Game Ideas Un limited: Character

  I was surprised to find myself quoted recently.  It was not that I don't get quoted, particularly on forums where I participate, but rather that I had been quoted almost entirely to express approval for something I had written, and that I did not remember having written it.  Particular merit was found with this statement I had made:  There is a degree to which what we call character generation is not the creation of the character; it is the creation of the character sheet.

  I did not track down the context of the quote, and nothing was offered to suggest it.  I suspect, though, that it may have been in connection with Multiverser's "On-the-Fly" Character Creation system, an idea we should have realized much sooner than we did, and which we disseminate through our web presence and our convention appearances.

  For anyone not familiar with the game or this character creation system, in Multiverser the player plays himself, or perhaps a game recreation of himself that is as accurate and complete as can be managed in transposing a real person to a fictional character.  In the earliest tests of the idea, people just started by playing themselves and put scores on paper as they needed them.  From this process we worked out what scores we were going to need.  Real people are far more complicated than anyone imagines, though, and we worked our way to the point that a starting character paper was a major project.  Of course, there are many games in which a starting character is a major project--my character creation web site for original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons consists of over two hundred web pages of materials--so we didn't worry too much about this.  Eventually, though, we realized that we were doing too much work up front.  Game play was better facilitated if we began by putting a very few important scores on paper and filling in the rest as game progressed.  Which scores are the important ones very much depends on the character.  Star athletes need to have physical scores and athletic skills on the paper, while academic scholars would require their intellects and their areas of knowledge covered.  The trick is to identify which are the outstanding and important qualities of this character and get those on paper, allowing the more mundane and insignificant aspects to be added at such time as the game calls for them.

  In that sense, it's pretty obvious that there's a big difference between creating the character and creating the character sheet.  In Multiverser the character already exists, and has existed for years before anyone thought to bring him into the game.  He is a highly complex and multi-faceted multi-talented individual not fully known or understood by anyone at the table, not even the player who plays him.  The character sheet, on the other hand, is a bare bones sketch of a few important aspects of this character.  It gives a few fragments of character abilities in terms that permit them to integrate with the game mechanics.  It cannot be more than that, really.  Were it a hundred pages in small print, it would barely scratch the surface of all that this character is and does, his abilities, his drives, his beliefs.  All it is is a quick reference document to keep a few fundamental character facts as matters of record, should they be needed in play.

  The surprising thing, though, is that this is true of all character creation processes in all role playing games.  The character is something rich and diverse, filled with motivations and history, relationships and anecdotes.  The character paper is nothing more than a reference sheet for a few relevant statistics that are likely to be needed for resolving important moments in play, possibly with some color added to assist the player in getting into the mindset of this character.

  We make the mistake of equating the two.  Pass me my character, we say, as if there could possibly be adequate information in a file folder to fully define the persona we bring into the game world.  Give me an eraser so I can change my character.  As was suggested when we discussed Credibility, that piece of paper is an authority to which players can appeal for support in their proposed actions and results.  The character exists in the shared imagined space, that is, in the minds of the participants in the game.

  For some of us, this is an essential restructuring of the understanding of the character.  The words and numbers on the sheet are not the character.  They could not possibly be that, and so they never were.  The character is that entity that lives and breathes in our imaginations; this piece of paper is a page from the hall of records, a birth certificate, a school transcript, an employee evaluation.  Just as those documents, even collectively, cannot say who you are, so too the character sheet cannot tell us who the character is.  It can only tell us a few important statistics about the character, which is not at all the same thing.

  Of course, this becomes evident in a game like Multiverser, where the entire character creation process (whether played as an I-game or playing a not-I character) involves imagining the character and putting the details on paper.  This applies in many other games as well.  Seth Ben-Ezra's Legends of Alyria (about which he wrote extensively on the development of that game in his Dreaming Out Loud series here at Gaming Outpost) does much the same thing, having the players define who the character is and then create the stats on paper that describe that character.  If you've created a character in your mind and then reduced it to notes on paper, it's blatantly evident that the notes on paper are a pale reflection of the character that has been created.  These are only the chart at the foot of the bed; the patient is much more than what the chart reports.

  Yet it is equally true of those games in which the statistics are developed through mechanical means, such as dice, and the character fleshed out by player choices and additional rolls.  In this case, the real character creation occurs after the sheet has been constructed, as the player defines who this person is in revealing him in the shared imagined space.  Just because we rolled up the scores doesn't mean we rolled up the character.  We only defined a few key points, and left the rest up to our collective imaginations to devise.  The character sheet in this case is the starting point; the character is about to be created from it.

  Either way, the character sheet is not the character, but only a synopsis of the character.  It is like the one paragraph biography of the author that appears on the flyleaf and tells you everything and nothing.  Stop looking at that as if it were the character, and realize it's only the framework, the few critical points to which everyone has agreed.  Start the game and watch the character create himself on the stage of the mind as play progresses.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.