Musings #3.3.1: Preparing for your first session, Part 3.1 - Helping your players create their characters - General Princples
Character creation can be difficult.
For people to create new, original characters to interact with your world, this can seem a daunting task. Your players may have questions like what class do I play? What should my backstory be? Do I have any relevance to the main plot? What do I look like?
Before we tackle these questions, let’s review some principles.
1. You need to provide some context for the world that the players find themselves in, and its major locations, groups, and themes. No one’s expecting you to have the entire map of your campaign drawn out, but some general notes on major cities, areas, and the overall feel of the people who live there can help give your character a place to live. A home is important (we’ll talk about that later), and the only way players will have a home to choose is to be offered potential ideas, or better yet, they come up with their own city and discuss with you, the GM, on how it fits into the game world!
Let’s take “Flight of the Valkyries”, a potential campaign outlined in previous parts of this Musing. Say my player wants to be a part of Relis. I might say to them:
“Relis is a large land mass, divided into four main areas. Eksho, to the northeast; Dakna, to the west, Armata, to the south, and Estera, due east. Each area has its own leader, with the four regions meeting at the capital of Relis, Midima, in a tetra-sovereign council to discuss matters affecting all of Relis.
Eksho Relians tend to be specialists in magic. Their leader has attempting to develop magic such that they can prove that the “city in the sky” is not inhabited by Gods as many in the populace believe. Central to Eksho’s capital, there is a research lab... [and you can do a similar thing for as many areas of the game as you like.]
You can give less, or more, detail as you prefer. My personal guideline is give detail until no longer asked for any further detail or the player finds something they identify with and starts to get an idea.
2. The most engaging characters are the ones that players create themselves.
Often, you may have a person who seems overwhelmed by the process say “just make a character and a backstory for me.”
I personally am quite against this idea; for the reason that if the player is given a story, whimsies about their character and quirks that they don’t identify or personally create, its hard to care about playing that character when they don’t have a personal investment.
The similar in spirit, but fundamentally different in execution strategy I go to is coaching. So, instead of saying:
“Okay then. Well, why don’t you play a Relian Paladin who guards the church of Thealla, where people believe that the city in the sky above is home to gods who reward and punish them for their deeds.”
Try:
“If you wanted to play a character, what sort of things would they like to do? Where would they want to be in society? Would they prefer science over religion? Do they even have a preference?”
Essentially you’re just walking through the brainstorming process together, but believe me, this can be a miracle for players. I have had many players tell me that brainstorming in real time together with the GM really helped their character creation, and allowed them to ask questions about their character and check with the GM to see how their character could fit into the world.
Just remember - the time you take to make your character and work through these things is worth it. Communicate this to your players.
3. Guide players into the mechanics with broad strokes.
“What class do I play?” is a really common question. For new players, especially, I would start with want the player wants to do, and follow suit when giving recommendations. Similar as discussed in Musing 3.A:
“What class are you interested in playing in [Insert system here] ? If you aren’t familiar with [Insert system here] classes, what kind of fighting style/character do you see yourself playing as? What weapons and moves would they use? What abilities would they have inside and outside of combat?
(This question is really helpful for me, because often new players have no idea what they CAN do, but they know what they WANT to do. This allows me to suggest classes or builds ahead of time, or work on custom homebrew ones [that I can balance in the context of the game] to suit their needs. It also helps with experienced players - if they have an idea, you know exactly what you need to read up on as a GM adjudicating their gameplay.)
4. When discussing relative pros and cons of classes, avoid jargon and use general language and broad strokes.
Exhibit A: “Well, a cleric can Channel Energy and but has limited slots per day, but has a higher hit die than a wizard.
Exhibit B: “Well, a cleric can heal others with Energy, but usually has less variety and amount of spells they can use than wizards. They tend to be able to take hits better than wizards, though.”
5. Embrace player imagination and creativity.
One of my players, completely independent of my suggestion, looked up additional classes within the Pathfinder selection outside of the Core Rulebook ones I recommended for beginners. He said it looked challenging but wanted help to use it because it sounded really cool.
Embrace this when it happens. Seriously. Nothing is better than players taking their own initiative. Embrace this and encourage them to tell you their ideas and work on it with you. You will have a much more happy and engaged player as a result.
This principle really works for anything. Does a player have a backstory idea or idea of how they might fit in the main plot? Listen and highly consider how you might implement it.
6. Consider a “prep session.”
This is part of your first session, where your players have decided on narrative components of their characters, may have a name, some amount of backstory, but when you get together, you can start working on doing all the ability-score rolling, skill-point adding, character-sheet filling, and more granular rule stuff together. This is not only helpful because it may be difficult for players to do own their own, but it can build camaraderie and excitement for your game as everyone rolls their scores and “stats out” their character.
7. Provide accessible resources and be a resource to your players.
Try to connect your players with a copy of your system’s rulebook, or if that is unavailable, find an online reference document that contains the information. Otherwise, if that is unavailable, chat with your players on a regular basis and ask them what information they need, and try to facilitate them obtaining that knowledge (even if it’s just talking over Skype!) Supporting your players in character creation as a GM means trying to remove as many barriers as possible so they feel supported and independent in creating something unique and inviting to themselves for your game.
8. Emphasize the fun! Hype up the game!
Character creation is supposed to be fun. The numbers and the details you can figure out later. But I believe its important to keep everyone excited about the great game they are going to play - and how cool some of the backstory or abilities they’ve chosen for their character are and how awesome it will be when it plays out. My players and I, when I met with them to discuss their characters and backstory, often grinned and smiled when we came up with ideas because we were anticipating how great it would be when it played out in a real game. The payoff of reading about Fireball and then eventually casting it in-game is amazing. Share that energy with your players!
For readability, I’m going to split this part in two. We covered some general principles here - in the follow-up, let’s discuss topics like relevancy to plot, backstory, and appearance. There’s a lot that can be said and written about character creation, but I am hoping to keep it all organized so that you can best guide your players.
As always, please let me know what your thoughts are or if you have any feedback! Do you do anything differently? Do you have other thoughts? Send me a message or reply!
As always, cheers and thanks for reading!
