patching up their comrades, most often the Warriors. In games with Healing Magic, Healing is likely to be a primary specialty. Let's face it; the Fighters could really kill all the zombies. They keep the Clerics around for "Cure Light Wounds." In other games, Healing is more likely to be a backup specialty.

Expert: This is kind of a catchall category. An Expert has a particular skill that's useful in the right circumstances. A Healer is a certain type of expert. Others are Pilots, Weaponsmiths, and Scientists. Esoteric Experts are probably the most dispensable specialty most of the time, but when you need one you really, really need one. In my games, Expert tends to be a backup specialty, or something NPCs do. Ghost (way back from the Character Creation examples) was a Warrior first, and a Weaponsmith a very distant second. Curiously, the way the game turned out his skills in the smithy turned out to be more crucial to the overall plot.

Jack-of-All-Trades: After all this talk about specialists, I'm going to extol the virtues of a generalist. If you have the room in your group to work one in, a Jack-of-All-Trades can really come in handy. He won't be as effective at anything as his companions, but he'll be useful just about everywhere. Since most characters can't be in two places at once, it can be really useful to have two people with similar skills. That said, it's probably best if a Jack of All Trades is at least a little better than average at one. A Warrior with a wide range of low-level skills is a good choice. In a D&D game, the Magic User is sort of a Jack-of-All-Trades. The right choice of spells can do just about anything any other character can do. If you're coming up on a big fight, load up on Fireballs. If you're trying to sneak across the country, Invisibility and some illusions will come in handy. If you need to make some friends, Charm Person is a good choice.

Redundancy:

The above descriptions hinted at this. You want to be sure your party isn't over-specialized. If you only have one Scout, you'll blunder into a lot of trouble he gets taken out. If you only have one Medic, everybody had better be very, very careful if anything happens to him. Besides, an over-specialized character is likely to be boring to play whenever the game doesn't revolve around his specialty.

Ideally, every character in your group can pitch in to help with one other character's job, and be at least a little competent at a third. Perhaps sadly, one of those three jobs should probably be Warrior. I've played characters that were totally helpless in combat. It can be fun once in a while, but it's not tactically the best choice. It can also irritate the GM, since he'll probably have to modify scenarios somewhat to take care of you. If you're going to play a character that can't fight at all, you should take care to make sure he's pretty good at something else.

Your exact choice of specialties will be dependant on the type of game you're playing, and the backgrounds of the characters. Here's the spread on my current Shadowrun game. I'm running Shadowrun to fill in for a while. Our Tribe 8 GM had to quit, and the next GM is too busy to start his game, so I decided to run a somewhat episodic game with a few subplots to keep things connected. I'm a big fan of Cowboy Bebop (an Anime about interstellar bounty hunters, for those who might not know) so I decided to capture a little of that flavor in my game. The Runners aren't bounty hunters, but they're more or less "good guys" operating on the edges of the underworld. Everybody's got at least a little combat skill, since I don't consider an episode complete without a massive fight that lowers property values in a six-block radius. (Well, maybe not every episode...)

The players didn't set out to coordinate their characters, but they checked in with each other to make sure they had the major bases covered. Here's what they came up with:

• Alex Black (Bodyguard): Alex has enough cyberware that he's as tough as a Troll. He's also a crack shot with a pistol. His primary specialty is Warrior. He can also handle the role of a Talker in the right situations. He's charismatic and good looking, and used to work amongst the rich and famous.
• Father Angus (Bull Shaman): Father Angus is moderately better at Conjuring than Sorcery, and has ready access to Spirits. In my terms he's an Expert in magic and kind of a Jack-of-All-Trades. He's most useful as a Healer, and pretty handy as support in a lot of applications. He's not a great Scout on his own, but his spirits can help the group's other Scout. He's OK in a fight, but mostly good at summoning a spirit to harass the enemy so his friends have an advantage, etc...
• Cammy (Con Artist/Burglar): Chameleon, Cammy for short, is adept at stealth, breaking and entering, and confidence games. She's a good Scout, and a decent Investigator or Talker when the situation calls for it.
• Ena (Elf Mage): Ena is the group's other Magical Expert. Like Angus, she's kind of a Jack-of-All-Trades. She's most useful as a Scout, with Clairvoyance and a Mask spell to let her see things the group's enemies don't really intend. She's got a pretty good Power Bolt for when things get hairy. She's not as adept a Conjurer as Angus is, and Elementals aren't as readily available, but they're more useful when she summons one.
• Ziff (Ork Combat Decker): Ziff is big and strong, with some cyberware to help him survive a fight. He's also a pretty good computer hacker. I'm going to tag him as an Expert in running the Matrix. Within the Matrix, he's mostly useful as an Investigator. He's also not a bad Warrior.

