Tales from the Rocket House
The main benefit of the SCCP is that players get to play the characters they want to play, as long as those characters are reasonable for the campaign. Not only does this greatly expand player choice, but it speeds up character creation and leads to some very interesting characters.
The problem with random character creation is that you don't get the character you want, you get the character the dice give you. End of discussion. Other than cheating the dice (which is a strong temptation when using random-roll systems), you've got very limited control over who and what you'll be playing. I have no idea why this process got started in original D&D, and even less idea why it's persisted for so long.
The problem with point-based character creation is that it creates a scarcity of power. As long as players have a budget to create their characters, they'll do everything in their power to stretch that budget. It's simple economics: when something is rare or limited, it becomes the focus (sort of like the way you always think of food when you're on a diet). I've never seen a point-build system that couldn't be royally twinked, and I've rarely seen one in which you could create the character you really wanted to play, at least without putting a tremendous amount of min-maxing effort into the process. The steep learning curve and tremendous amount of work required to get the character you want means that character creation tends to be very slow with point-builds.
So, my answer to the eternal “GURPS vs. D&D” argument was “stuff them both.” Subjective character creation, done through thorough conversation between the player and GM, allows the player to play the character she wants, removes the tendency to min-max that's caused by the scarcity of power in a point-build system, and helps build trust between the GM and player.
Since they work together to build the player's character, with the GM advising and approving, gently nudging the character to be campaign appropriate while staying true to the player's concept, the GM and player are emotionally on the same side from the beginning. I think it's incredibly important to have the players and GM feel like they're both part of a team, especially in games in which the NPCs will be plotting against the PCs. Remembering that the GM is on the players' side, even if the NPCs aren't on the PCs' side, really helps the social climate of the game.
Part One: The Concept
The first thing to do is, of course, come up with a basic character concept. This can be very sketchy at first (the questioning process will help fill in the gaps), and anything from “young second grade schoolteacher” to “veteran crusading knight” to “ambitious, elite starship engineer” will work.
To turn a concept into a character, you mainly need to know four things:
- What can he do? (Capabilities)
- How does he act? What face does he show the world? (Personality)
- Who is he, underneath it all? (Character)
- What are his functions and relationships within the group? (Niche)
In my opinion, it's vitally important for the GM to carefully vet the characters not so much on power, but on spotlight time and connection. Intra-party conflict is one thing, but having a group that has no reason to work together, and who would most logically go their separate ways, is a nightmare. For some reason, this has been a standing problem in our online games, except when the GM required that the characters' backstories be interwoven from the start.
Another potential fun-killer is when characters overlap too much. There are generally six main niches: persuasion, fighting, healing, knowledge, stealth, and crafts/repairs. Depending on the setting and theme of the campaign (and the composition of the group), some of these will be more or less important than others. Each character needs, if not a separate niche, then at least a separate approach to his niche.
And it's important that no character's secondary field overshadows another character's primary field. The knight who knows first aid should not overshadow the healer, for example, nor should the engineer who's good with computers overshadow the hacker.
If you have two characters with the same primary focus in the group, they'd best have some differences of personality or secondary capabilities to distinguish them. If you're playing a group of courtiers in the king's court, they'd all be skilled at etiquette and intrigue, but one might be an apothecary (thus both a healer and a poisoner), one might be a great duelist, one might be a scholar, and one might be a military leader. If you're playing a group of soldiers, they all might be skilled in fighting, but be distinguished by their other skills. One might be a sniper, while one might be a medic, and one might be a communications and computer expert.
Or, using Stargate: SG1 as an example, all of SG1's members were skilled at fighting, but Jack O'Neill was the leader and one of the best fighters, Teal'c had knowledge of the Jaffa and Gou'ld and was arguably the best fighter of them all, Daniel Jackson had knowledge of languages, ancient cultures, and legends that related to the aliens they faced, and Samantha Carter was the math and science expert who invented, decoded, and repaired McGuffins.
