What if We Got Rid of Character Creation?

[aco175]

I could see a list of PCs of varied levels, but mostly for 1-shots or to quickly bring in someone after a PC death until the next week. I made a10 PCs for the scout game I ran using the Delian Tomb from MCDM. I had 6 players and let them choose from the 10 to see what kind of party they came up with. They ended up with 1 wizard, 1 cleric, 1 rogue, and 3 fighters.

 

[Teo Twawki]

This kind of suggestion reminds me of the scene in Robert Altman's The Player where one exec makes a point about getting rid of screen writers to save money in making movies. Then, in sardonic agreement, the title character suggests that the film industry remove actors and directors from the creative process as well.

 

[Lanefan]

Do away with character roll-up in favour of pre-gens? No.

Simplify the char-gen process such that a character can go from blank-sheet to playable* in 15 minutes or less? Hells yeah.

* - by playable I mean it has a name, species, class, stats, basic gear, languages, spells (if necessary) - enough to play it right now, with the full fleshing-out and backstory etc. to be done later if such doesn't arise organically from play.

 

[Umbran]

What if we just threw it out?

So, you'd have... Gloomhaven, but not miniatures-based.

 

[GMMichael]

Don’t write a campaign. Write a world filled with monsters, people, factions, and adventures. Fill out a hex map and let the PCs explore. Write scenario hooks for your world and let the players pick and choose their way through them. . .

This kind of suggestion reminds me of the scene in Robert Altman's The Player where one exec makes a point about getting rid of screen writers to save money in making movies. . .

Maybe I'm reading these wrong, but overgeeked seems to be saying that we should keep character creation because it's not necessary to have a campaign lined up in advance, and Teo is saying that character creation is just as critical to the game as the screen writers, who are analogous to those who write the campaign. Do we need reconciling here?

On campaigns: yes, a 10-page story of how the GM wants the game to go is tantamount to railroading. I'm all about the world filled with monsters and factions and so on...but 1) I can't come up with it all on the fly, and 2) a lot of the entities in the world are more sophisticated than I am. So it helps a lot to write up scenarios beforehand, to make up for these shortcomings. These pre-written scenarios are more or less what I consider a campaign.

And I see a lot of importance in tying these scenarios to the PCs. A lot of published adventures fall flat because there's the simple expectation that the players will want to do what the writers want them to do. If the GM knows beforehand who the PCs are and what they're likely to want, then getting straight into the meat of the game seems a likely outcome.

My whole purpose to roleplay is to become someone else and enjoy the action. But if I am not connected to the character I cannot become them. For me, personally, chargen is where I make that connection. If it is a handout, I have no connection to the character, and thus to the activities this character is doing. I feel completely disconnected to the character and game.

I, too, probably would not take well to a character that my GM just handed to me. But for the OP, I'm picturing a short list of awesome characters, complete with awesome artwork, that sort of speaks to everyone. Even the bard (Edward!) looks awesome, for some strange reason. Would you want to play that, if you could pick from your favorites?

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I, too, probably would not take well to a character that my GM just handed to me. But for the OP, I'm picturing a short list of awesome characters, complete with awesome artwork, that sort of speaks to everyone. Even the bard (Edward!) looks awesome, for some strange reason. Would you want to play that, if you could pick from your favorites?

Background, personality, motivation and abilities are all tied together in a character I player, and the character has to be someone I could play with an emotional connection with. That includes all those listed things - and I am very particular about how it comes together. It could also be that I have a particular avenue of myself I want to enhance in the characters personality.
So I double it would work.

To put things in perspective - 2 of my longest played systems are D&D 3.PF and HERO. Those games have about the right amount of character customization for me to feel comfortable to play, and expect to enjoy (although PF is a little limited for that). I can take weeks to make a character just exactly what I want them to be. Add to that the fact that our games run long - my last 2 HERO characters had been played for more than a decade by retirement, and my last PF character for 4 years. I couldn't get long term invested in a pre-built character (even if awesome) for that.