This group is a nice spread. I don't think they would have done a lot better if they'd tried to coordinate from the beginning. So far, the only real weakness they have is a lack of Investigative talent, which they don't need a lot of. Most of their runs don't require more than basic fact-finding. If the game runs long enough for much development, they'll probably decide they need some more investigative skills in the meat world. Ziff will probably decide to leave his Combat abilities alone and get more adept at Matrix running. Another solution is for every character to develop a wider range of contacts the group can tap for information.

And that's about it for this time. Next up: Combat Roles. See you then.

Welcome back. Thanks for stopping by. This marks the beginning of my second year of columns. The fact that you're still here either means I'm not as bad at this as I think, or you're all literary masochists.

Last year we talked about character creation. Of course, there's more to a game than a single character. Besides all those guys the GM plays, you probably have to deal with two or more other players and their characters. I touched on this way back in the first column, and for the next few columns I'm going to expand on that idea.

All the Player Characters will form some kind of group. Whether it's an effective group or not depends on how the characters interact. A good group needs a range of skills and abilities appropriate to the group's goals. For instance, a team made up of a portrait artist, a street mime, and a hurdy-gurdy man with a monkey would probably not make the most effective hostile insertion team. On the other hand a ninja, a navy SEAL, and a MI6 agent might not do all that well collecting change on the boardwalk, at least not without bloodshed.

A team also needs some measure of cohesion. They need to have some means of making group decisions, either through a command structure or some type of democracy. If they can't act in concert they're not really a team, just some people (probably highly armed) hanging out in the same place.

The players as a group need to build characters who will fit into a team (Unless they're playing a highly competitive game like Amber, perhaps). The beginning of team building is figuring out what the team does and how it formed. The GM may have something to say about this. He might tell you "You will be a team of Rebel Agents with the mission of delivering the Death Star plans to Princess Leia." That's pretty specific, while still allowing for a range of character types. The GM's concept could be even more restrictive, like "You're the only surviving members of a Ninja clan that was just wiped out by the evil Shogun." Often, though the GM just tells you to make up whatever characters you want. That has been my general experience, both as a player and as a GM.

The "open call" sort of games, if done well, provide the players with the most freedom and produce some of the most fun groups. If done poorly, however, they lead to the variations of the old cliche of "you're all at the tavern when an old wizard comes in and says he's looking for adventurers..." With a little more thought, you can do a lot better. Just because the GM didn't say your characters had to start the game already knowing each other is no reason why they shouldn't.

So then, who are your characters and how do they know each other?

Let's start at the beginning. Usually the GM will have some concept of a game. It's a good idea to find out as much as possible about what's going on before you make up characters. Find out if there's anything the GM really likes or hates. It's a good idea to avoid things you know the GM's not going to like. Find out where the story will begin. With that as your starting point, figure out who you want to play and how they got there. Start with generalities and hammer out the specifics later.

Once everybody has a character and a general idea of how that character wound up at the game's starting locale, you can start looking for connections. Every character does not need to know every other character, and nobody necessarily has to be best friends. What you want, if you can get it, is a lose web. Character A knows B and C; C knows D, and D knows E (who is secretly A's half-brother). When the game starts off, those characters would tend to gravitate toward one-another just because everybody else is a totally unknown variable. You can start building a real team as you go along.

Example:

I never tried to build a really cohesive group until my Vampire Chronicle titled "Now is the Winter." I gave the players some direction by giving them several concepts from which to choose. The one they liked best was "Servants of the Prince," but nobody wanted to be an actual "servant of the Prince."

I love being the GM.

So anyway, what I finally wound up with was:

Bradley O'Neil - Losombra Antitribu and former Arcanum member. Bradley was pretty easy. When the player initially gave me the concept I told him the only way such a poor fool would have survived was with the protection of the Prince.

