Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

My gaming group is getting a little bit of a boost. One of my players has decided to try out being a DM, which means that a new D&D game is being launched, and I recently had the opportunity to roll up my first 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons character.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast, but I always seem to really enjoy playing the characters that I create — at least since I reached this “adulthood” stage of life. And because I have this little corner of the Internet, I thought I might write Mr Topp’s Guide to Character Creation.

Treat the steps below with caution. While they are generally the order in which your blogger does things, sometimes steps need to be revisited and reconsidered later. In particular, step two and three are interchangeable, and are repeated (in step four) until they are settled and in sync — although they should never lose sight of the decision made in the first step.

Step One: Find a part of the game that you want to explore

Perhaps this is easy for you.

If you’re a longtime gamer, as I am, you probably remember making characters when you were a kid. You wanted to have the Fireball spell. Or get to have a Mount by virtue of being a Paladin. Or you just got the latest Complete Guide to some class or other, and wanted to try out the Spy kit, or the Gladiator kit.

When I hit my teenage years, however, this stopped being rewarding. A “new” character class (or a twist on an old one) simply did not make characters interesting anymore. As a result, I started to play blank slates — characters that were jack-of-all-trades, or just fit into the party, and counted on random “growth” and interaction with the world in the game to make them come to life.

This was mostly unsuccessful. Over a ten year period, playing a character I liked became something rare and accidental. I decided that I did not like playing PCs, and should only GM.

And then along came the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. I read the novels. I read the rulebook. I re-read the novels. I played in a campaign, ran a short-lived game, and played in numerous one-shots. It is a game I enjoy very much.

But there was a part I did not understand. The power called Logrus Mastery.

When a friend decided that he was running a game based around the Courts of Chaos, that seemed to be my opportunity. I created a character around the idea of Logrus Mastery — he was an exploratory vessel for a part of the game that I did not understand, but wanted to.

And I rediscovered that childhood joy in playing something new. I rediscovered the power of discovery in playing a character. And it was good.

Today, it is the first thing I decide about my character — in terms of the game, what am I looking at? What am I exploring? What part of the game am I trying to experience?

In this new game, I have chosen — quite generally — the incorporation of fey into the game. It has always been there, somewhere, in the background. But in fourth edition it really comes alive. The fey races — Eladrin and Gnomes — have special racial powers built around their fey nature. The Feywild — Fairy-land, if you will — has been expanded as a real and reachable place. And Warlocks can have pacts with fey creatures, from which their powers originate.

All of this explores something not available in the D&D games of my youth, and the central theme to my character concept involves exploring this in the game. A PC steeped in the Feywild gives me a starting point, and grants a heavy focus to the entire character creation process.

Step Two: How does my character get to their starting point?

This step is, essentially, the character’s background and history.

This is a standard part of character creation, but for some reason it tends to be treated as an afterthought. Not here. We are all shaped by our experiences — I, for instance, am not a set of my skills and abilities. Five points of fencing, seven points of blogging, and so on. I am a sum of my experiences — my schooling, my parents, my teachers. Where I have lived, what I have lived through.

Once you have fleshed out your character, these choices are limited. But when your only limitation is the overriding character concept (see step one), you have a lot of freedom to define who your character is before the sum of their experiences has been limited by what is written on a character sheet.

Like most long-time roleplayers, I have seen (and written) all sorts of character backgrounds, from short novels to single paragraphs. What works best for me is to have a very lightly mapped out history, with more detail as it gets closer to the game.

For instance, in this game, there is a sentence or two about my character’s family. A paragraph about his life up until recently, and then about a page on the events that lead him to where he is at the start of the game. Excepting some early-in-life character-shaping event, this seems to work well.

Step Three: How does my character interact with their environment?

Once we have the basic drive of the character — and probably a good idea of what they’re going to look like once skills have been assigned and powers chosen — my next consideration is how they interact with their environment.

Are they bold? Quiet? Arrogant? Confident? Proud? Humble?