Questionnaires: Turning Concept into Character
So, if we need to find out four major areas, we'll need four basic questionnaires.
Questionnaire One: Capabilities
Since you have a concept, you can let it guide this process. The schoolteacher would be a weaker character unless she had some “adventuresome” hobbies like hunting, racing, or martial arts, but she'd probably at least be good at dealing with people. The veteran knight would be a warrior and might have some knowledge skills as well (or even some first aid training). The ambitious engineer would have her science and design skills, repair skills, and probably some connections and social skills, too.
The simplest way is to go through all 8 Traits and ask: “How good is this character at ____?” Once you understand the thresholds and what the traits themselves mean, it's easy. For each Trait, you should also ask if you're specifically good or bad at any particular areas within that Trait. For example, let's say the schoolteacher (we'll call her Lisa) is also a highly competitive mixed martial artist. Her player might look at Strength and say, “Hmm. Actually, I didn't see Lisa as being that strong, but she's tough, she hits hard, and she's great at grappling, so she should have a Good (13) overall Strength, with Specializations of Very Good (16) Wrestling and Average (11) Lifting and Carrying.”
Then look at the list of skills and do the same, again following the character's concept. The ambitious engineer (we'll call her Maggie) would have “Design and Engineering” at Very Good (16), “Repair” at Good (13), and Starship Engineering & Repair (starships being so complex in this setting that they merit their own skills) at Very Good (16). She'd also be Good (13) with Computers, and would have a little training with Guns and Piloting, just from her academy days. We'll put both at Average (10). Her brown nosing and credit hogging abilities would fall under Presence and Rogue.
The aforementioned veteran knight might have a knowledge skill of “Military Tactics and Logistics” at Good (13) (it's not on the main skill list, but why have a Subjective Character Creation Process if you can't make up new skills as you go?), the “Survival” Skill, also at Good (13), and a “bare Specialization” of First Aid at Good (13), since he doesn't know enough about medicine to have the whole skill.
Questionnaire Two: Personality
This is fairly simple. How does the character interact with the people around him? Does he seem optimistic or pessimistic? Is he friendly, reserved, or a mix of friendly and reserved (friendly on a shallow level, but reserved when it comes to more than small talk)? Is he quiet or loud, vulgar or refined, and so on? This is the face the character shows the world, and may or may not be true to his core personality.
The veteran knight (we'll call him Sir Bart) might be gruff but paternal to younger characters, and completely businesslike, almost unemotional, with his superiors.
Bart's gruff paternalism may be his way of helping younger characters while maintaining an emotional distance, because he's certainly lost people close to him in 20 years as a warrior, or it could be that he's just a goodhearted roughneck who doesn't show any more manners than he has to. His professionalism may hide a deep contempt for most of the nobility that gets the “officer” jobs by virtue of birth rank, rather than military achievement, or it may just be his way of showing appropriate respect.
Questionnaire Three: Character
This takes a little more work, because you have to get down into the character's mind. Here are the four questions I asked the players about their characters in my survival horror game. They're not the only possible set of questions, but they dig pretty deeply into the character's soul. Some of the material generated by these questions didn't come up directly, but I think it all impacted the way the characters were played and interacted.
For the example here, I'll use a real character from a survival horror game I ran. Gloucester, one of my best friends, created the character of Lou, a Welsh-born engineering graduate and amateur fencer.
1) From the character's conscious perspective, what is his/her greatest virtue and greatest flaw (whether that flaw is a "sin" or a weakness or whatever)?
Virtue: He thinks of himself as having the virtue of "making wishes come true." That is, he likes to think he takes the visions, desires, or best interests of other people and makes them reality. He also prides himself on thinking in three dimensions, and three moves ahead. (we'll see if I can actually pull that off).
He views his greatest flaw as lack of skill, physical weakness, and intellectual limitations. He also recognizes that, despite his outward focus on others, his filial loyalty to his family is notably lacking. He can't bring himself to spend time with his parents or grandparents even though he knows he should. He tries to "make up" for that by sending money home.