He was an occultist embraced by a Sabbat Losombra. She was so cruel that he eventually attacked her and, by a stroke of luck, managed to diablorize her. Having been a member of the Arcanum, he knew enough about vampire politics to know that was bad. He fled to the one city where he knew any other vampires, and begged for the protection of the Prince (who kind of owed him a favor).

Jason Sinclair - Brujah political manipulator. Jason was the Childe of the Brujah Primogen. The Primogen was fairly weak owing to the fact that the Prince recently killed half his clan in a fit of anger.

Jason didn't present too much of a problem, either. He Bradely O'Neil was one of the Prince's flunkies, so they would have run into each other from time to time.

Dr. Zhou - Tremere Feng Shui expert. An old, Chinese doctor embraced by the Tremere for his occult knowledge.

Once again, it was no great stretch to say he would have known Bradley. The players even went above and beyond the call of duty and made up some personal connections. The Tremere Chantry was in the local university, and Bradley taught a night class. Better yet, my city's Chinatown was within Brujah controlled territory, so Dr. Zhou and Jason had crossed paths on ocassion.

Catlin (who's last name I can't remember) - Ravanos Stripper. (Why Amanda wanted to play a Ravanos Stripper I truly don't know). She was a former blood doll/prostitute. The Ravanos who eventually Sired her used to rent her out to other vampires as food. One of her customers was careless and gave her AIDS. Rather than see her die, her Sire embraced her. Later he regretted wasting perfectly good favors on a "chew toy" and abandoned her.

Catlin's story gave her some great hooks which I'll get into a little later. In the short run, we just needed a reason she'd hang out with all these other vampires. Since Bradley was an agent of the Prince, the players involved decided he got the job of teaching her the ropes after her Sire kicked her out. That put her next to one of my two prime movers, which was good enough for me.

Sir Miles - Gargoyle.

Sir Miles' player wanted him to be an ancient warrior who had been serving the Tremere for centuries. Since I didn't want a 1000 year old warrior of death in my game, I insisted that a huge portion of that time be spent in Torpor. Since I already had a Tremere, a Gargoyle was easy enough to fit in. If nobody had been playing a Tremere, I would have insisted that Miles' player come up with a connection to somebody else.

All in all, they were pretty cohesive, even though there was still a lot of room for conflict. In fact, it wasn't long before a couple of them were plotting to kill each other, but that's a story for another day.

Once you have a loose structure, it's time to start putting the pieces together. If the GM has guidelines follow them. For instance, in the Dungeons and Dragons game I'm playing now, the DM wanted to throw us together in the first adventure. Our pre-game planning was limited to figuring out how we might interact once we actually met. Since one PC was a Northman (and really big and strong) it wouldn't have been a good idea to have another PC who hated the Northmen with unquenchable passion. An initial prejudice would have been fine. In fact, we got a little bit of that kind of thing. But, the players needed to know what to expect going in to avoid hard feelings and player to player misunderstandings.

If the GM doesn't have any preferences, then you can do whatever you want. Try to figure out what's logical based on everybody's characters. In games like Pendragon, your characters might have well all grown up together. It's a good idea to work out these social dynamics early on. I've come up with really cool ideas for my character after hearing another PC introduce an element from his. I personally like to create the closest relationships possible (within reason), but some people like to start off as relative strangers.

Whatever you do, however you do it, you'll eventually end up with a bunch of characters who you know will soon be thrown together. Your next step is to figure out, at least in general, how they're going to interact. This is when you start really comparing histories and doing a bit of character editing.

Example:

Going back to the PCs in Now is the Winter, we had five vaguely connected characters. As the PCs played around with their backgrounds, some interesting hooks emerged.

Jason wanted the Brujah to run the city. It had been held by the Ventrue since it was more than a crossroads with two buildings, but everybody needs a dream. In the short term, he just wanted the Brujah to be less weak than they were. Still, his political ambitions were quickly going to bring him into conflict with two other PCs. Anything he did to or around the Prince was going to involve Bradley, since the Prince used Bradley as an agent in any matter he didn't want to risk one of his own clan over. Also, since Chinatown was in the middle of Brujah territory, Jason and Zhou were eventually going to be fighting over a piece of territory.

Dr. Zhou didn't intentionally cross any of the PCs, but the easiest way to work Miles into the rest of the group was to have the Regent put Miles under Dr. Zhou's direction. Zhou was also the Regent's Childe, so she tended to send him on her errands, particularly since she didn't like her Second. That made it easy to tie Zhou to the Prince.

