So, once the Players and GM are decided, it’s time to get down to the business of creating characters (or in the case of the GM, everything and everyone else). The GM and/or Players will have an idea (or they’d better come up with one really fast) of the kind of game they’re wanting to play and give the players an idea of what character types are suitable. The genre or type of game may be heavily influenced by the RPG they have sitting on the table in front of them – hard to play a sci-fi shoot-em-up if the most advanced technology in the book is “quarterstaff”.
For our example, we’ll go with a standard medieval, sword-and-sorcery “fantasy” game – cliche? Yeah but you know it’s gotta be one of the most common. So now you check through your gamebook to see what character creation involves. Again, for our sake, lets go with a really scaled-down version of a well-known fantasy game and say that you get a basic “character concept”, choose a race and a trade, fill in the rest of your information and and roll dice to generate your other scores and money, etc.

The Character Sheet

This is where you’re going to write everything about your character as you create him/her/it, and also edit later on during play. Most character sheets look like highly-stylized tax-forms (sometimes even more confusing) with lots of empty boxes and blank lines for you to fill up. Most sections will be self-explanatory and match the following aspects of character generation. Usually character sheets are provided by the GM by photocopying the original blank sheet from the game book.

Character Concept

This is pretty self-explanatory, and you really want to look at the Races and Trades for your game to get an idea of the kind of concepts that are doable. Everyone has their own preferred way to come up with characters – some just wing it, some plan it out, some try to challenge themselves, some people emulate a character from a show or movie, some even make characters with certain skills/abilities to take up the slack in a group of PCs (Player-Characters). Since we want to just tear into the whole process, let’s just go with a lumbering human warrior type, we can work on developing a better concept as we go on.

Race

Looking through the descriptions of races in our hypothetical RPG, we see Human, Elf (pointy-eared and agile), Dwarf (bearded, gruff, short), Gnome (like more sociable, beardless Dwarves), Ghoms (big, strong, a little dense) and Squibs (strange multicolored furry bipeds). Now, different games even in the same genre (fantasy) will tend to have different races, or describe them differently, but thanks to the standard practice of ripping off J.R.R. Tolkien, most fantasy RPGs will have most of the above. We already decided in the Character Concept we’d go with a human, since it will be the easiest to play and have the fewest special rules to pay attention to.

Trade

Also known as “Class” in a lot of games, this is a character’s profession or career or general means of survival. Let’s continue with our simplistic theme and say you can pick from Mercenary (makes his living by “selling his sword”), Sorcerer (thrower of magic spells), Friar (the good and pious pilgrim) or Drifter (a bit on the shady side, probably not welcome in nicer establishments without disguise).

“Stats” (Attributes, Ability Scores, Characteristics, etc.)

The “meat and bone” of the numerical aspect of a character, stats represent natural, innate levels of inclinations toward certain types of activities. In this case, let’s go really simple and boil stats down to Body (for doing most anything physical), Mind (anything mental, as you might guess), Spirit (anything abstract and ethereal like magic or faith), Guile (anything sneaky) and Charm (personal presence, charisma, ability to socially interact).

Getting the Numbers

In our game system, you need to roll three normal six-sided dice (like you find in any normal board game like Monopoly) and sum the dice together for each stat, giving each a possible range of 3-18 (which can be considered a basic 1-20 scale). Some games get their stats other ways, such as providing each Player a “pool” of “character points” from which they can assign points to each stat; some games offer both or a combination of random/assignment or something else altogether.

So let’s toss the bones! Four rolls – 6, 9, 15, 12. ouch, 6 is pretty low in most games that use a similar number scale for stats (some games let you reroll certain low scores).

Let’s say our game lets us assign our rolls to our stats however we want, so if we want a Mercenary (which we do for this example), we won’t want to put our lowest score on Body so we’ll have to pick one of the other stats – let’s go with Charm, the traditional “dump stat” that most gamers see as relatively useless (though sometimes this isn’t the case). The 9 and the 12 are pretty dead average so won’t help or hinder anything, so we can safely drop these onto Mind and Guile. And now that awesome 15 rounds out our Body score, being only 3 under the maximum roll possible – perfect for a warrior type.

Skills, Feats, Abilities, Perks, Flaws, etc.

These vary even more than stats, in that, while most games have them (though some don’t), they are usually divided and classified in infinitely different ways. Some games might have “Left Handed Fighting”, “Read Elvish” and “Perform Magic Tricks”, while others might have “Lightsleep”, “Perfect Recall” and “Jump”. Some games presume a pretty broad range of actions that most characters can do without any specific training, while others require Agility, Acrobatics, Tumbling. Leaping and Dodge. Also, some games divide all these extra abilities into Abilities (capital A) or Talents, meaning inherent things you can’t usually learn easily (Natural Musician, Ambidexterity, Danger Sense, Cast Spells) and Skills which, although possibly difficult, are things which just about anyone can learn (lasso, juggling, computer programming).

Skills and Abilities, like stats, are usually rated on a certain scale – sometimes its similar to the ones used for stats, sometimes they just have numbers like +1, which represent bonuses to certain attempts and rolls you make when performing an action where that skill is relevant. In most games, non-human races usually provide at least one Ability/Skill ( Night Vision, Sense Direction etc), and some games allow you to assign points or roll dice for a chance at other random skills relevant to your PC.

Money and Gear

It can’t be avoided, in most games, you gotta have it – money, gold, currency, shillings, whatever name(s) or denominations, currency is the coin of the realm. Most games presume all characters start out with some minimal equipment such as a couple of changes of clothing and personal effects, basic travel kit (mug, knife, dried food), probably some poor to medium quality weapon, sometimes even a pet or horse. It is also common to presume different types of starting items for different Trades (warriors might have a shield or armor, sorcerers would have a spellbook etc).

Next though, is your liquid assets, how much money you start with – which you can either keep or use to buy extra starting equipment. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use 3 dice again and multiply the result by 10 for Silver Shillings. We roll a 4 (d’oh!) so start with 4×10=40 shillings. If our game is “heavy” on the money and equipment angle, there’s likely a whole section of items and weapons and all kinds of things to look through, each with their own in-game uses, and purchase (with the GM’s and our own common sense’s approval). Some games however, pay very little attention to the details of items and equipment, but for the most part, its a safe bet you’ll get a chance to “browse the shops” – its fun but can get to be tedious.

Everything Else

There’s no way to really cover any of the rest of this in order. “Everything else” would include mostly things the Player is free to assign (with reason), such as name, sex (make sure to write “yes” in this blank for your first character because that joke never gets old), age, perhaps social class, nationality, hair and eye color, height and weight, religion, family members, hometown, other organizations/affiliations, rank (if royal or in the military etc). Your game may also have “figured characteristics”, which are even MORE stats obtained either by universal assignment (all characters have a Move of 3) or by applying some mathematical equations to your basic stats (Mind + Charm to get Appeal, or Body + Guile for To-Hit, for example). These will all need to be filled out before play.

That’s It

Although there are always last-minute and situational decisions and changes, you’ve pretty much got your “platform” for participating in a role-playing game. Now go out there and critically fumble a few times!

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This entry was posted by J P on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 1:48 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.