2) From the character's unconscious perspective (or the player's perspective), what is his/her greatest virtue and greatest flaw?
The jury says his greatest virtue is loyalty, and that he tends to those around him. His greatest flaw is a fair amount of hypocrisy in how he chooses which jobs he undertakes. That is, he does not know his own ethical boundaries well enough to be sure of himself when he sets about to make something a reality.
3) What is the character's general belief system (not necessarily the same as religion)?
He believes a form of Episcopalian Christianity heavily tinged with Buddhism. He doesn't rule out reincarnation, even if he does firmly believe in Heaven, and his views of the human relationship with God are considerably more fluid than the standard Christian line.
4) What is the character's greatest past trauma or heaviest psychological baggage?
He has a few things. One, he fears that some of his family will die without him having shown them proper care and love.
Two, he's fighting an addiction to caffeine, one that he finds ridiculously powerful to resist (he finds himself lately thinking of it like alcoholism).
The part of his past he is most ashamed of, which links back to my comment about his responsibility for his own ethics in helping others, comes from his OL (Ordinary Level) days in the British school system, where he first got his start enabling the dreams and desires of those around him--A friend of his dearly wanted to own a gun, which is illegal in Britain. So on a trip to America, he bought a Glock 9mm and smuggled it and some ammo home for this friend. That friend then killed his parents and then himself.
The last part was changed to finding anarchist cookbook type information, which his friend then used to blow up his parents and himself. The reason for this change was the extreme difficulty in smuggling a gun and ammunition into Britain from America when you have no prior experience in smuggling. It had the same emotional impact while being more believable.
Questionnaire Four: Niche
How does the character fit into the group personality wise and capability wise?
Sir Bart would be a father or uncle figure to younger characters, as well as a warrior and protector. He could also serve as a medic if need be.
Lisa could be muscle in a survival horror or other civilian game. She'd also be the voice of kindness, since she's used to fair competition and working with children.
Maggie would be the scientist and engineer, the one who fixes the ship when it's broken, reconfigures the tachyon displacers and turns off all the vending machines on decks 4-32 in order to change the polarity of the shields and defeat the villain of the week, and figures out whatever high-tech McGuffins come their way. She can create a little tension with her ambition and position-seeking, but that kind of drama can be a good thing.
The Process Itself
Start with a broad, basic description and get more specific from there (example).
Creating characters for a survival horror game, Nathan decided to play Lou, a Welsh-born graduate of Tulane (all of the characters were old friends, and all but one were Tulane graduates).
Capabilities: Lou was an engineer with a good grasp of politics, and his main hobby was fencing. He'd even made a sword cane from a double-width sharpened epee blade. He was also very aware, good at noticing things, reacting quickly, and sneaking around.
In game terms, we came up with: Prowess: 11 (Specialization in Fencing: 13), Strength: 10, Athleticism: 11, Awareness: 13, Rogue: 11, Willpower: 11
At the time we skipped Wealth Level because it didn't matter to the scenario, and we hadn't started using Presence yet. This was a low powered one-shot, and these stat levels were perfectly appropriate.
Skills: (this was an earlier iteration of the skill system, one that was less unified and more complex) Business: 11; British politics: 12; American politics: 11; Engineering: 12; Driving: 10 in England, 7 in America (representing his ignorance of American traffic laws and his tendency to drive on the left side of the road)
Personality: He was good humored and level headed, the kind of guy who'd joke self-deprecatingly about getting a ticket because he forgot what side of the road to drive on, and then get up early to make breakfast for his friends the next morning.
Character: But deep down, Lou feared that his loyalty to his friends was just to mask the gap between him and his family, he felt himself weak because of a caffeine addiction he kept trying to break, and he carried the trauma of having literally enabled a friend's self destruction.
Niche: He was absolutely loyal to his friends, and was a levelheaded, good-humored, practical voice. He could also fight as well as any of them, at least if he had a fencing sword in hand.
Well, that's about the size of it. Any questions