How will they react to those monsters, characters and dilemmas they are likely to face in the game?

Most importantly, can I, as the player, find something inside myself that can be drawn upon to behave in the appropriate fashion? It seems to me that I have moments in which I behave — or would like to behave — in a manner that would fit any of the characteristics I would place here. Chances are you do too, but be aware of them right now. If you decide to be a proud character, but normally deflect praise yourself, be aware of this when creating the character.

It is the differences, personality-wise, between you and the character that make them an interesting person to play and explore. The alternative is to play yourself with superpowers — there is nothing wrong with that approach, but make it a decision and not an inevitability.

Step Four: Stir

Here we take our steps two and three, and revisit them. Adjust them until they fit together.

The character’s past ought to either inform the manner in which they interact with their environment, or be consistent with it. In other words, there should be an event (or events) which lead towards their behaviour, or the character’s story needs to be consistent with that form of interaction all along.

For instance, if you want to fulfill your commuting fantasy about pushing your fellow jerk commuters down the stairs, your character will probably be short-tempered and violent. They might have a past that involves being imprisoned, living on the street and fighting for cash (consistency), or have suffered a recent trauma (event). They likely should not have had a happy childhood with good relationships and had top grades in school.

People do “just snap”, but there ought to be a trigger. Do not count on encountering a proper trigger in the course of the game, unless you have already agreed such a thing with the GM, and decided what it would be.

Step Five: Put your character into the game’s framework

Only now do we turn to rulebooks and character sheets. Create your character based on what you have already decided.

While there will likely be a few painful choices — two things that both fit the character as written, where only one can be chosen: where to spend the last few points, what skill gets the last slot — most decisions will be made by your character concept (Step One), with the peripherals informed by your character history (Step Two). Your circus-raised Sorcerer, for example, is more likely to know acrobatics than history.

Step Four: Development

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

All of the above is designed to give you an interesting person to drop into the midst of a game that somebody else is designing. What happens from there is anybody’s guess.

In the majority of games, the events in-game are supposed to be the defining moments of a character’s life. Unless you’re playing retired superheroes who are called to action one last time, this is likely to be the case in the game that you are playing.

And there’s something about experiencing life-defining moments. They change you.

And so they will change your character as the game progresses.

Think of the four Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. Merry and Pippin go through profound changes over the course of the story. Sam and Frodo, on the other hand, are more stalwart and bent to the purposes they have been assigned at the beginning of the story. But they are also much changed by the adventure. Their future selves are quite different to the Hobbits who were plucked from the Shire by adventure.

There is little point in trying to plan it out. Certainly, your character can have goals, but how reaching (or failing to reach, or being sidetracked) will change them is difficult to guess. The events with the most impact to the character do not have to be those most important to the story: A friend in danger can turn a reticent hero into the one leading the charge. Wielding a flaming sword could change the character’s own self-image, and alter their approach to dangerous situations.

Whatever happens, let it happen. Your character might continue to be interesting long into the future.

Top photo by Steve Barry.
Bottom photo by Lydia.

I’m still brewing over what happened on Sunday night, when my regular group gathered around a table to play another chapter in my D&D game.

It has been nearly twenty months since we started the game. The cast consists of …

… Me, an experienced DM who is used to experienced players.
… Them, a group of first time players — the most experienced among them having played one or two one-shots.
… The game, Dungeons and Dragons – Fourth Edition.

The last time I had played Dungeons and Dragons, the game was on its second edition. And wow had it changed.

At the end of the game Sunday night, I remarked on how well it had went. The players — doubtlessly thinking of the infamous April game where they had made useless all the planning I had done — thought that I meant that my plot was intact. That they had not screwed up the plot by killing a major bad guy.

But I learned that lesson earlier this year.

Sure, they screwed up a plot — but it was a plot belonging to the bad guy they killed, not me. Confusing my plot with the plots being carried out by the characters in the game is what screwed me over before.