Miles didn't have too many connections. His only real link was to Dr. Zhou. That was OK, since as GM I was able to quickly insert some others. I made sure Miles owed Jason a small Presitation debt in the first session.

Catlin was already connected to Bradely. She looked at him kind of like her Sire early on, and later fell in love with him (more or less, these are vampires we're talking about). She also came up with another cool connection due to one of her Flaws. Catlin was a Plague Carrier. Since she's had AIDS when she was Embraced, there was no easy way to get rid of it, but the Tremere with their blood magic, might know a way. If any Tremere would know, it would be a freaky blood alchemist with all kinds of esoteric medical knowledge. Luckily enough, there was one of those in the city, Dr. Zhou.

Bradely didn't really need any more connections. Almost every PC had some link to him already.

These hooks didn't turn them into a perfect team by any means, but they did establish some initial relationships. Bradely was the natural leader, with Jason always trying to wrest control away from him. Zhou could be counted on to be loyal, but only for as long as the Regent wanted him to. Right there I had a cool dynamic with all three subtly playing against each other. Miles wasn't interested in being in charge, but his ties to Zhou and Jason, along with his natural tendency to want to follow someone, put him in an interesting position during all the power struggles.

And there you have it. A group built this way has some possibilities that a group just thrown together at random doesn't really have. Before I started doing things like this, most of my PCs would interact with NPCs but had relatively little to do with each other. There weren't many in-character conversations between players, particularly in the early stages of the game. That left a lot of burden on the GM if players wanted to play through anything beyond the basics of the "adventure."

In Now is the Winter my players spent almost as much time interacting with each other (arguing, back-stabbing, sharing blood...) as they did talking to NPCs. That turned out to be a good thing, since it gave me time to figure out what was supposed to happen next while they were arguing about it.

The next column in this series will cover roles within the group. It doesn't matter how well integrated your characters are. If they don't have the skills they need to get the job done, they're going to be in trouble. So be sure to tune in for The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker.

See ya' then.

Hi folks. Welcome back. This is the first totally original column I've written for RPG.net. I'm extending my series on character creation one, and just possibly for two more columns.

Today's topic is adapted characters. Almost everybody gets the idea at some point "wouldn't it be cool to play Wolverine?" or Connor McLeod, or Luke Skywalker, or James Bond, or some other literary character. In superhero gaming it's almost expected some times. In other genres, the possibility hovers like the vision of the Holy Grail, beautiful but unattainable (unless you're Galahad, and then you'll die when you get it).

So, for purposes of discussion, let's assume you want to play some literary figure in an upcoming game. My first piece of advice would be "don't." Outside of some fairly specific circumstances, it hardly ever works.

There are some pretty formidable obstacles. First of all, in most RPGs, characters start at a fairly low level of ability. The heroes of novel, comic, and screen, on the other and, start off at or near the apex of their development. One only has to look at Raiders of the Lost Ark, and then watch some Young Indiana Jones to see what I mean. (A fact that will become useful later) Most of the time, starting characters simply don't have the capabilities necessary to totally match their literary counterparts. They often can't be as good, or skilled in as many areas. If all your hopes are set on your grizzled bounty hunter being as cool as Boba Fett, you're doomed to disappointment.

Second, in many cases the worlds are different. Characters are partially a product of their environments. The Highlander needs the game. Otherwise he's just a psychotic antiques dealer. Taken out of context, a lot of characters just don't completely work. I could make a short, Canadian assassin with metal laced bones and hand blades in almost any cyberpunk game, but without all that backstory, he wouldn't really be Wolverine. This is less of an obstacle than the first, but you've still got to consider it. A related problem is that, while the background might support someone very much like the character you have in mind, the game doesn't really translate him very well. Going back to my pseudo-Wolverine, I can come very close to simulating all his abilities, but I can't get it exactly without a "Mutant" healing factor. My simulation can have all the concrete abilities (to some degree), but so can anybody else.

Third, most of us aren't really very good actors. (Not you, you're great, I'm sure. But I have to write this for all those other people) A great deal of what makes a character "cool" is the way he's portrayed, even more than anything he does. Look at Boba Fett. In the original movies he gets about four scenes, and in his one fight he gets knocked off the skiff and swallowed by the Sarlacc. He never does anything really amazing, yet he has tremendous mystique. Unless you can pull off that same quiet menace, your armor-clad, weapon-festooned bounty hunter just isn't going to be as cool as Boba Fett no matter how good a shot he is. Even if you can portray a character you created very well, it can be hard to imitate someone else's character. So much of the performance is personal that your portrayal is likely to be different, and possibly disappointing.

