It Builds Character: Character Creation as a Meaningful Part of Your Game

Most roleplaying games begin with character creation, because most of them are fairly difficult to play without a character. We break out our given system's character sheet, and we follow the book through the process of filling it in, and through this process we turn the sheet into a character. It's a familiar process, and one of the common threads throughout the hobby.

That familiarity has also bred a disdain towards the activity. For some, the process of character creation is treated as an unfortunate speedbump, something to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible, a necessary evil on the path to the Actual Fun. 

I'm not here to tell people that they're playing wrong, but I do want to talk a little about why I think people feel this way, how embracing the activity can improve our experience, and how some games make it easier to accomplish that. 

(note: I will not be talking about premade characters in this post. Not because I consider them to be bad or illegitimate; I don't, they are very much good and valid. But this post is about character creation in games, and the presence of premade characters doesn't negate a system being iffy.) 

Frontloading our Exasperation

I have the bold opinion that people who dislike character creation are on the same plane as people who are less inclined to learn new systems. And I think it all stems from having a bad first (and often ongoing) experience with the games they've played, or are still playing. For my example, I'll be using Pathfinder 1e. Not because it's the only example of this, or even the worst, just one I have a lot of experience with. 

I think that Pathfinder, and many other Major TTRPG Systems That I Will Not Name, provide a terrible character creation experience for first-time players. There's a lot of arguments to have about why it is the way it is, and I'm not saying these games are objectively bad or whatever, but it's a fact your average newbie doesn't have a good time.  

The scariest opponent in the core rulebook.  

Frontloading is the practice of putting a lot of information and choice-making right at the beginning, before your players have actually had any experience with the system. It's difficult to not have some choice-making at the start of your game - as said, you can't really start learning through play until you've already got a character, and you need to know how to make one - but there's absolutely such a thing as too many options.

Pathfinder drowns you with choices right out the gate: choose a species, choose a class, choose your class subtype if applicable, choose your skills, choose your feats, choose your equipment, probably choose some spells too, and god help you if we're allowing supplements. Each of these things may or may not interact with the other choices in ways you don't quite follow, many of them will have implications that you may or may not understand, and most of these options range from iffy to downright bad, perhaps outside of very specific cases (most of which you won't be aware of as a new player). 

I've seen the horror myself, back when, and you've almost certainly seen (or even felt) it too. You sit your newbies down, you explain to them what the game is, and you say that the first step will be making characters. And no matter how excited they are, nor how supportive and helpful you are, you're gonna hit the second hour of the process with a group of confused, tired and/or annoyed players with half-filled sheets. Sure they'll finish eventually, and they'll probably still have fun once you start playing, but they still had to wade through a whole lotta muck to get to that point. A bunch of painstaking math just so they could get to the part that they want, the storytelling and adventure. 

The party fights for their life, terrified by the prospect of dying and having to make a new PC.

In my folly-mired youth, I wasn't particularly critical of the whole thing. I saw it as a rite of passage, in a way, the trial by fire that you must pass which just makes the prize at the end all the sweeter. But I found myself reexamining this, wondering if I was just putting my players through the same rigmarole because I had to, and retroactively deciding that it was actually good all along. These days, I can still appreciate the more crunchy process, but I've grown less patient for games that fail to make it involving, and I understand that others feel the same.

After they had to suffer through the process, spending significant time and effort getting to grips with all the cruft, and finally learning the mechanics of making a good character, can you really blame some people for not wanting to go through this timesink more than they need to, or for being opposed to learning a new game because they'd have do it all over again? It might even seem unreasonable of me to ask people to just go looking for a better system.

Going Looking for a Better System

I think one of the biggest roadblocks for a lot of people (past me included) is that they treat the mechanical part of character creation as separate from the narrative part, either completely separating the two or making the the former a formalization of the latter. While neither of these are innately bad methods of doing things, they do reinforce the idea of the "game" part of the process not being related to the character of your character. 

To clarify a final time, the games themselves shoulder most of the blame. The systems don't exactly make it easy to derive narrative from the process of character creation, and even PF1 basically says that your character's personality and history are something you'll figure out on your own later. Does that mean it's not possible to have a narrative character creation within PF1e? No, but it means that you have to go out of your way to do so, and that doesn't help get your newbies into the process. 

The driver's license-level character detailing on the sheet itself.

What's my answer? You've guessed it: looking at some other games! (Your attentiveness and deductive skills are only a small part of why I appreciate you so, dear reader.) You might think that I'm not really offering a new or different solution to the problem, and to that I say: when there's already a bridge right there, should I lead you to it rather than help you build a boat? 

So let's look at some other titles, and see why I'm just so dang convinced that they do a better job. 

Shadowrun: Frontloaded, Chummer  

Once you're done laughing at me for citing one of the most infamously unwieldy and cumbersome systems as my first example of doing this better, I want to make a few things clear. Yes, Shadowrun absolutely frontloads you with information and choices. Yes, it requires a degree of mastery to be able to make "really good" characters. And yes, it suffers from many of the same problems as Pathfinder does, especially the later editions of the game. Thus, I'll be talking about the 2nd edition; because it's my current favorite, because it lacks a lot of the cruft of later editions while having all the good bits, and because I think it has some good examples how to inject some character into your frontload. 

