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View Full Version : character development methods (DMQ)



juggalotis
2008-12-17, 02:00 PM
out of curiosity what methods do all you DM's use to try to inconspicuously get your players to develop more personality for their characters? do you give them a random personality trait? do you enforce more roleplay, give rp xp, etc etc?

bosssmiley
2008-12-17, 02:17 PM
During character generation you might want to try a Lifepath-style ("When your character was 16 he was (*roll*) kidnapped by pirates and (*roll*) sold to the slave marts. He (*roll*) escaped during a (*roll*) urban fire and...") generation systems to create significant life events, friends, enemies, lost loves, allegiances and rivalries. Cyberpunk, HoL and the mighty Megatraveller had excellent and easily adaptable examples.

If that or a 20 Questions background is too much grind then just rip off quick-and-simple the Answer Me These Questions Three (http://www.hackslash.net/?p=158) (What is your name? What is your quest? Whom do you serve?) background generator from hack/.

Lead by example during play. Give the players interesting moral dilemmas and fun NPCs to interact with. If it works well they'll soon stop saying "my character says/does..." and start coming out with lines of dialogue and the statement "I do (such-and-such)". Immersion. :smallwink:

Tacoma
2008-12-17, 02:18 PM
A: I've tried the chargen "20 questions" sheet before. Result? Uninteresting vanilla backstory except for the party powergamer who wanted a PhD in Magical Theory and an academic fellowship, a tenured position in a prestigious magical academy, his parents were respectively an owner of a media conglomerate and an arms manufacturer ... you can see how this is going and we'ce just covered 5 questions.

And he forgot to fill in his name. "I'll figure it out after we start" he says.

B: I've tried making a set of random history tables - and no, there was no "death in chargen" result possible. People liked it but didn't like how random it seemed and it didn't really fit into the history of the world I had established.

C: I offered starter events, which gave small gameplay benefits but also gave backstory. You'd pick a series of life events and each event had a numerical point value for various aspects: wealth, likeability, health, criminal level, morality, perversion, violence, self-control, etc. A luck roll based on birth sign, race, religion, and a bunch of other stuff would enhance or possibly critically twist each event.
It was pretty awesome, because people could choose what happened and in what order, and could decide to take a quiet life with no chance of gain or loss if they liked. And if life became disastrous they could change plans, so for example if their Health went into a nosedive they might have wanted to go on a pilgrimage to a holy site to be healed.
The first game session was largely making up characters and generating backstory for each one. The first player arrived a little early and had already finished his character, so we started on the backstory generation right away. Another two players caught the tail end of it and thought it was awesome, and made up their characters quickly to get to the fun stuff. While one was still working on his character I did the other. It took longer than normal D&D chargen but it was a whole lot more fun and it felt like just playing the game but with mostly roleplaying.

One player ended up with a weird birthmark he didn't know about, but missing an eye and started with almost no money. He started out wanting to become a Magic-User but had to abandon that when his master was arrested for tax evasion and the mafia closed in to get their cut before the government seized his assets. So he ended up settling for Fighter but he still really wanted to be a Magic-User. Once play began, another character in the party got him connections to a Mages' Guild in a larger town with whom he had a history, and this downtrodden Fighter was able to start training as a Magic-User after a couple of adventures. Later he developed this sort of twisted personality and had a hollow false eye made in which his spider familiar rode with him. And he went on to develop various cockroach-related spells after he found the mafia don was horrified by them. We never got to the point where he found out about the birthmark, or took revenge on the mafia, or rescued his master from prison, but we could have run a short campaign just on the aftermath of chargen.