about the player

[scurv]

An exercise that I do with my players to keep in mind their background and how it will influence how they play their chars.


Collage major

trade

jobs that you have done

your parents profession

hobbies

Veteran?

reading tastes

systems you play



And before this starts a storm, Keep in mind that if you are playing with a group of vets, That their will be a different focus on tactics due to player awareness, Same with farm-boys and such. Normally we would do these and pass them around so everyone knew were everyone was coming from. And I will say this from experance. If you ever want a jail break campaign to give you nightmares, Have an Ex Con as your DM.

[NotScaryBats]

I might be missing the point, but I find "what kind of game do you want to play" to be very important when it comes to learning about my players. If I want to tell "Lawful Good High Fantasy" and they want to play "Gritty Realistic Intrigue" then we have many potential problems.

I think that is more healthy for a game than knowing what a person's parent's profession is.

[Lentrax]

There was a really incredible thread on the WotC website entitled Lessons from DMing with my Girlfriend.(I think)

It had a lot of discussion on this topic. If you have the time and patience to read it, you will get a lot of good advice and tips for running any campaign you could ever want.

[Arcanist]

And I will say this from experance. If you ever want a jail break campaign to give you nightmares, Have an Ex Con as your DM.

Lemme first start off for saying I am so sorry for the above.

I can tell you from experience that this doesn't really work, because I tried to do this once for a game where I asked everyone who they were. What they saw themselves as and why they saw themselves as such... Everyone was either brutally honest with themselves and didn't like what they saw or was so far out there that it just seemed completely illogical.

Sure you can take the approach that you went with it asking background information and stating out the character for the person, but you also miss out on small details about that very character.

[scurv]

It is not about making copy's of your self to RP with. It is knowing the background of the players.

As someone with a technical background, My brain bleeds rainbows when a DM with no tech knowledge tries to explain something technical. It is an effort to avoid that with other players, and perhaps make use of experiences they have to enhance everyone gaming experance. Apologies if it has not worked for others in their experance.

[snikrept]

Definitely worth knowing each player's area of knowledge focus. Doing world creation, you'll want to stick to your own knowledge strengths and avoid those of your players to maintain verisimilitude.

I once had a DM center a plot around a religion he had created, not realizing one of the players was a college student religion major; she managed blast all of our suspensions of disbelief to heck with her dis-assembly of his fantasy religion's principles.

[DontEatRawHagis]

I have to keep in mind that a lot of my players tend to be very attached to their religion. Not religious mind you, they only go to church twice in a year. However, have a fundamentalist, zealot who represents 0.01% of their religion as a villain, its a hate crime.

So a good question to ask what are sensitive subjects for you? e.g. Rape, Religion, Race...