And because it features the best cover art, of anything, ever.

So, what so great about SR? The very first thing you're going to do is use the notorious Priority Table. Essentially, you have five ranks, A-E, one of which you will assign to one of each Priority: Race, Magic, Attributes, Skills, and Resources. The higher you place a priority, the more value you will have in that category. Ranking Resources at A gives you an absurd 1,000,000 nuyen to spend during character creation, whereas having it at E gives you a near-destitute 500. Since the game has freeform design rather than set classes, this already starts you thinking about what your character will be like, even if you already came in with a premise. You want to be a mage, sure, so Magic is gonna be a high priority. But is your mage well-off? Do they have great natural talents? You already have to make a decision off the bat, yes, but the decision pertains to character as much as it does mechanics. 

Each edition changed up the table. 3e, for example, split Metatype into two tiers and moved it to C/D, in order to separate metatype from magic. 4e completely dropped the priority table in favor of build points, in order to remind us that it's a terrible game.

Another important part is that alongside purely combat-and-adventuring features, you're going to be picking and purchasing things that define your role in the world beyond your personal shadowrunning capabilities. Your lifestyle, for example, can range from luxurious to homeless, and determines the quality of your clothes, your food, your home (if any) and more, which are all elements that might naturally come up in game. 

You also need to select your starting contacts, people who your character knows and can call on (and be called by) when something is needed. You could call these another mechanical tool, the same as skills or attributes; and you wouldn't be wrong, but they're mechanical tools that involve you even more in the world and setting, giving you palpable connection to the fiction you'll be playing in, rather than having your finalized character be a roving "adventurer" with no particular ties beyond what you wrote in your system-unrelated backstory.  

One final point is that, while the game does in fact give you a whole lotta things in a whole lotta categories to pick from, very few of those things are outright bad. You might attribute this to the system simply providing fewer total options, which means there's less room for overlap and redundancy; this is true, but it certainly doesn't feel like there's not enough options in the book (there's always splatbooks if you disagree, of course). And not feeling like you have to maneuver an option minefield means that you're likelier to involve yourself creatively. 

While there are certainly some skills or attributes that are highly recommended to have (having a low body or absolutely no combat skills is just asking for trouble in most campaigns), it takes effort to make a character that will be truly useless, and playing suboptimal characters doesn't feel like a slog. This is partly because of how the lethal and fast-moving core system works, but mostly because the type of work PCs will be doing tends to cover more than just fighting good, so you have other things to shine at and many different solutions to apply to situations. Unless your GM happens to be me in my teens, in which case make sure to have all the chrome you can afford, chummer. 

Traveller: The Wisdom of the Oracle

The classic sci-fi system has many, many iterations, so I can't really talk about all (or even most) of them, but the wisdom I'll be imparting comes primarily from Classic Traveller and Mongoose Traveller 1e (MgT2e sucks, there I said it). If you've got a different favorite, and have some qualms with my conclusions, comment me all about it.  

What is it with these games and the amazing covers?

Traveller falls pretty far on the opposite side of the the previous games on the list, tending towards simpler rulesets and suggestions for procedure rather than big fat lists of stats and numbers. CT especially is basically OSR with how delightfully minimal it is. That's not why it's in this post, though.

Traveller's most iconic feature is probably the lifepath system. With character creation essentially being a looping flowchart made from a bunch of tables, the term "Character Generator" is pretty appropriate for the system. That doesn't mean that you're just sitting there rolling for a few minutes until you're done, though, as you'll still have some fun choices to make. The two games I've mentioned do the same thing in staggeringly different ways, and I think both are great, so let's look at 'em. 

The system that teaches you risk assessment before you even start playing.

"Classic Traveller" could refer to any one of several, very similar systems, but they all share the same character generator. After rolling your stats, you pick one of six military-leaning careers, roll to see if you got in, roll to see what career you got drafted into if you didn't, and from there you go through one or more terms of service. For each one you survive, and based on whether you got commissioned or promoted, you'll roll one or more times on your choice of career-appropriate tables to see what skill or stat increase you got. After most terms you can decide to cash out, or you can stick around hoping to get more skills and a better material payout.

This whole thing is dirt-simple, to the point that some folks might not like how little control they get over the finer details, but the process has an innate narrative quality to it, with each roll revealing a little of your PC's past. If your navy officer got a promotion in their third term, and improved their cutlass skill during that, after which they got kicked out of the service, you can already imagine a backstory there. 

CT is also the one that you've heard about, where your character can die before you finish making them. This adds an interesting "push your luck" element to generation. If you've grown attached to your character, you feel less inclined to send them through another potentially deadly term of service. On the other hand, you might have less affection towards a character with poor stats, so you can send them in for another few rounds in the mill, and if they come out of it more skilled and storied, it feels less like a "bad" character. It's an upsettingly elegant way of mitigating characters with poor stats, and since the entire process takes about 5 minutes, losing someone doesn't really feel crippling. 