The world has places, and people. And things. There are bad guys, good guys, and guys that don’t clearly fall to either side of that line. These characters all have their own plots and plans and goals. So the players cannot screw up “the plot”, they can only foil the plots of their enemies — or, if they prefer, their allies. While their actions changed my plans for a scene later on in the session — they caught him earlier than expected — that’s OK. A third scene was also eliminated, in which the bad guy’s plot was successful, but there was always a good chance that said plot would be foiled at some point.

If the triumph of my approach over potential game-changing action by the players was not what made Sunday’s session great, what was it?

The answer is a simple one: The Game Flowed.

Until Sunday, there had been two types of sessions: They were either roleplaying intensive, where the dice tended to stay put and the rules were not needed, or they were combat intensive, with lots of rolling, rulebook referencing, and the game was a constant trying-to-figure-out-what-is-going-on. In a bad way.

On Sunday? There was a ton of dice-intensive action — robberies, fist fights, sword fights, invasions of underwater temples, ambushes — but it flowed. They would describe what they were doing. I’d say “roll against [insert skill/stat here]“. They would tell me the result of the roll, and I would describe the result of their action.

It was an absolutely beautiful game, the way roleplaying games ought to be, but seldom are. The conflict felt like conflict — sometimes it was dangerous for the PCs, sometimes it was dangerous for their enemies. The players explored creative ways to solve their problems that were not written explicitly on their character sheets.

Rather than having conflict be a series of checking character sheets (for both the good guys and bad guys), and referencing charts and rulebooks, it was a quick describe-roll-react scenario.

A quick caveat: There were no huge drag-’em-out fights in this one. Only small skirmishes, usually with one side or the other mismatched. We will have to see if the Big Fight can possibly go so smoothly.

But for one glorious afternoon, we (largely) left the 4E power structure behind, and used it’s other mechanics — and it was devastatingly simple and effective.

When I was a child, most of the adventures I played were of the pre-packaged variety. I replayed the Draglonlance books through their corresponding adventures, completing the D&D campaign to novel to D&D campaign circle.

I must have sent every single one of my friends through the Isle of Dread, although I am still unsure as to why there is a Ring of Regeneration inside the guts of a dinosaur. None of the players ever found it, but it led to me to vivisect monsters for years to come.

This is to say nothing of my favourite adventure, The Egg of the Phoenix, which — when first played at the age of 12 or 13 — I was sure was the greatest adventure of all time. I still have a tendency to occasionally steal bits and pieces of it for my own games.

For my current game, I had decided that I wanted to give my players (who are all a bit new at this) a bit of an old-school adventure experience, and started looking around for a 4th Edition adventure that I could slip into my campaign.

There were none.

All the stores that sell roleplaying games have no more than two or three adventures — the same in every store — none of which slide easily into our present campaign. No problem, I thought. I’ll just check online.

The same problem.

As I have learned from last week’s look around D&D Insider that new adventures are still regularly published in Dungeon. But Dungeon has not been published in paper format since 2007, and I can hardly do “old school” from my laptop. It’s just not the same if you cannot take the cover off the adventure and use it as a DM screen.

Besides which, you need a full subscription to access Dungeon. You cannot just buy one adventure (or one issue) and then print it up. Not that I’m entirely sure of the legalities of printing an adventure sold on a subscription basis — that might be expressly forbidden.

While I was never a huge customer of pre-packaged adventures (after Egg of the Phoenix, everything turned to homemade adventures), I am quite sad to see shops devoid of them these days — particularly when I happen to be searching for one, myself.

However I did find one thing online. Wizards of the Coast will be releasing a version of Tomb of Horrors as a “Super-Adventure” this summer. Tomb of Horrors is one of those original — strike that, the original Gary Gygax dungeon crawl, where the entire setting is just trying to kill you.

Monsters, traps, the Big Bad at the end … it’s all there.

The end result is that the big traditional dungeon crawl has been delayed until such a time as I am ready to plunge my players into The Tomb of Horrors!

I can’t wait.