Every game basically starts the same way - you make a character. For me, character creation has always been one of the hardest things to do, mostly because of the various GMs I had played for requiring an extremely large backstory. Since I think of myself as fairly uncreative, I usually had fairly cookie cutter backgrounds, followed by some fairly exciting stories about my characters in the game. This realization helped me to discover my philosophy on character creation.
Simply put, for MOST games, I believe characters are/should be be relatively uninteresting at the start. Sure, if you’re not starting at level 1, then maybe a more intensive backstory is required (but not always!), but I think the real interesting things about a character is what happens to him/her IN THE GAME. My view is you aren’t a hero until the game starts - then you start developing your true character.
This isn’t to say that you should sit down at the table with just your stats. You need to develop a personality. Where did you grow up? What was your family situation? You need to have some sense of what your character’s worldview is, so yes, you do still need a backstory. I’m just saying it doesn’t need to be long.
Dark Heresy’s character generation chapter has a great outline of what you need to do after you’ve finished the stats for your character. Spirit of the Century’s character generation phases offers several key questions to answer with regards to your character (keep in mind that SotC characters actually are heroic prior to the game begining, by design), but has the goal of keeping your overall story short.
I could continue to discuss this topic, but I think I’ve passed my point along. Its not the right way to do things, its just the way I like the best.
Game Recommendations
As promised, here’s a group of indie games worth a look.
- Cold City - Monster Hunting in 1950s Berlin.
- Burning Wheel - There’s several settings already produced for the Burning Wheel system. Character creation sounds quite interesting.
- Piledrivers and Powerbombs - Pro wrestling without the spandex!