So, if you shouldn't simulate characters then what's the point of this column?

Good question.

I use quite a bit of literary inspiration when I make characters. There are several things you can do that lead to some really interesting characters.

The Early Adventures of...

Remember young Indy? While you probably can't make the fully mature version of a literary character fit into the stats available to a starting PC, you probably can make a younger, less experienced version.

I still don't really recommend this, since it doesn't address the fact that your character doesn't fit into the game world - he belongs in some other world. It would probably work, though. If there's some background element you want to have, just work your way back along the character's life until you get there and see if the less experienced version fits. In some ways, this might be interesting since it lets you play "what if?" Maybe your version will handle a problem better than the original did and go on to an entirely different fate.

I've never done this, but I did once kind of do it the other way around. There was a Vampire Chronicle I played some years ago, troupe style, with vampires who were borderline Elders. I had reason to believe that my current PC was not long for this world, and that it would be a good idea to have one who was a little better at fighting than my Toreador musician.

I had recently seen Lonesome Dove, and read the book. It occurred to me that Agustus McCrea would make a really cool Gangrel. Of course, with an elder's worth of points, I didn't have to make too many adaptations.

Inspired By...

I do this a lot. So do a lot of other people. If you can figure out what it is you like about a literary character, sometimes you can distill out those elements and work them into a new character. I do this in supers games sometimes just for the challenge of figuring out how to make an interesting character's powers work in Champions (or Silver Age Sentinels, these days).

More often, I'll just take one or two elements that I thought were cool and try to work them into a fairly original character. I loved Mick Jagger's bounty hunter character in Freejack, and somehow he turned into a Lone Star Combat Mage in the Shadow Run game I was playing. All I really kept was the cool coat and the attitude. Eventually, I ditched the coat, too.

Another Place, Another Time...

This option is really cool, and actually feigns creativity if you don't tell anybody what you've done.

Take a character that really inspires you, then translate him to a totally different environment. Change the details so that they fit the new setting. Depending on how much the backgrounds differ, you might have to change things quite a bit. Find the key points of the character's background, personality, and cababilities, and figure out what those elements do.

Wolverine is a good example. His background is somewhat mysterious (unless you've read Origin, which I haven't). He's a mutant who was forcibly recruited into a secret super-soldier program. We don't know why, how, or by whom. Later on, he was heavily involved in the Yakuza, and is sort of a Ronin. He's got powers that make him a devastating tracker and fighter, almost impossible to kill in human scale combat. He's cynical, violent, and loyal.

So, since I've always liked Wolverine, I want to translate him to some new environment. Cyberpunk is too easy, as I already said. Fantasy is tempting, but I can't think of a system to which he would adapt well for purposes of this example. I love Eden Studios' Witchcraft game, so let's do that one.

Witchcraft has the Combine and various other nasty groups, any of whom would be likely to try to build a cadre of sociopathic, superpowered ninja death warriors. One of them will easily stand in for Weapon: X.

Capabilities are a little harder. Right off the bat, I think Wolverine would do well as a Feral, or with the Disciplines of the Flesh (psychological trauma based shapeshifting, for those not in the know). Either one will give him the raw combat ability. Neither are quite the same as low-end cybernetics and a mutant healing factor, but they have similar effects. Divine Inspiration and Tao Chi won't really work because they require too much willing participation. I'm more familiar with the Disciplines (since my copy of the Abomination Codex never materialized after I ordered it). They also lend themselves more to the kind of torturous process that Weapon: X seemed to be. I can see Combine agents kidnapping likely kids from the streets and subjecting them to horrors just to see if they develop superpowers quite easily.

My Witchcraft-Wolverine isn't likely to be as skilled as the real thing unless we're playing characters built on a lot more points than usual. Wolverine has 50 years or so of experience that I just can't simulate, particularly after I blow all my points on cool magic powers. I could do the longevity thing, (and might buy the increased lifespan just for the heck of it) but I would probably start my Wolvie off fairly soon after his transformation. As a nod to the Samurai part of the original's background, I'd probably make my character have an interest in the martial arts. Maybe he doesn't like the terrible rage inside him, and wants some way to control it. I might say he'd had some kind of ties with the Storm Dragons in the past.

