Hindrances: Best Writing Prompt Ever

I have a fear of deep water. The idea of swimming in the open ocean where I can’t touch the ground freaks me out. Swimming pools give me a bit of the chills when walking by. Free Willy freaked me the hell out, and it wasn’t just the creepy whale. The ironic thing is I used to be a pretty decent swimmer.

So What Happened?

I’ve been afraid of deep water since I was young; my mother tells me it probably started when I was first taking swimming lessons. As some of you may know when your first teaching a child to swim there are two different schools of thought. The first involves basically swimming with the child letting them acclimated, blowing bubbles, and generally mucking about while they got used to the water. The other involves throwing them in and letting them figure it out. Guess which school I attended? In my mother’s defense she only threw me in after much prompting from my swim instructor. I kept going to swimming lessons for years after that, but never liked doing it. After a certain age I asked to stop because I didn’t want to go anywhere near the diving board and it was pretty much all that was left for my instructions. I haven’t really swum much since, and am quite weary of swimming pools ever since.

Oh, I think I know where you’re going with this.

During character creation take careful consideration of hindrances. Each hindrance should have a brief backstory explaining why the character has the hindrance. Was the character born blind? How did they lose their leg? Was it during the war? When did they realize they were an ace pilot? Think of every hindrance and edge as a writing prompt. Each selection should have a story that comes with it that will give character history and insights into your characters behavior.

Great, any other parting words of wisdom?

Yeah voice in my head, when did you show up? I don’t remember taking the insanity hindrance. Anyway, using hindrances as a writing prompt should allow you to quickly sketch out some background information on character generation as well as putting some insightful thought into your character’s history. This will also help you fill out our Character Wheel sheet with even more background information (as if six pages weren’t enough). Which if you haven’t yet you may want to pick up and fill out, your GM will love you for it.

So what is the story behind your hindrance? Why’d you choose it and how does it affect your character?