Quertus rambles about… story?

[noob]

No. I was fairly clear that your character having different thoughts, desires, motivations "agency" than the player are what differentiates an independent character from a self-insert character. All characters have some elements of their creator in them, but it is the degree of difference that separates the two.

Besides, I don't see what the problem is. It's not a judgement on one being better, more fun or anything else. It's just different playstyles. I know a lot of folks enjoy self-insert. I know a lot of folks who like to make characters entirely distinct from themselves.

The playstyle I mentioned make your character more different from you than making your character have a personality.
Unless you are a puppet controlled by distant forces that makes you behave in an absurd way.
No ttrpgs character have thoughts, none have desires, none have motivations, you are talking about fictional constructs used by men around tables to decide actions to pick for their characters.
Your ttrpg character can not have fictional thought different from your real thoughts unless controlled by a player other than you for the simple reason that for you to assign a thought to a character you need to think it.
You defined self insert in such a way that nothing else than self insert could exist then imagined things that are physically impossible and defined those as what was not being self insert.

Unless you can describe your character as thinking about dogs without yourself thinking about dogs, your goal is impossible.

The furthest character you can do from yourself is what I described: grouping at a table with multiple different people and deciding absurd actions for a puppet to do, this makes a character that is entirely different from humans, it does not even have fictional traits like thoughts, desires or motivations, by not having even the fiction of them it is more different from you than any fictional characters you would make with the system you described.

If we use difference relatively to yourself as roleplaying then the only form of roleplaying is grouping at a table with multiple different people and deciding absurd actions for a puppet to do because else the character will inevitably have the same fictional thoughts as your own thoughts due to the requirement for describing a thought to think it.

Unless you think the pinnacle of roleplaying is copying text from internet without reading it because it is the only way to make a character do fictional actions more different from your own than the group at a table, decide absurd actions I mentioned.

[Quertus]

@SimonMoon6 - if you meet your nemesis in the 20th century, does it remove your agency to have defeated their Immortality (killed all their descendants, sealed them inside a statue of Venus, whatever) in Ancient Greece?

[Quertus]

One thing that may have been lost / that may not have been clear about the opening post is that what was under discussion was “what is needed before you begin?”. That is, do you begin writing about Grant on the island when all you know is that he has a box, or do you need to know who Grant is or what’s in the box first? Do you need to know how the PCs will respond to “suddenly, castle!”, or even who the PCs are before you begin playing?

And… I should add that, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it “roleplaying” rather than the “character creation” it actually is, I *have* been in games where the players started with such a neutral Prompt, no characters until they began play.

[noob]

One thing that may have been lost / that may not have been clear about the opening post is that what was under discussion was “what is needed before you begin?”. That is, do you begin writing about Grant on the island when all you know is that he has a box, or do you need to know who Grant is or what’s in the box first? Do you need to know how the PCs will respond to “suddenly, castle!”, or even who the PCs are before you begin playing?

And… I should add that, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it “roleplaying” rather than the “character creation” it actually is, I *have* been in games where the players started with such a neutral Prompt, no characters until they began play.

When writing you do not need any preparation work if you are fast enough at making stuff up in real time and do not care about consistency(look at very high budget movie plots: often characters will behave in a non internally consistent way because the screen writers are in a rush and can not check they are making something vaguely coherent one of such movies is interstellar)

[Jay R]

And… I should add that, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it “roleplaying” rather than the “character creation” it actually is, I *have* been in games where the players started with such a neutral Prompt, no characters until they began play.

i suspect that that isn't true, that they have some vague notion of who the character is even before play.

But even if they actually had no idea who the character is before play, they still have to form one in order to play his or her first action.

"I run away from the box."
"I open the box"
"I search the box for traps."
"I look around to see if anybody else is watching us before examining the box."
"I try to talk somebody else into opening the box."
"I throw the box into the ocean."
"I don't know what to do."

Each of these statements was motivated by some idea about who the PC is.

When writing, you'll use a similar sentence, but in the third person. Either way, a decision about one tiny aspect of the character creation preceded the statement and determined what the statement would be.

[NichG]

One thing that may have been lost / that may not have been clear about the opening post is that what was under discussion was “what is needed before you begin?”. That is, do you begin writing about Grant on the island when all you know is that he has a box, or do you need to know who Grant is or what’s in the box first? Do you need to know how the PCs will respond to “suddenly, castle!”, or even who the PCs are before you begin playing?

And… I should add that, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it “roleplaying” rather than the “character creation” it actually is, I *have* been in games where the players started with such a neutral Prompt, no characters until they began play.

