I started down the path of analyzing the seven rules of character creation last month, focusing on the first section – Getting Along With Other People. I will assume that in the last month that all of my readers spent some diligent time and effort practicing how to get along with other people and that we are ready to move on to the more straightforward section – Character Composition.

Section 2: Character Composition

Character Composition does not deal with the emotional, "touchy-feely" issues of the first three rules. This is about getting the basic mechanics of the character correct so that they do not interfere (easily) with game play. These are truly the rules that should be obvious (and thus show up in most role-playing books) but I'll try and give some new perspectives on them.

Rule 4: Would the character go adventuring?

This is the duh rule. Yet even after twenty years of gaming I've missed it on characters. This is about having a connection with the story. Characters can be made, but some are like portraits – you can hang them on the wall and admire them, but they never actually do anything with them. You don't want your character to be a portrait. In fact, you don't even want the character to be a background character. You want your character to be a major part of the campaign story. So why take chances by creating a character that might get swept up by the flow of some great adventure? Go create one that is looking to get swept up in a grand adventure, a dashing knight or a lost princess with enemies seeking them out at every turn.

This section can easily revolve around background. Kidnapped princes, lost loves, and revenge-filled oaths are all wonderful fodder for the GM to create the story through your character. The long and short of it is that it is very rare that having too much for your character to do is a serious problem, while not having anything to do is almost always a problem. It is just not fun.

If you think designing a character to go adventuring is a little cheesy, it is even cheesier when the GM has to use artificial plot hooks to get your character involved in a story. It is always possible that a great GM can overcome players' lack of plot involvement, but that usually involves at least having a personality or background detail. GMs with nothing to go on have to rely upon luck and the willingness of the player to follow plot hooks. This can work, but almost always will feel artificial, because the character involved is artificial. They have no real life of their own.

Building the adventuring motivations is usually the most fun task in character creation. It is the place players get to use their creativity in designing an adventuring hero. And many players consider the adventuring motivations to be the largest part of the character and put the most work into building them.

Rule 5: The character must fit the campaign style

This rule is really just getting the GM and the player on the same page. Usually, a good means of accomplishing this rule is for the GM to give some basic goals for what he sees happening in the campaigns. Often this is in the campaign overview or proposal. But simply put – if the group is supposed to go into dungeons and you make someone deathly afraid of enclosed spaces, this is a problem.

Remember – it is not just a problem for the GM, it is a problem for all of the players. They have to deal with the offending character getting into the way of the overriding campaign goals. In fact, the problem character is generally not fun for anybody as that character becomes almost a “loner”, trying to accomplish or fight against the established rules of the campaign.

There are a lot of subtle ways that a characters can fail to fit the campaign style. The GM needs to make sure and ask the player what they want their character to do, what they about that character they will enjoy playing, and where they see the character ending up. All of this can be clues that the character isn't fitting into the campaign style, if the answers are quite a bit different then the answers of the other players or the GM's view of the campaign.

One final warning: just because a player is playing a cheery character in a dark campaign doesn't necessarily mean that the character doesn't fit. Some people are cheery in in the face of darkness. In fact, the cheery character may add a lot to the campaign by giving a variety in character types and become a foil for the darker events. If the cheery character isn't being disruptive to the campaign goals and direction, then they are not just working, they are working well.

Rule 6: The character must have long term goals

No, this isn't your parents grilling you on what your going to do after college, or with your life in general. This is about making sure your character's adventuring motivations aren't easily completed. If a character has easily completable adventuring goals, it is very likely that they will complete the goals but no longer complete rule 5.

Gamers often give a little scoff and ignore the importance of rule 6. Because rule 6 is not hard – when you come up with a reason, it usually is good for a long time and the GM is also very handy at adding new things so this has never been a problem. So why worry about running out of adventuring goals?

To illustrate, we will discuss the adventuring motivation called greed.

Everybody has played with a greedy character at some point. They seek out every magic item, serach the bodies for extra loot proclaiming "Hey, he might have swallowed his magic ring" loudly while drawing a sword over the dead body and making everybody else go pale.

A lot of players base their characters on greed. It is at the core of original D&D games, and has carried itself through into the dungeon crawling genre of gaming. "Get as much as you can."

That's great – except it is a player motivation, not a character motivation. In order to introduce believability into our characters, we have to see the adventuring from their perspective. And the more money they get, the more power they accumulate, the less likely they will be to risk that loot. A person with nothing is much more prone to risk their life then one who has everything. (And we'll ignore any social commentary you might be thinking up right now.)

In fact, a character truly motivated by greed will always get to a point where adventuring is no longer worth it (assuming they are successful at all). More money can be made by starting a merchant company or ruling a kingdom. In order to keep that character involved in campaign goals the whole campaign has to change with it, which isn't a problem, except there are usually other players. . .and they might be more interesting in saving the world from evil then buying cargoes of salt and shipping them across oceans. That is what the GM initially had in mind, after all.

I'll talk a bunch more about goals in a later column, as I view them as very important, but for now it enough to just remember to think long term when building your character's adventuring motivations. Simply put, you don't want to run out of fun stuff to do, and why rely on the GM when you can solve the problem yourself.

Section 3: The Final Gut Check

This is not really a section – it only has one little rule. But this one has to do with the player and not the character, so it gets its own section. You might call it the odd rule out.

Rule 7: The player must be able to actually play the character

This is another one that seems really easy, but is not. Rule 7 means checking your ego at the door and honestly asking yourself, not matter how fun or original the character concept is, whether you can actually play it.

If you are a talkative, active player, and you come up with a glooming introvert, can you curb your chatty tendencies? Are your ready to try a trans-gender character? Can you play a pacifist? Is the complex internal dialog of the mentally disturbed half-elf/half-lizard too much for your psyche?

And if you can't play a character, it creates one of two problems:

1. You aren't having fun; or
2. You don't end up playing the character you designed

The problem with the first one is easy to see. If you aren't having fun, you've failed and then your ego really can take a hit as you have failed to have fun at something as free-form as role-playing. That is right – you have failed a game that has no win conditions. Or rather, role-playing has one: to have fun.

The second one is not your problem, the is just the fact that your character is now the group and the GM's problem. Any planning done by the GM or other players involving your character (reference the rest of this article) is often wasted when what you said you would do, you couldn't, so you did something else.

Now this may not be that bad, especially if the character you are actually playing fits in pretty well, but it has the potential to hurt everybody's fun. And then you all fail.

Conclusion

That concludes all seven rules. Next month I will add some summary information about the seven rules, and talk a little more about the NENAD (Neutral Evil Ninja Assasin Drow) to bring some closure to the seven rules before I move onto new and exciting topics.

Until next time.