Your first Spin of the Character Wheel
Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/02/04 – 00:00 -
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.
Example of Significant Details:
Concept: Korinthus Talwin is an adventuring noble who has sought a life in the wilds and dungeons of the world to escape his oppressive family who has members in every major city.
Description: Fair appearance and soft skin. Looks like he’s spent his whole life coddled.
Motivation: Afraid to go into any trade city for fear that he’ll run into family.
Motivation: Gambling Addiction
Background: Member of the noble Talwin family.
Background: Lost his ancestral home in a gambling binge.
Attitude: Sneers at the poor and destitute.
Attitude: Loves opulence. Only buys the highest quality gear.
Relationship: Geron Talwin, Father. Korinthus is hiding from his father, who would make an example of him to the rest of the family.
Relationship: Mak, Friend. The gnome who snuck him out of town in the first place. He said he was going to join Korinthus, but never appeared.
As you can see, these details are just small pieces of information, but they tell a lot about the character, and provide a number of hooks for the game master to use. And better yet, the whole process only took me a few minutes.
A Note on Secrets
It’s often tempting to make a character more interesting to yourself by giving him a secret, but many players then spend the entire game trying to keep the secret from the other players and feel violated if the game master exposes them.
This behavior is anathema to the entire nature of tabletop roleplaying and characterization. If a character is going to have a secret,is must affect the game in a positive way. In essence, your character’s secret is a significant detail that provides the game master an adventure hook, and is useless if it isn’t exposed at some point. You should work with your game master as to how you would like the secret to effect the story.
Write Down Your Details
In addition to filling out any relevant sections of your character sheet, make a list of significant details collected from all categories and give it to your game master so he can use them. If your sheet doesn’t provide space for these details, make sure you write them down for yourself as well.
Continue Indefinitely
Your character, like the campaign, is not complete until you stop playing. Keep moving around the wheel a little at a time. Character advancement is a great time to do a little more work. You’re already having to make mechanical choices, so you may as well take a spin around the wheel, adding to the character and considering how the character may have chanced.
Make sure you go over your significant details occasionally. If any of them have been used as hooks, and probably won’t be again, then it’s time to come up with new ones. You never want your character to run out of interesting ways of landing in trouble.
Tags: character concept, character descriptions, goals, jeff carlsen
Categories: Character Wheel |
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Introducing the Character Wheel
Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/02/03 – 00:00 -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.
As the Wheel Turns
Alright, Mr. Carlsen. You’ve beaten me over the head with a metaphor, but how does it actually work?
Fair enough. As this is an introduction, I won’t dive deep into the details yet; the individual parts of the wheel will each get more dedicated development, but what follows is an overview.
First, you must establish goals. You need to consider what you wish to accomplish with the character prior to anything else. Establishing goals and guidelines prevents you from creating a character that doesn’t fit the campaign, or that doesn’t work with the party.
Second, come up with a character concept. Your concept is a short description of the character. Your elevator pitch, no longer than a few sentences.
Third, develop an image of the character in your mind. This includes tone, atmosphere, emotions, actions, sounds, smells, and anything that adds to that intangible feeling you have of a character. Everything that follows is an attempt to capture and define that image.
Finally, once you have a concept and image, you can start working your way around the wheel. You start with one category, develop some ideas within it, then move on to the next. The spokes, or categories, are arranged in an order so that what you develop in one will most readily influence what follows. But this order is what works best for me, so rearrange it at will.
- Description: This category includes physical description, interesting marks, accents, behaviors, and mannerisms. Essentially, all the things that someone might notice about the character.
- Motivations: Goals, fears, dreams. That which drives a character to act.
- Background: The events and places that have influenced the character, including history, education, and hometown.
- Attitudes: Characters have opinions on everything. Record them for posterity.
- Relationships: These are the people who have influence on the character.
- Mechanics: The game rules. These come last because they feel more natural if they are influenced by the other categories.
That’s it for the basic outline, and is probably enough that you’re already considering how to use it. Tomorrow I’ll start digging into the meat of the process, so stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m interested in what character creation systems you have most enjoyed. Let me know in the comments.
Tags: character concept, character descriptions, goals, jeff carlsen
Categories: Character Wheel |
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State of Apathy – Goals Going Forward
Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/01/13 – 00:00 -Apathy Games dreams big. We have goals so grand that we’d sound insane for uttering them. But to get there, we have a number of short term goals for the next year that we must accomplish first, and we want you to know about some of them.
Savage Setting – Foremost, we’re developing a Savage Worlds setting. By itself, it’s fairly simple, but we have high standards. In the meantime, there are resources that we want available when the flood of new and adoring fans hits our pretty new site.