My primary purpose in roleplaying is immersion, to maybe even have moments that I forget I am playing and completely feel the exact thing a character feels. For that work, the character has to be an extension of me, and for that to be the case, I have to create the character.

I think, in the abstract, your idea would work... but it would never be a game I feel comfortable playing. I would no more connected to what was going on than playing Sorry or Chess. It would just be completely mechanical and not what I want out of roleplaying. Even playing such a character for weeks and months I would never develop that .. emotional bond (for lack of a better phrase). It would always feel like moving pieces around a board and not becoming the character.

When I play I always refer to my character as me "I attack the ork" "What do I see". In a character I didn't create it would be "he attacks the orc." So again, it could be a great game, but one I would never play, as the basic concept is almost antithical to what I want out of roleplaying.

(Disclaimer some of that comes off a little one true wayism - I am only applying these standards to myself, not how other people play).

 

[Teo Twawki]

Teo is saying that character creation is just as critical to the game as the screen writers, who are analogous to those who write the campaign.

The analogous equivalent would be the actors mentioned.

I, too, probably would not take well to a character that my GM just handed to me.

In our group, we've been playing together long enough and have enough desire to roleplay that we often used characters issued to us or play characters constrained by stats or traits according to game world parameters. But that is hardly the same as skipping the process. There is still often discussion and consideration before play about who these folk are. We, as a group, tend to lean toward rping in the first-person, so we do like to know Ourselves... the whole (for example) you wake up with amnesia thing is only interesting once or maybe twice if the story and plot are really good.

One exercise twist we've employed is the rp-initiation-rite of make-yourself-as-a-character is to then have someone else play the You you just created. Another variant on that theme is to have everyone else in the group make you-as-a-character and then you have to play You created as others see you (this might only work when everyone involved likes and trusts each other). Characters from songs is a popular source for need-a-character-now situations. They provide great jumping-off points for the player to begin immediately but be able to fill in as desired.

But, again, skipping the process or excising it it seems--to go back to Hollyweird analogies--is like an actor signing a contract to perform as a character they know nothing about in a film that may or may not be detailed to an informative degree. Were I the actress involved, unless the gm/director is Stanley Kubrick (perhaps one or two others), I don't think I'd be very eager to get involved.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I've run D&D at a summer arts camp for the last few summers. There's a substantial chunk of the kids who are more interested in character creation than actually playing the game, and for most of them character creation is at least a substantial selling point of the activity.

I think many people get burned out on the process, which for some games is its own whole minigame, so I understand the impulse to want to skip it, but I think it's a core part of how most people initially get excited enough to try the hobby.

This is also why I think using pre-gen characters as a hack to get new players playing quickly is a mistake, bred of people not remembering their own early experiences. Pre-gen characters are great when you are an old hand trying a new game, or doing a one shot. When my D&D group first tried Call of Cthulu we used pre-gens and loved not having to immediately tangle with the rules creation mini-game of a game we might only ever play for a session or two. But someone's first RPG character is a whole different animal. It is personal to them in ways that it almost never is for experienced players, because they typically make it not really fully understanding what a ttrpg even is, and it is an integral part of most people's first experiences.

Which is all to say that, by all means have character creation-less rpgs... so long as the leading gateway games into the hobby still start people off rolling up a character.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's been done:
View attachment 277288

Oddly, Dallas was actually a pretty innovative RPG. Its just that the subject matter was, shall we say, less than super exciting for most gamers. The IDEA is pretty solid though, for a specific type of game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To answer the OP, "I'd most likely find something else to do with my time." As an occasional special occasion playing a pre-canned character might be okay, but my dissatisfaction with how appalling bland and undifferentiated mechanically most OD&D characters were was a non-trivial part of what drove me away from that game system relatively early in my gaming career.

Basically, bluntly, I want to play the character I want to play in general, and I want them to work the way I picture them working. The farther a game system gets away from either of those, the less I want to deal with it.