Even in space, we can be dickass rogues. 

Mongoose Traveller goes a lot harder than its minimalistic ancestor, expanding the old tables and giving you a whole lot more tables to roll on. With a whopping 12 backgrounds to choose from, each one with 3 subcategories, the game's more granular skill system means there's a lot more for your characters to be measurably capable at, and you have (somewhat) more control over what your final character might look like, especially since you'll be getting way more skills. CT characters can fit on an index card, but MgT characters would need to use a real small font. 

It goes even further by adding Event and Mishap tables to roll on, each one unique to their background, as well as a general life events table. The system introduces many more modern complications, such as contacts; but because these things are presented to you as part of a generative backstory rather than an entry in a long list of items, they never feel overwhelming. It's less interpretative than CT, since your backstory details are just directly derived from roll results, which you may or may not appreciate. 

(Side note - MgT does not have death as a possible outcome during character generation (though you can still sustain permanent injuries, including pretty serious ones), but this is fine. Character generation is much more detailed and involved in this system, and consequently takes much longer. Having to restart due to a bad roll is a lot less acceptable when the process takes upwards of an hour.)

These games are far from the only ones that feature rolled lifepath systems, and many modern systems involve some sort of "Backstory rolling". What makes Traveller stand out is that this system is not a secondary, separate set of tables that gives you background information unrelated to your gameplay information; Rolling up a character simultaneously generates your history, and the two are intertwined. Because of this, even if chargen runs long (which it can do, in the case of MgT), it never feels as tedious and overwhelming, since you're all creating a narrative throughout the process. 

Band of Blades: The System is the Story 

Until I draw my dying breath to spit out a baneful curse, impaled upon the legendary blade of some ostentatious cosmic heroine, I will continue to mercilessly decry generic systems and universal roleplaying games as the domain of the basest cowards. The true cosmic heroes of our time are those with the wit and talent to create roleplaying games designed to deliver a specific experience, in a specific world, and can use that focus to make some tight design. 

Black Company? Never heard of it. 

Band of Blades comes from the Forged in the Dark line of titles, a subdivision of the Powered by the Apocalypse framework. And while I could have selected any of the FitD systems, I chose BoB both because I think it best exemplifies my point, and also because it's objectively the best game under both of those umbrellas, and I will fight any stellar champions who claim opposite.  

What makes this system so great that I'm picking fights with my non-existent readership? Basically, it's the whole-assed commitment to its premise: it's a game about a dwindling mercenary company on a fighting retreat through the middle of an advancing undead apocalypse, escorting the sole magical avatar that isn't trying to kill you to a great keep, where you hope to make a final stand. Every single part of this game, and everything you'll be doing in it, is geared towards that premise. 

When a game is so singular in its purpose, it's a whole lot easier to direct character creation. It's got all the PbtA trappings - you've got playbooks, moves, traits and abilities, all that - but the laser-focused nature of the game really sells it. Unless your GM is being unhelpfully mysterious, you know exactly what the game is, and what you'll be doing in it; add the fact that most of the game's mechanics are based on fictive positioning rather than a variety of maths, and you get a system where the learning curve is mostly tied to your explainin' chops.  

These officers understand how to run a good battle. 

Another great element, and a common thread in FitD games, is that character creation double as "game mode selection". Blades in the Dark, for example, has you create your gang and hideout, choosing its class and features, which will determine what kind of game you're going to play and what missions you'd typically undertake. BoB has players creating not only the troops that will go on missions, but also the head officers of the company, as well as the Chosen they will be escorting. All of this means the players are simultaneously learning how the game works, learning the setting and their place in it, and learning to decide what they want to do based on fictional information as well as mechanical info. And none of this feels overwhelming to the player because of the way it's presented, as a series of small choices that naturally feed into one another, and as solid procedures that lead you from one decision to the next. BOB has been called board game-like, and the comparison is apt in the best possible way.   

With all this gushing, I make it sound like there's no downside to this thing, but there's some drawbacks (though mostly ones native to FitD in general). While the game does give you a lot of direction, in the sense that it tells you what you can be doing and what your objectives are, it does put a lot of expectation on the players to carry the action of the game. Newbies might be overwhelmed by having so much pressure on themselves, especially if they don't have experience with video or board games. Also, In a rare display of designer bravery, there is a win condition, and more importantly a fail condition. I personally love that, but I can understand some folks being intimidated by the idea of getting a Game Over in their TTRPG. For all the non-traditional elements, though, I still consider it to be a modern classic, and I don't even like most FitD games. 

At the end of the day, no game is an orbital island. It's very possible that none of the games I mentioned don't fit in what you want your game to be. But even if that's the case, I hope you've come away with a greater appreciation for how a system's design can make the character creation process more fun, a better learning tool, or both if it's BoB. Whatever system you end up playing next time, make sure that you don't wait until after character creation to start having fun.