Exchange of Realities

So you need a character. Where do you start?

First off, you’ll need a concept. This part is pretty straightforward, but there are multiple ways to find the core of a character.

One is purpose—a role which the character is supposed to fill. This can be function, like filling the need for a close combatant, filling a story-role like “antagonist” or “mentor” or filling the slot of innkeeper in the next big town; it can be dramatic in nature (one of my favorite characters was designed to give a friend of mine a chance to pull the same character-altering redemption scene on me that my group and I had pulled on one of his in the last new game); it can even take more of a literary bent, like trying to subvert a genre staple.

Another is image. Some characters begin as a picture; in fact, this is a rather common means of getting inspiration. (Then there’s the subgroup of this kind of character, who are straight rips of a pre-existing individual from a movie, game or story—try to avoid those. Please. I’ll go into more on that later.)

A third is the question. This is one of my favorite means of character conceptualization. Essentially, this sort of character comes from a simple question about the concept, about the world, or about the player. I’ve seen characters who in some way answered everything from “What does it mean to be a seer?” to “So what happens if you push the boundaries of this magic system?” to “Okay, can I do creepy on purpose?” The advantage to these sorts of characters is that the question can guide their characterization in ways that image and purpose often can’t.

While you can start with any of the above, the best characters will have all three. For an example, I’ll use my old friend Ruby, whom we met last week .

Ruby was originally constructed from Purposes. Yes, two. One was her role in her group as The One Who Hits Things, the other was “All right, let’s take every cliché and expectation we can find about the servants of death and turn it on its head.” This gave me her boundless energy, general combat style (I squeeze it until it stops moving!), and worked me towards her image. Then I came back and filled in the image (getting me her appearance, particularly that red streak in her hair). Then came her first question. It wasn’t a concept-grounding Question, per se, but it led to one, and it gave me enough of a springboard to move on: “What’s a nice girl like her doing serving a cause like that?”

That brings us to the next part: Applying the purpose, image, and question to everything else, particularly how the character gets along with the world. Applying the purpose is straightforward; you track backwards to figure out how the character got into the purpose, and forwards for how she can achieve it. For the image, you can look at things like whether the character tries to attain said image, where certain elements of it come from (either physically or symbolically, if not both), and how the world around them views it. The question results in what might be either the easiest or the hardest design process: try to answer it, and see what you get. Once you’ve got these, you can come up with new applications to them, giving you further chances at breadth and depth.

For this part, I stuck mostly to the purpose and the question. The purpose required that she not have the usual angsty outlook towards her role; the easiest way to do that was for her not to have figured out what she’d gotten herself into. From there, I realized that she would have to have been talked into it by someone else.

This is where her primary relationship, the one between herself and her mentor Lirit, comes in. Ruby couldn’t have come by her powers the normal way, because then she would’ve understood what she was doing; she had to have gotten power from another source, then had it changed. This led to a new question: Why would she want to? Which in turn had several answers, mostly variations on “Lirit talked her into it.” She didn’t know what to call what she was capable of, had no idea what she was supposed to do with her new abilities, and had been chased out of where she had belonged due to her new status; Lirit gave her a position she could put a name to, a purpose, and a group to belong to. There was something she was looking for, that could take a while; Lirit offered her the resources and the lifespan in which to find it.

Then I applied this knowledge. It was pretty clear, given the magnitude of what she’d talked the girl into, that Lirit would be the closest relationship Ruby had—a mix of student/mentor, monster/one who accepted her, and bodyguard/protected dynamics. Score one for context.

From there, the rest of the initial decisions were detail-work, little things like what how she viewed the other members of her group, how she was likely to view other people, and what exactly her powers would entail. After that it was simply a matter of letting her out into the world and seeing what happened and how it would change her.

But that’s another story.