Group Character Creation

First off, the aforementioned kings of geek metal, Slough Feg are coming to Chicago on April 1. If you’re in the area, you should check it out. I’ll be there, and hopefully I’ll post a review, pictures, or something right here.

Now, on to the real topic…

Hopefully, we can do this topic some justice on an actual podcast, but I was thinking about what I like about group character creation today, and wanted to get some thoughts out on (cyber) paper.

We did group character creation for the Sorcerer game which John Kelly is running right now and it’s worked out awesome so far. I really feel like we not only know each other’s characters, but like we’ve created a pretty dense web of relationships between our characters and other people, places, and things in the world. It makes play incredibly rewarding and gives us a lot of ability to interact in interesting ways.

Sorcerer is designed for this, obviously, and so are lots of other games (fate system games, for example, which have the great aspects mechanic for it). Most games, however, aren’t designed for this. You roll up your character, and that’s it. Any group character creation is done without the aid of game mechanics.

Having said that, lots of people do “group character creation” in games that aren’t designed for it. However, it’s usually more like “I’ll be the fighter, you be the cleric.” That’s obviously not quite the same. It did get me thinking what I like about group character creation mechanics, and how they could be used in any game, even games that aren’t designed for it.

To me, it seems like the interesting things about group character creation are:

1) figuring out how the characters relate to each other. This is more than just “we have been adventuring with each other for a long time,” but creating either some kind of actual bond which keeps them together or some kind of tension which could make things interesting.

2) Coming up with complimentary or conflicting motivations for the characters. Groups character creation should either set overlapping wants and needs for the characters which will make their interactions richer or (and this is more fun) set up major conflict between the characters. Part of what is so interesting to me about our Sorcerer game is that we went out of our way, during group character creation, to create characters who have such conflicting motivations that the game can’t not result in real juicy conflict.

3) Some kind of deep seated reason for the characters to be pursuing the villains, their goal, or the other characters. Sorcerer calls this “the kicker.” Spirit of the Century wants you to come up with your arch-nemesis and, preferably, how other characters have helped you fight them. This gives the GM plenty to work with in terms of some big bad or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m starting to sketch out ideas for a superhero campaign I want to run, preferably in Wild Talents. There’s no mechanic in that game for group character creation, but I think I want to allow the players to create their team together, create their villains, and decided a fair amount about the fictional city they’ll be in.

This can lead to all kinds of other topics, such as world creation, player created NPCs, and games where the characters aren’t a “party.” I’ll come back to these later, hopefully.

-Todd