So you want to make a character. This shouldn't be too hard – every role-playing book out there has a section telling you how to create characters. The odd thing is, they don't all really say the same thing. Most of them say "come up with a concept" so that must be good advice ... except that it really seems almost the same as "come up with a character".

So, I'll help you out a little bit by talking about some actual methods by which characters are created. Here are four methods of creating characters, all of which are usually touched upon in any character creation process.

Inspiration

Inspiration is the step where you decide what sort of character you want to play. I consider this the heart-strings step. You have found something you love to play, something you want to play. You don't have any details, you aren't sure how you will play it, but in the back of your mind you know you want to play something like Van Helsing, Drizzt, Jayne, Buffy, Spider-man, Jack Sparrow, Tyrion Lannister, Ripley, Sandman, Pug, Eonwy, Duncan McCloud, Inigo Montoya, Vlad Taltos, or whoever else moves you. Inspiration has nothing to do with possibility. It is your desires. It is what you want.

Conceptualization

Conceptualization is the art of taking an inspiration and refining it into an actual character. This is like cutting an unfinished diamond into something that will sell. This step involves coming up with backgrounds, creating personality, motivations, goals, attaching the player to the plot and into the world. Conceptualization can be a lot of work, but it is usually very rewarding work and well appreciated by GMs and other players. Conceptualization can also be viewed as the depth of the character. Highly conceptualized characters seem alive and involved in the world.

Mechanization

Mechanization is making the numbers work for your character. The step involves building the representation of your character using the numbers available in your system. Obviously, this is sometimes simple and sometimes complex. It can also be a very frustrating step if you don't feel the numbers match up with the concept, leading to many players doing mechanization before conceptualization.

Dramatization

Dramatization is how you are going to play the character. Accents, quirks, always sitting hunched over, squinting at the other players, never talking in complete sentences, or whatever is needed to make the character truly come to life in the role-playing session. Dramatization isn't really as much of a character piece as a player piece. It is how you decide to interpret the character and display it to your fellow players. The same character can be handed to two different players and they will dramatize differently.

How do these make a character?

Any character creation will usually have all four of these creation steps take place. The order presented here is by no means the only order in which they can occur. It may be a standard order, but a character could easily use use dramatization to create inspiration - "I want to talk with an arrogant aristocratic accent" and then move onto mechanization before finishing up a conceptualization. I would call this a DIMC character creation process. (There are 24 possible orders that these steps could be completed in, all possible.)

What is generally more important then the order is the focus. Most systems tend to like to focus on one of the four methods. Standard table-top lends itself to Conceptualization and Mechanization, while live-action often focuses on Inspiration and Dramatization. Dealing with focus is important enough that I will take the next four months to go through each method, discussing how that sort of focused character generation works.

Until then, you can play the game of figuring out what method of character creation you use for your characters, and what order you complete the steps. Are you a standard ICMD player? Do you you hate mechanics and leave them till last? (IDCM) Or perhaps you just open the book and start rolling dice? (MICD) Or maybe you totally ignore actually defining a character at all? (MD)

Till next time.