New Website – Yeah. It’s something special. No peaking.
Savage Worlds One-Sheets – Within the next couple of months we plan on releasing our own one sheet adventures and begin to show you what zero compromise roleplaying really means.
Savage Worlds Primer – We want to have the best and an almost all-inclusive guide to Savage Worlds and the SW community. The kind of guide that only a company with time, resources, and deadlines can ever get done. It will not only introduce new players to the game, but will also show them where to find resources in the community. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and it deserves some spotlight.
Evangelize Savage Worlds – Sure, it might sound a little cult-ish, but we will continue talking about and creating buzz about the game. This great community and game should be shared by all, and we are planning strategies for press ganging more recruits… err. introducing new players.
Embrace the Community – Savage Worlds is not only Fast, Furious, and Fun. It has the best, more creative and understanding community in the gaming world (the studies are still out, but we know it’s true). We will shout this fact from the mountaintop. We will find the best and share the best. We will let the D&D community know who’s boss. So say we all.
Branch into Other Media – Blogs don’t work for everybody, so we’re looking into other forms of media to bring this information to people. While we can’t say exactly which media we plan on breaking into, we do want your help. You can watch our page for new exciting ways to get involved with our projects, or for new forms of receiving news, information, and community projects.
Partnering with Tabletop Armory – We are excited to announce that we will be working with Tabletop Armory on some future projects that will be coming out this year. They will be intimately involved in our branching into other mediums and we look forward to the exciting work we’ll be doing with them.
More useful Advice – With all of this talk of branching into other mediums and developing Savage Worlds settings you didn’t think we’d forget about you, our dear readers?
For our players we’ll be hitting you hard with articles discussing:
- Building a character
- Being a good player at the table
- Roleplaying Skills
- Table Standards
Game Masters will continue receiving the fountain of information on:
- Session Planning
- Encounter Design
- Adventure Design
2010 will be a busy year for us here at Apathy Games and we thank you for joining us while we begin it. We’ll be letting you know more details as they come out so hang on tight! And remember–zero compromise!
Tags: goals, savage worlds primer, tabletop armory, tyson j. hayes
Categories: Apathy News |
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Defining Who We Are
Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/01/01 – 08:00 -
As the New Year is upon us we take time to establish goals and make resolutions, but before you can decide what to change you first need to define who you are.
Apathy Games is game company and as we’ve said before we love Savage Worlds and are pursuing a license to sell our games. Now the simple act of this makes us game designers, but what does that mean? I struggled with how to define Apathy Games to my family over Christmas. None of them play Dungeons and Dragons, nor have they even heard of Savage Worlds, and the closest they come to a board game is the occasional game of Pictionary
Focus on the social aspects
One of the biggest things about our community and our games I hear is that they are social games. Most table top games cannot be played by one person alone, they require other people. If I am going to play a game with someone I’m more apt to choose a board game, or card game to play over a video game. The reason is that I can interact with them more with a board game then I can during a video game. The distinction is important in it directs where your attention is focused. Instead of on the screen and what your avatar is doing you’re focused on the other person.
I decided to share with them a story about playing a game of Gloom
It’s like acting on a stage
I tend to describe roleplaying as a group of actors on a stage that are improvising their lines. The GM is the director, set designer, and miscellaneous characters. He helps drive the plot forward and settles disputes as they become necessary. As the play is being made up as the players are playing it can result in anything from Whose Line is it Anyway? To Grey’s Anatomy, with slightly less drama, depending on your players. The goals of the game vary depending on the game and what you’re trying to do during it, but the play tends to look the same. A bunch of people gather around a table with dice and paper and talk like they are having grand old time (which the secret is, they are).
Our part in the grand scheme
After explaining all of this I simply add that we help the GM’s to create the world by giving them ideas and the tools to do it. As we’re using the Savage Worlds rule system the heavy lifting is done for us and we can focus on creating a story and characters to populate it. We focus on turnkey games allowing anyone who has never played before to pick up and have all the tools to run the game. We provide everything we can to make sure the game runs smoothly in as much time as it takes to read through the adventure. As adults and GM’s we understand that there is little time to prep some weeks or at all. We try to assist this by making it as easy as possible for anyone to play without compromising the game. So while we are not creating a game for the XBOX (a common misconception) we are creating a game for people to play. It just requires more thought, more people, and a bit more prep to play.
What have I missed in describing games and game designing?
Tags: defining, goals, tyson j. hayes
Categories: Behind the Bar |
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