That covers the basics. We've got a rough background, a pretty good idea of where to put the numbers, and, what the personality would be like.

Let's give him a name. Billy Logan. Normally, I wouldn't use a name remotely related to the character I was stealing for one of these things. Doing that kind of rubs everybody's nose in my lack of creativity and runs the risk of turning an otherwise serious character into a joke. But hey, this is just an article, not a real character. (That might be next month, if I'm lucky)

Billy Logan was a kid in trouble. Home was no shelter, so he ended up on the streets, in gangs, and eventually in a Combine laboratory. Somehow, he escaped, or maybe they let him go. His memories of the past are hazy. He knew he had power, and a very strong urge to hurt people who seemed to deserve being hurt.

Since then, he's wandered the country, mostly in the area around wherever the game takes place. Mostly he's been a fighter, and sometimes the line between fighter and assassin has been very thin. Deep down, he wants something better. He wants to find peace. He also wants to find a home.

I'd give him high physical stats, and in deference to his background, I'd make sure he could have claws. He wouldn't have a lot of high skills, other than hand to hand fighting ability - which would be as high as I could possibly make it. I'd also want to be sure to assign a Flaw of an personal nemesis, another survivor of the Combine project who's bigger and stronger, but maybe not quite as skilled. I absolutely wouldn't call Billy's nemesis "Victor Creed." (But I wouldn't resist the urge to use the first and last names of two different members of Creed for his name)

In one way, Billy sort of breaks the rules. Normal Disciples of the Flesh have to dredge up memories of past trauma to activate their shapeshifting powers. Since Billy doesn't really have any clear memories, I'd want to get permission from the GM to say that Billy's memories are disconnected flashbacks that he doesn't really understand. If I was the GM, I'd let me do it.

The end result doesn't look a whole lot like Wolverine, but you can see the resemblances if you know where to look.

Next month is in a bit of a flux. I hope to do the last piece of this series "The Sordid Truth," which will be a more or less step-by-step rendition of me really making a character, along with observations from the other people in the group. That's totally dependent on me getting into a game before the next deadline.

Failing that, we'll be starting a short series on group dynamics.

See ya' then.

Personality Based Character Creation

This column finishes up my original four part series on Character Creation. It also finishes up the first four "reprint" articles from Sabledrake. For the next couple of months, at least, we'll be in entirely new territory.

We've done characters based on a set of abilities, on a type of personality, and now we're going to talk about building a character starting with his history. I've only really done this once, so this is the most artificial of my examples.

Step 1: Choose your Background

Obviously, if you want to build a character from the background up, you start with the background. This is more involved than the character story you might write for an average character. You're going to use this background as the framework for everything else you do. It needs to define your character's life in some pretty serious detail, and to connect him to the rest of the campaign.

If you're building a character by beginning with his background, there's probably some compelling reason to do so. Maybe you're making up a character related to another PC, or one who has to fit into a specific slot in the story. That's your starting place. If your new character is supposed to be the long-lost brother of an existing PC, then you should start by examining the existing PC's background. Figure out where the two characters' backgrounds met, and where they diverged. Maybe you're turning an existing NPC into a PC. This really happened to me once, but it's a long story. In this case you probably have some idea of capabilities and personality, but you need to build a history to fit all the bits together. Anyway, find your starting point and work your way into a full background.

Step 2: Building the Frame

Once you have your starting place, work out the major points. Ideas for personality and capabilities will occur to you as you work, since what you're doing is deciding on the experiences that shaped your character's life. Try to make logical decisions, but don't hold yourself back if you get a couple of wild ideas. It's the GM's job to stifle your creativity.

Figure out where your character was born, and under what circumstances. What was his early life like? Were there any really significant events in his childhood? Children are remarkably resilient, but a child who lived through a really traumatic experience was probably marked by it in some way. Even in childhood look for the chance to connect your character to other characters or major game events. Then try to figure out what your character would have taken away from those experiences. You don't need all the answers now, but you should be asking the questions.

Go through your character's entire life up to date. You don't need to chronicle every moment, or even every year, but you should have a decent biographical outline when you're done. You want a pretty good idea of what happened at each stage of your character's life, and what effect those events would have had. That will help you work out the personality and skills and so forth.

