{"id":2846,"date":"2002-09-12T22:40:52","date_gmt":"2002-09-13T03:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=2846"},"modified":"2002-09-12T22:40:52","modified_gmt":"2002-09-13T03:40:52","slug":"character_study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/09\/12\/character_study.html","title":{"rendered":"Character study"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s this week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whiterose.org\/turn\/archives\/000380.html#000380\">Game WISH<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"block\">How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I find characterization and character interaction to be among the most interesting part of RPGs (else why not just play video games), and character quizzes and backgrounds are an important part of that.<\/p>\n<p>So I tend to have an elaborate history worked up for each character.  Actually writing it down takes a while, and it would probably be wise of me to actually check with the GM to determine whether the background fits in with where the character is going.  (On the other hand, I always try to make sure that my character bios provide the GM with plenty of hooks to play with.)<\/p>\n<p>On my current supers RPG I actually went wildly overboard in pestering my players to do <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/dave\/rpgs\/jsquad\/game\/character_quiz.html\">a long, elaborate character quiz<\/a>.  The problem with it is that until you actually play a character, you don&#8217;t have his or her voice, which makes an early character quiz sometimes like the first draft of a TV series &#8220;Bible&#8221; &#8212; recognizable but parallel universe versions of the characters involved, waiting to be fleshed out by actual production\/play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s this week&#8217;s Game WISH. How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6390,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/13\/game_logs.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":0},"title":"Game logs","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 13-Sep-04 8:19am","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, non-gaming people can just skip over, move along, nothing to see here ......","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4679,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/07\/24\/for_starters.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":1},"title":"For starters","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 24-Jul-03 3:49pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Doyce has an interesting post on character advancement in RPGs. Go ahead and read it first. I'll wait ... By and large I agree with him, at least in terms...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5560,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/02\/20\/stuck_on_the_wh.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":2},"title":"Stuck on the wheel","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 20-Feb-04 3:27pm","format":false,"excerpt":"A fine article about why players make the same character over and over -- or the same subset of characterss. Vampire, Mage, and AD&D, to name just a very few,...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4942,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/12\/01\/ding.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":3},"title":"Ding!","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 1-Dec-03 3:22pm","format":false,"excerpt":"And yet another gaming post. This amusement never ends. One of the biggest meta-gaming problems I run into (both as a GM and as a player) is pacing, in terms...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17104,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/13\/dragon-age-rpg.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":4},"title":"Dragon Age RPG","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 13-Apr-10 10:10am","format":false,"excerpt":"Doyce has been running the collective Consortium (me, Margie, and Katherine) through a small game using the new Dragon Age RPG from Green Ronin. We've actually met over two consecutive weekends, which based on the last year or two is like a long-term campaign for us. System: Dragon Age comes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12975,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/08\/28\/dd_4e_character_sheets.html","url_meta":{"origin":2846,"position":5},"title":"D&#038;D 4e Character Sheets","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 28-Aug-08 6:52am","format":false,"excerpt":"The\u00a0D&D 4e character sheets that come in the Player's Handbook (or downloadable as free PDF -- fergoshsakes, don't buy the damned things!) are ... um ... sucky. I mean,...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Gaming&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/d20-dnd.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}