What a concept
This week’s Game WISH appears to have stirred up more response faster than some previous ones. I don’t let myself read answers until I write one, though, so here goes.
The question this week is whether character creation starts from an idea about who the character is—a “concept”—or from Da Rules.
I’ve kinda done it both ways, in a sense, which is horribly waffly of me. Afletana came about because Da Rules pretty much dictate that any party needs a cleric, so I had to roll one up. She isn’t noticeably less rounded or enjoyable a character than, say, Shirley, who is the utter epitome of high-concept characters.
(No, you don’t know what the concept is, though you are welcome to guess. I assure you I haven’t offered enough clues for you to be sure. Do feel free to email me your guesses, though I shan’t tell you if you have it right until the Ellipse is over. As I’ve said before, Shirley’s concept is a total MacGuffin, and I don’t want the other players getting hold of it—so kindly no blogging your guesses either.)
Even under the strictures of plugging a hole in a party, though, I can’t be satisfied with numbers on a page. If all you know about Afletana is that she is a DnD3e cleric, you know practically nothing of importance about her. You need to know that she’s from an ancient family reduced by conquest to marrying money, that she is a refugee, that she’s clashed with her church hierarchy, that she’s fallen in love with the party leader (and the entire party knows it)… much of this stuff that typically falls under the heading of “concept.”
Concept can and does develop over time, certainly. I didn’t know all these things about Afletana when I first rolled her up. (Er, partly because she hadn’t fallen in love with the party leader yet; she hadn’t even met him.)
It starts with setting, though. I knew the party I had to fit Afletana into; I knew what they were up against, and I understood the place and time of the campaign setting. If I don’t understand these things, at least a little, I find I can’t create a workable character at all. Either the character becomes all-concept (as happened with a Vampire character of mine), or s/he withers into numbers on a page. Or both.
I am guessing, by the phrasing of the question, that some people consider character templates such as DnD3e’s prestige classes to be “character concepts.” I don’t. The essential bit that these things miss (I mean, other than that they’re generic, not individual) is “What is this person doing here?” Templates can spur a character concept; they are not of themselves concepts. In my ever-so-humble opinion, and all that.
I thoroughly enjoy playing alongside strongly-envisioned characters. I vastly prefer it to the alternative. For obvious reasons I don’t necessarily expect much of a just-introduced character; it can take time to get used to a new one, no matter how much thought went into character creation. When all I’ve got to react to are a bunch of numbers, however, I get bored.
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