That set up a really interesting dynamic once we started the game, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Step 3: Fill in the Blanks

Now you have a fairly complete story, and probably a decent idea of what the character is like. It's time to fill in all the slots on the character sheet. By now you've made most of the big decisions just as a consequence of writing out the character's past. If you decided he was adopted by a ninja clan, then he'd probably better have the skills of a ninja (even though there's no such thing as ninja). If he's part of a family of wizards, then his life is going to be really miserable if he doesn't know any magic - which might be very fun to play. If he's the adopted son of a Kansas farmer then it's up to you to convince the GM about the dying alien planet and the yellow sun thing. Otherwise, he'd probably better join the Marines when he grows up if you want him to be a big, tough adventurer type.

Make the personality fit the background and abilities. A trained warrior is probably not a total pacifist. A lifelong librarian probably doesn't know Hidden Ultimate Ninja Mantis style Kung Fu, and wouldn't want to hit anybody with Dim Mak if she did. (except for those annoying patrons who download AOL Instant Messenger on the public internet terminals - but maybe that's just me) There aren't really a lot of limitations. The world is full of people who had very similar experiences, but totally different personalities.

Step 4: Finish Up

File off all the rough edges, and work out the final connections to the rest of the game, and you're pretty much done. Working from the background doesn't leave you much to do at the end, since it forces you to work so logically at the beginning.

Obviously, the GM will want some input. If he doesn't like your story, you can't really move forward at all. It's a good idea to consult with him every step of the way so as to avoid continuity errors. ("Your ninja can't have trained at the Red Dragon Pagoda when he was sixteen. It was destroyed twenty years ago, and he's only twenty-five now. Do you want to make him over forty? I'd be glad to drag out the aging tables...")

Compare your character's story to the other PCs. If you haven't already found a good connection, try to come up with one now. Since most Background characters come up as a response to past game events, this is usually not too much of a problem.

Once you know where he's been, and have a good idea how he got to wherever he starts the game you're ready to go.

Next month we enter some uncharted waters. I have two articles, and I'm not sure which one I'll give you first. Either we'll do "Even Better than the Real Thing" which is about how to adapt a character from another source or we'll do "How it Really Happens," in which I reveal the sordid truth about how I really make up characters, instead of this sanitized, organized facade that I've been showing you.

Personality Based Character Creation

Last time I showed you how to create a character starting with his capabilities. This time around we're going to start with his personality. I use a lot of these techniques in all my characters, since with a few exceptions I have a pretty firm idea of the personality I want to play right at the beginning. There's also a lot of crossover to capabilities, since what you can do is a big factor in how you act.

Before I go much further, I'd better explain that I've never made a character based on a deep psychological profile, and that's not what I'm proposing now. A Personality based character starts with more of a character sketch. Many of the specific details won't be available until you get the character's background and capabilities nailed down. The first step of building a Personality based character is less work than either of the other two types. At the beginning you're just going to build a thin framework, which you will be filling in as you go along.

Step 1: The Personality

OK, this part is pretty obvious. Figure out what kind of character you want to play. Some people will say that no matter what you decide, your character is going to be pretty much like yourself. I don't think that's completely true, but I know from experience that it's hard to play someone a lot different. You don't need to make a lot of decisions right now, but there are a few things you need to know.

What's your character's general outlook? Is the glass half empty or half full, or are you just going to drink whatever's left to forestall the argument? Are you going to play a trusting character, or a suspicious cynic? Very little of this aspect will make it onto your character sheet in most games, but in some ways it's the most important aspect. Your character's general outlook should be played out in almost everything he does.

Since I love to throw in personal stories, I'll elaborate. In a VLARP I played some time ago, my character was Tybalt St. Croix, a Ventrue who should have really been a Brujah. His Nature was Martyr, and his Demeanor was Bravo. He acted tough and violent, but it was really an expression of his desire to protect his friends.

A perfect bit of roleplaying came up about near the end of a really climactic arc. Some powerful force was messing with all the Kindred of the city by opening magical portals, kidnapping Vampires and torturing them for information. In the session in question, Tybalt saw an open portal. Before this session, the gates were always too far away for him to reach.

This time, I grabbed a Storyteller and said "I jump through the portal." I had to tell him three times before he believed me.