One way I've heard this described which might make more sense is, you might begin writing in order to find out what's in the box. The act of taking a broad idea to a more concrete form (specific sentences, paragraphs, etc) shows you things you could not have seen well by looking at the story purely at the abstract pre-decision level.

Another angle to think about would be, why make character special in this way? One could equally well say 'you need to know what is going to happen in Chapter 17 before you decide what kind of personality Grant should have'. From the perspective of writing process, I don't think that would be any less valid than starting with Grant's personality and then writing to find out what happens.

[Thrudd]

One thing that may have been lost / that may not have been clear about the opening post is that what was under discussion was “what is needed before you begin?”. That is, do you begin writing about Grant on the island when all you know is that he has a box, or do you need to know who Grant is or what’s in the box first? Do you need to know how the PCs will respond to “suddenly, castle!”, or even who the PCs are before you begin playing?

And… I should add that, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to call it “roleplaying” rather than the “character creation” it actually is, I *have* been in games where the players started with such a neutral Prompt, no characters until they began play.

I would say reasonable minimum prompts for character creation (assuming you want players proactively engaging in the game rather than being led purely through narrative fiat) would be:

- setting information covering the starting area of the game and general character knowledge

- expected general activities for the campaign. This might be defined and obvious by the system you are using (like D&D, that explicitly says characters are adventurers who will be engaging in combat), but it's still best not to assume anything about your players. It helps if you have a more specific premise than "anything allowed by the rules"- ie. explorers on long travels through the wilderness searching for lost cities, a government's special ops team being sent on covert missions, traveling Witcher-like mercenaries that are hired to kill monsters and bad guys threatening communities, etc. Note, this only has to be how it starts, not locking the GM and players into only doing one thing forever. It helps for players to have an idea what will be bringing their characters together and to help them conceive of their life/professional goals.

- basic background and personality prompts: following off the previous point, ask players why their character is willing to do the things the game will ask them to do. Why do you want to be an adventurer, explorer, etc.? What do you want to achieve? What is most important to you, money, power, knowledge, status, etc. Give examples and acceptable suggestions. Some systems have this baked into character creation, like 5e's character traits are a pretty good way to do this, but I'd still explicitly ask the questions and ask them to describe those things themselves so that they actually have to think about it beyond just rolling a die and writing down a sentence. Again - only a starting point, nobody should be expected to be locked into something forever, they are allowed to change (preferably in an organic matter in response to events in the game).

Of course, you can't force players to act/take on the personality of a fictional character. Some people are only interested in the game parts of the RPG, and will just follow along until it's time for a battle. When you prompt them for background, they give the minimum basic answers, and that needs to be acceptable, unless you have a large pool of applicants for your game and are going to choose based on how much thought they put into a character background- which, I think, is not a super common situation. Requiring that players write a short story about their character prior to the game is not reasonable in most situations. Just make sure you ask enough questions at the start so they know what their character is supposed to do and will fit in with the party and the premise of the game.

The most malleable part of a character is probably their personality. Whatever traits the player might choose at the start, character personality is going to be filtered through their own, the whole "it's just me + X" situation, and a lot of time the "X" will only appear sporadically during play, or be forgotten altogether. Even those who attempt to portray a personality significantly different from their own will likely shift over time. The longer they play in the group, their original vision of the character's mannerisms and behavior might change- they might find a niche in the group and develop new quirks based on play, they might find their original vision doesn't quite mesh with the setting and decide to shift how they act to fit in better, they might get tired of doing a silly voice or a mannerism and decide to tone it down, or vice versa, find a voice they like and start doing it all the time.

If you were to read back the campaign from the beginning as if it were a story, you might say the character was written inconsistently or wasn't properly conceived. You can't hold the RPG players to the standards of a character that would belong in a story that has gone through multiple revisions to correct all those problems. Perhaps, only after the same character has been played through several campaigns, could you expect a player to have that strong of a conception of a character, and be able to portray them consistently. So, if we want to compare the RPG medium to writing a story, it would work best if you have the same players playing the same characters for a very long time. The first campaign might be like the first draft of the character. Through subsequent campaigns, the character becomes more and more refined, until the player has habituated their quirks and mannerisms and knows what they would think and feel about any situation. Unlike refining a story, the same players don't replay events in an RPG. It is like writing first drafts of several different stories, except you keep the same characters - so the characters might get better and better with each story, but no individual story can be improved after the first draft.
Except, most of the time, people don't play the same characters in campaign after campaign. Usually they start all over, wanting to try new things. So pretty much everyone's characters are going to be in "first draft" form, in every campaign.

