The Blog of Roon

This week’s Game WISH asks how system affects character. For y’all non-game-geeks, every game system has a different way of laying out who your character is and what s/he can do.

Let’s just take it as read that system impacts character, okay? If it didn’t, we could just swap characters indiscriminately in and out of games using different systems (assuming roughly congruent genre, of course; one couldn’t swap Shirley into high fantasy, nor Renate into Victoriana), and you know as well as I do that just doesn’t happen.

The chief difference for me is how constrained my character is at the initial-concept stage, I think. Do I come up with an idea that fits the gameworld and the situation and then figure out how the system accommodates that idea, or do I have to start with system dictates?

Shirley, who is a GURPS character, is a good example of the former style of character development. I figured out that he was a cross-dressing barrister with some independent crime-investigation skill, and looked at what GURPS gave me to that end. He turned out just about right, I think.

Afletana, who is DnD3e, is a sterling example of the latter style. The party had just lost its main healer, so it needed a cleric. Ergo I had to roll up a cleric. It’s the system demanding that I plug a bad hole in the party’s abilities; it’s the system constraining what a cleric does.

Now, note that Afletana wasn’t a shallow or uninteresting character once I started playing her. It is possible to have fun despite a constraining system.

However. I do believe that the more a system constrains, the more its players are liable to cookie-cutter characters—at some point, even the most creative brain ends up in a rut—and the less likely they are to create real standouts because the system eliminates possibilities.

I’ve just about gotten to the point that I won’t play another DnD game unless I can see the gameworld in advance and it’s clearly a standout. I’m tired of the fighter-cleric-rogue-wizard Northern Melancholy treadmill. Time for something different.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2003 at 9:40 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.