I only figured out later how much of that came from Tybalt's personality. On the surface he was murderously angry at whoever had been kidnapping other Kindred. They'd killed the Prince recently, and Tybalt was very loyal to the Prince. On a deeper level, he knew eventually one of the PC's would have to go through one of the gates, and he wanted to be the one - so that nobody else would have to face the danger.

How honorable is your character? Does he live by a strict code, or the law of the jungle? Does he strive for justice, or just for himself? Maybe he tries to be honorable, but doesn't have a lot of willpower. Maybe he pretends to be cynical and cruel, but really has a heart of gold. Like his general outlook, your character's moral outlook will come out more in play than in statistics, but a lot of games do have rules to cover things like codes of honor. Besides, you can use this information to help point you to your character's chosen career. A deeply honorable, honest man is more likely to be a cop than a con artist.

What's his thought process like? Is he deep and philosophical? Brooding? Shallow and irresponsible? Is he very patient, or rash and impulsive? These decisions will help you decide how to flesh out his capabilities. If he's an intellectual, he probably doesn't spend a lot of time at the gym. If he doesn't have much focus, he probably hasn't spent much time at anything, but might have a lot of skills at a fairly low level, gained as he studied until he got bored.

Step 2: Definition

There are two ways you can go here. If, by now, you have a pretty good idea of the attributes you'd like, you can just skip to the capabilities, then write a background that fits them. On the other hand, you might want to work on the character's past for a while. As you figure out what experiences shaped your character, you'll know what he's had a chance to learn.

A dark, brooding avenger has probably been deeply wronged in the past. Figure out when that happened. Were his parents killed in a mugging on the way home from the movies? Maybe his whole family got caught in a mob shoot-out in the park. What if his father was a great sword maker, and an evil duelist killed him in a dispute over the price of an exquisite sword?

Your character's personality won't tell you what all the details of his background should be. Try to make logical decisions, but don't worry too much yet. People from all walks of life have all sorts of personalities. Two different people may have a very similar experience and come away with very different results.

With some ideas about the character's past, you can start filling in concrete details. You'll know where he came from, where he went, what he did, what he learned. Always try to remain true to your initial concept, but if you find it changing don't worry too much. My last Amber PbeM character, Miranda, is a great case in point. I started with a sketch of her background and a general personality. By the time I was done, her background bore almost no resemblance to my original ideas. If the Miranda I ended up playing had ever met the Miranda I thought up in the first place, she would have thought the "original" Miranda was a terrible wimp. She would have probably stole the original version's stuff, too, just to keep in practice.

Choose abilities in keeping with your concept. A brooding warrior had probably better be able to fight. A happy-go-lucky thief had better be good at running, and probably hasn't studied the art of poisoning. A quiet intellectual probably has a lot of knowledge, but maybe not a lot of charisma.

Step 3: Putting it all together

The last big step is to weld all your ideas into a coherent character. Right now you have a bunch of loosely connected facts and concepts that you need to transform into a finished character. How you do that will all depend on your game's character creation process. You can probably have just about any attributes you want, within the limits of the game. Obviously if you wanted your character to be really clever, it wouldn't make sense to give him a lower than game average intelligence. Similarly, if you were planning to make a grim warrior, you'd be ill served by giving your character low physical attributes.

Skills also have a lot of leeway. Unless there's something just screaming against it in your background, you can probably do just about whatever you want. The background you built to go with your personality will give you a lot more guidance than the personality will. Choose abilities based on what makes sense for your character. As much as you might want the Occult skill, your hard nosed, atheist cop who doesn't believe in anything he can't see and touch probably doesn't have it. Of course, if he's a Scully like skeptic, he might have studied the Occult so he could debunk it, but that's a little different.

That was pretty much it. Unlike most of my characters, he didn't have a dark past where evil forces had killed everyone he loved. He grew up in a California suburb where his dad was a real-estate agent and his mom was a paralegal or something. Nothing all that exciting had ever happened to him until he figured out that he could bench-press a Volvo and fly. Unlike most people, his first thought wasn't to put on a spandex suit and fight crime. His first thought was that now it would be really easy to get onto the Varsity football team. He was the only sophomore who got to start. He only decided to be a superhero to impress one of his girlfriends when he found out she was a member of some established superhero's fan-club.

I liked Max. I kind of miss him.

So anyway, that's our show for this evening. Tune in next time and I'll show you the most challenging process of all, building your character from the Background out.