Knowing your role

Welcome back to my continuing (and rambling) series on character creation. This time I’m going to explore some interesting and fun ways to explore your character inside and out. I hope that those just creating characters as well as veterans with characters in on-going campaigns will find something here to give them new insight into their characters. Shall we begin?

1. Character Profiles. Over the last two months we talked about building believable characters and also explored the use of character worksheets and questionnaires as a means of building your character. However, Character profiling can lead to an in-depth look at what makes your character tick depending on how intensive the questions are. Has your character been in prison? In the military? What was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to your character? Did he finish high school? College? Space Academy? What sort of friends does he have? What kind of hobbies? Why? How does he feel about his family? His religion? His job? The questions are endless and there might be questions that force you to explore aspects of your character’s life and personality you hadn’t even thought about yet.

2. Write your character’s autobiography. Yes, autobiography. I actually saw this as part of a writing assignment for a class I was taking. It was oddly the warm up exercise. Here’s what you do: Write a 2,500 word autobiography (first person, from the character’s point of view). Write whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a rambling account of the character’s life at home or his experiences at summer camp or his misfortunes in love. Whatever it is, be creative.

3. Fill out a job application. You can get these at most fast food places, grocery stores, or mall shops. Pick up a few and fill out as much as you can. You’d be surprised what you discover and if nothing else, you’ve got some details you may or may not use but help define your character as having had a life, having existed before that moment that the Game Master started the campaign.

4. Write a character journal. For those of you already in a game, this could be as simple as writing a game journal from the character’s point of view — it’s always interesting to see the game world from a fictional character’s eyes. Plus this is a nice opportunity for you to keep track of what’s going on and it’ll be there the next time you play for you to review and get back into the game’s frame of mind.

For those of you who are just creating your character from scratch, this can be a brief journal of some event that has already occurred, some tidbit of background information. This might be useful for discovering what motivates your character or what likes and dislikes your character has.

On an interesting note here, not everyone will play a literate character. I heard a tale once of a player of a barbarian character who kept a journal that was all pictographs. As always, be creative.

5. Interview with a character. This is another exercise for writers, but I still maintain that writing a story and role-playing in a game are more than similar; after all, in both cases, a story is told, one way or another. Write out an interview with your character. It might be a job interview, an interview for a newspaper or a talk show (remember that episode of Xena with the talk show host?), or it might just be a question and answer session with a “friend”. It’s up to you what angle you take but remember to ask the important questions: Who, what, where, when and why. This can be as long or as short as you like, but use it like the Character Profiles to discover aspects of your character you might never have thought of and role-play as well. Make sure all the answers are as the character would answer — if he’s cagey and secretive, play that out. Another way to do this, if you aren’t big on writing is to have someone else, a friend or another player, play the interviewer and tape record the interview so you can play it back at your leisure. Heck, it might be fun to have all the characters for the game on a “talk show” before the game begins as a good way to get a feel for everyone’s characters and how they will react with each other.

6. Do a little research. So you’re playing a character from the U.S. in 1871. Life was more than cowboys and Indians and little houses on the prairies. Check out your local library or bookstore. Reader’s Digest has an excellent collection of books that all begin with Everyday Life in and cover everything from 1800′s America to Victorian Times. Heck, The Idiot’s Guide series has books on the Old West, ghost hunting, and even extra-terrestrials. The web is a good place to look around too and check out your local video store.

The point is that you don’t have to play a modern day computer geek in cowboy clothes. Just a few facts can go along way to making the character just a bit more authentic and making the game a bit more fun. Granted, you’ll likely never know it all, unless you’re just one of those people, but you’d be surprised what you can learn. (And my mom thought gaming was a waste of my time… hehe)

I hope these suggestions help or at least entertained you. Until next time, remember it’s just a game…have fun!