It has taken a some time, considerable thought, and a little bit of effort, but here is the final entry in the Character Wheel series. As promised, in the coming weeks I will compile all these various posts, edit and refine them, and put them out as a PDF so you can make better use of them.

By now, your character has a complex set of Attitudes and Motivations. You can describe him down to the mole on his left shoulder, and you know how he celebrated his sixth birthday. But do you know who was there?

A character doesn’t grow in a vacuum. He’s influenced by the people around him. As such, you need to take some time to think about his important relationships.

It’s Who You Know

Relationships are complex things, and people have a lot of them. A hugely tremendous number, really. In part, they define us. In a game, a character’s relationships are powerful motivations, tinged with deep-rooted attitudes. Each has it’s own history. To a certain level, every relationship a character has is practically a character biography in and of itself.

If Motivations describe what your character does, Attitudes describe what he says when he does it. Attitudes are the core of roleplaying, and are deeply tied to motivations.

This is where a character gets spunk, and where it becomes interesting at the table. Other players don’t care as much about your character’s Background or Motivations as you do, but they will certainly respond to a well crafted attitude.

I’ve Had Just About Enough Lip Out Of You

People don’t behave in just one way all the time. They react to things. Your character shouldn’t either. He should have a variety of opinions and reactions to various situations, and behave differently when experiencing various emotions.

When most players think about character development, they think about background first. Sometimes, it’s all they ever really consider. I think that it’s actually the least important aspect of the Character Wheel, but it does have value in helping guide and inform your choices elsewhere on the wheel.

Hey, Good Lookin’. Where you from?

A character’s background includes where he came from, what events have occured during his life, and how he got to be where he is today.

A character’s personality is split into two parts: Attitudes and Motivations. Of these, the latter is the most important to a roleplaying game. A motivation is anything that drives your character to act. They can be external or internal. A poisonous snake can be an external motivation, but we’re not overly concerned with these right now. Those are provided by the game master, and are more directly related to attitudes. Instead, we’ll going to think about internal motivations–those that come from the character’s own twisted mind.

Director, what’s my motivation?

Significant Details are critical under this category. Choose a handful of powerful motivators you want constantly considered by the Game Master during adventure planning.

As was foretold, the Character Wheel has returned to us. This time I begin a series of posts going over each hub of the wheel in gruesome detail. In addition, I have rebuilt the Character Wheel sheet. It is now completely system agnostic, and has just a touch of color. Check it out, as I’m quite proud of it.

Can you describe the perpetrator?

Let us start by going over Significant Details. These details are supposed to have an effect on the game; you want the Game Master to utilize these during adventure design.

Look over this section of the sheet for inspiration. Perhaps you have a distinctive tattoo that will cause conflicts. Perhaps your love of a particular drink will eventually become unhealthy. Or, maybe, the ultimate piece of your car emblem collection has been discovered, and it’s a race to discover it. Essentially, consider how some of the entries could be used in an adventure, and build a detail from there.

It’s been a while since I discussed the Character Wheel. Obviously, you’ve been waiting in frustration for more of my genius, but I wanted to give the concept time to bounce around in my head so it could truly be the ultimate character creation tool. If you’re not familiar with the concept, please check out the introduction and first spin posts.

What we’ve covered so far is enough to generate significant details in each of the six categories. In the next few weeks, I will be covering each category in detail, as well as providing a character sheet to supplement this process. You can already check out a rough draft by downloading the sheet [.pdf] I provided in our 100th post.

While you don’t want to build your whole character at once, you should give the wheel a quick, cursory revolution before you start play. The reason to do this is in a cursory fashion is that none of the details should be set in stone. While the order of the wheel is designed so that early categories readily influence later ones, during the first pass the whole character in malleable. New ideas you come up with later in the wheel can contradict earlier choices, which you can change to match.
Significant Details

Every good author knows not to bombard a reader with large amounts of superfluous description. It puts the reader to sleep and detracts from the story. Instead, it is best to present only the significant details, and leave everything else out.

The same holds true for your character. Comming up with pages of information that will never have an effect on the game is a fruitless effort. It is better, particularly on your first pass, to concentrate on creating one or two details for each category that you want to effect the story. These will be your go-to details. You’ll use them to describe your character to other players, to directly influence the character’s actions, and to provide the game master with plot hooks for adventure building.

Character creation is an ongoing process that, like any art, resists too much structure. Nevertheless, it benefits from a guidelines and process. What follows is a development tool that will help you grow a character alongside your campaign. It’s called the Character Wheel.

The Basics

The Character Wheel is a simple metaphor. The wheel’s hub are both your character’s core concept and the image you hold of them in your head. All other aspects of the character are spokes that revolve around, and are informed by, the hub.

The wheel itself never stops turning, because character development never ends, but also to provide a convenient order of operations when considering aspects of your character. As you play the game, you just keep moving around the wheel, adding to your character.

Finally, the wheel is a reference. Every has aspects of their character that they develop more easily than the others, but this can make the character’s wheel unbalanced. This isn’t terrible, by any means, but it points out weaker aspects that deserve attention.