[Easy e]

If you want to start writing, the first thing you should do is..... start writing.

The editing process is what makes something worth reading.

[SimonMoon6]

@SimonMoon6 - if you meet your nemesis in the 20th century, does it remove your agency to have defeated their Immortality (killed all their descendants, sealed them inside a statue of Venus, whatever) in Ancient Greece?

Well, if you sealed them in statue of Venus in ancient Greece, they are going to be royally pissed at you when an archeologist frees them in the 19th century, giving them a hundred years to plot against you before the 20th century rolls around. (Or if you guard the statue and keep it in your home, what a shame that one of the hired help accidentally broke the statue when trying to dust it.)

And it's very hard to kill off all the descendants of an NPC in ancient times (you can't Google all of his relatives). You can kill a ton of them but there are probably more. And even if you think you killed Scipio III, you may have only killed his look-alike Publius.

I mean, actually with people who have lived since the Stone Age, an NPC could easily have produced so many children that virtually everyone alive could be considered a descendant. But more distant descendants would theoretically be more difficult to take over (in ways that I haven't thoroughly detailed... there would be an extra loss of some sort of "points", maybe sanity points or "Hero Points" or "determination points" or "story points" or something), so it would be an incredible inconvenience if you've killed all his 4th century BC descendants, but there might be more descendants from previous centuries still out there. You still would've gained an advantage in his loss of (something), but it might be hard to perma-kill a given enemy.

You can frustrate an enemy and ruin his plans, but it's very hard to keep an immortal down. You might ruin his life for centuries, but eventually, he may come back...

... or maybe the 20th century antagonist was just somebody who looked like the defeated foe, carrying on his work in his name. :)

[Alcore]

Ah, you're writing an Isekai light novel!

I was thinking, after reading it, that he was going to go one step further; no people being displaced. Imagine it if you just came into being at the door to a dungeon. You clear it and it felt good; like you were born for it


Now imagine walking into the village and seeing all the people with families, lives and names.

"Who am I?" This imaginary person might say...

[noob]

I was thinking, after reading it, that he was going to go one step further; no people being displaced. Imagine it if you just came into being at the door to a dungeon. You clear it and it felt good; like you were born for it

That is if you do not dies in the dungeon shortly after being born due to having been made next to the tomb of annihilation.

Now imagine walking into the village and seeing all the people with families, lives and names. "Who am I?" This imaginary person might say...

Or you might just shoot at them, how could you know they were not just more monsters?

[Cluedrew]

I think it is entirely reasonable to include things that are not just role-playing in a role-playing games. Historitically the genre was built around a player facing dungeon crawling game, and I don't enjoy that but some people seem to adore that.

And more than that, building out a character is pretty closely tied to playing them. Even in Lady Blackbird*, a system where character creation is replaced with character selection, probably ends up with very different views of the same characters. In fact the best argument for "a character is never truly finished" is Quertus, not the character, the forum goer who started this very thread. They have told stories of how they played a single character over multiple campaigns to drag the character through as many different situations. A character is pretty much a mental construct, so what is truly unknown about them doesn't exist so exploring a character and building them are pretty much the same thing. And boy can they be explored.

* Which I've never played so all this is second hand, sorry for any mistakes.

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Or you might just shoot at them, how could you know they were not just more monsters?

Did you have anything in mine for this beyond the shock value.

[noob]

I think it is entirely reasonable to include things that are not just role-playing in a role-playing games. Historitically the genre was built around a player facing dungeon crawling game, and I don't enjoy that but some people seem to adore that.

And more than that, building out a character is pretty closely tied to playing them. Even in Lady Blackbird*, a system where character creation is replaced with character selection, probably ends up with very different views of the same characters. In fact the best argument for "a character is never truly finished" is Quertus, not the character, the forum goer who started this very thread. They have told stories of how they played a single character over multiple campaigns to drag the character through as many different situations. A character is pretty much a mental construct, so what is truly unknown about them doesn't exist so exploring a character and building them are pretty much the same thing. And boy can they be explored.

* Which I've never played so all this is second hand, sorry for any mistakes.

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Did you have anything in mind for this beyond the shock value.

I did not have any shock value in mind at all.
The idea was that knowing what to kill and spare is something learned and that they would learn how to be part of civilisation entirely from scratch.

[Cluedrew]

My experience is that when players sit down without giving their characters any thought, the character isn’t a blank slate, but an unconscious set of assumptions – usually who the player is, or (more likely) who he thinks he is, or who he wishes he could be.

I agree with the unconscious set of assumptions, but in my experience they also tend to be drawn from their view of the generic hero. Especially in a game with such established archetypes as D&D.

To noob: I don't quite follow but it certainly sounds to be more than shock value. The shadow of child murder might be a bit of a downer though.

[kyoryu]

For a TTRPG that does roleplaying, let's look at FATE - it has 5 aspects, which are short, punchy ways to describe who your PC is. The advice the system gives is to attach descriptive language to them, don't say "I fight with sword good", say why and how you fight with sword good, e.g. "Studies the sword to reach inner peace". Of those 5 aspects, one is the High concept, one is Trouble and three are for fleshing the character out.

High concept is almost the same thing as a class, but instead of "warlock", you need to make it say "Sold his soul for power to never be enslaved again". Trouble is something your character struggles with, let's go with an example of the most stereotypical "Turned to alcohol after his squad was wiped out". The remaining three can be anything you want, but the FATE rulebook basically says that you should create the character with other PCs and these three can be based around the first meeting your PCs had.

Important caveat: aspects can change. It's not really important how right now, but character development is reflected in aspects, aspects don't serve as a way to lock you down into a given personality forever.

Point is, if you were writing a module for FATE, you can make a quick chapter on what some of your PCs aspects should be at the start. And you can do it because FATE gives you a framework for communicating about the necessary building blocks of roleplaying. Compare that to DnD backgrounds, which are "eh, figure it out and pick some skills and gear to go with them", and you can see the difference.

Interestingly enough, the "quick character generation of Fate", which is standard in some Fate builds (like Fate Accelerated) avoids this. In that, you start with your "high concept" (which is often a lot like "race/class" with maybe an adjective attached), a max skill, and... you fill the rest in via play.

In practice, i think this is how "backgroundless" play works - you really start with some general thrust to the character, and then from there see what the reactions feel like, which then feeds into your concept of the character. This is how TV shows work, from the audience perspective. The first episode or so you get very broad strokes, and they get filled in over time.

[Catullus64]

What you're describing is a deeply character-centric approach to storytelling. It seems like a solid approach, but it's a mistake to try to apply it too broadly. Things like Plot, Character, Setting, and Ideas are mutually defining of one another, and I'm always going to be skeptical of any writing doctrine that gives absolute priority to one of them in the creative process. It seems to me like an attempt to turn taste into rules.

I feel as though I frequently encounter a significant bias towards character-driven stories in both writing advice and literary criticism (and rejection letters, but who's bitter?), and the assumption that character-driven stories are in fact the only good stories. Aristotle considered plot superior to character, and criticized tragedies that were about one character but were haphazardly plotted. Myself, I'm far more interested as a writer in language, atmosphere, and the sense of time and place. Characters and plot are mostly there as vehicles for the exploration of these things; so constructing stories first and foremost around character would be a mistake for the kind of stories I want to tell.

I think good writing is usually that which knows clearly what aspects are the most important to it, and gives proportional weight to those elements. Character-driven stories need resolutions that stem from the character's traits, conflicts, and development over the course of the story. Plot-driven stories need resolutions that are carefully consistent with the stated events and facts that have gone before. Setting-driven stories need resolutions that capture the underlying reality or changing reality of the setting. Idea-driven stories need resolutions that coherently express a central idea or set of ideas. Some writers are virtuosic enough that they can give great attention to all of these things, but most I think would be well served by prioritizing.

And, because it's fun to make lists, here's a list of types of stories which I think benefit most from focus on different aspects of story:

Character-driven: Slice-of-life, crime drama, romantic comedy, Classical tragedy, slasher horror.
Plot-Driven: Heroic fantasy, heist movies, murder mysteries, Classical comedy, superhero fiction.
Setting-Driven: High fantasy, Secondary-world science fiction, Urban fantasy, Gothic horror.
Idea-Driven: Primary-world science fiction, Cosmic horror, political drama, disaster movies.

[kyoryu]

In a lot of cases, character and plot intertwine.

A good example of this might be the first half of the first season of Buffy. A lot of monster of the week stuff - but the specific monsters also highlighted something about the characters that were being focused on.

Externalizing internal conflicts is a great way of combining plot- and character-driven stories. The only trick when doing something like this is that you have to make sure that the story and conflicts work on both levels.

Zack Snyder's greatest issue, repeatedly, is that he tries to make things that are idea-focused movies, but fails to really give good info on what the idea is, and also doesn't write them in a way that the surface-level plot makes sense if you don't get the idea that he's exploring. Conversely, the original Matrix both explored a set of interesting ideas, and worked on a surface-level plot basis as well, even if you didn't pick up on the other themes.