I love this idea.

Jeff, your Buffy Q&A sounds like a great blueprint for kicking off collaborative character creation — I may just have to steal those questions myself!

Writing backgrounds is tricky– especially as the way you play your character often changes quite a bit from the way you imagine during the first session. Too much background can feel like a straight jacket…

A GM in our area has insisted on playing the character backgrounds.

He runs Seven Seas, so certain details of the background are random. He then feels out the character backgrounds (by talking to his players) enough that he can run solo sessions with each character before they meet.

Yes, each player plays about a session alone with the GM.

What this does is change the rate of character development. When he gets to the first session together, all of the characters have already developed a voice and personality. And every player knows his character’s motivations.

The irony of this is that so few people bother to read intros that not only have many people missed this suggestion, but a good handful have inferred that the presence of 365 questions means you’re somehow supposed to answer ALL 365 with regard to ONE SINGLE CHARACTER. Honestly, I can’t imagine a worse way to go—I think by the time you’re done you’d hate your character because you’d have burned out on it. The presence of so many questions was merely meant to give folks a variety to choose from so they could find ones they liked.

One of my current favorite character backgrounds was from someone playing a druidic elf who joined an army unit. The army built an outpost near his woods to hunt orcs. The elf kept pestering their patrols because they were infringing in his woods. They asked him to stop and offered him the chance to fight orcs with them. He did, not realizing that he was signing up for a 4 year stint in the army.

Tell them, in detail, what I’m going to do as “setup” for the first few sessions, and ask them to build a character that will fit that paradigm. I haven’t had a problem with really seriously inappropriate characters since I started doing this. Usually it’s the players telling me that they think their character “won’t fit” and I have to explain why I think it will.

Next, the players can decide, spontaneously in game, that they “own” some part of the game world. The NPC shopkeeper they run into is a cousin. The NPC wizard is one of their old adventuring buddies. They had a nasty run-in with priests of this god at some point. Thus their background is pretty much automatically integrated with the game and all I have to do is adapt to these new “ownership” situations. It works pretty well for everyone.

My group doesn’t really like long backgrounds, at all, and I don’t really ask for ‘em (anymore). But I’ve found myself pretty much writing their backgrounds for them – so that our Dwarven Dragon shaman suddenly found himself a rival (a red dragon shaman) who was related the dwarf’s background (something the player told me a week into play and then didn’t really think about).

Problem is, the player didn’t really connect with it. And the same has come up a few other times, too.

So now, we’re background-lite. But I think this might be a good way to introduce things.

One thing I really hate is the long novel background that sort of works like this: “X did a whole bunch of heroic stuff, made enemies with an evil wizard, and lost his family’s +12 magical sword. He hates the thieves’ guild of Y, because of blahblahblahblah, and now they occasionally send assassins after him, which he has so far either fought off or evaded. And now, as a level 1 fighter, he is ready to begin his career as an adventurer…”

If you’re gonna write a background, it has to be stuff that’s not so crazy that you’d rather see it played out. I personally prefer “X came from a small village, got bored, and joined the army. A year later, his unit was disbanded. Now, he’s looking for work. So he’s an adventurer.” Works *So* much better, I’d say.

Is the setting happy go lucky? Dark? Horror? Is it rated G, PG, R? Is it a story where the characters rise to exalted heights, or one where they fight a losing battle to the end?

Any of these moods can work, but if you don’t know enough beforehand, it’s hard to form the character & mentality. A character that can thrive in a dark and gritty setting comes off as silly in a more lighthearted one.

I ran a dark setting as a variant of the Warhammer world, gritty stuff. One of the character concepts given to me was for ‘Nimpy Fancypants’, Half-copper dragon gnome bard.

You get all types.

1) Tell me how you know at least one other Cast Member, and what you think about them.

2) Describe your relationship with at least 1 Guest Star — this could be good, bad, or indifferent. Include both how you feel about them and how they feel about you.

3) Why is your character not going to run screaming from all the things that go bump in the night?

4) Suggest at least 1 detail for somebody else’s character. You have to use at least one suggestion made for you, and can use all of them. (This is designed to help the players get into a groove with each other.)

brcarl – You make some interesting points. Linking players together can do wonders for group cohesion, and a couple of lines of info about their passions can help the GM in the future.

Telas is right too about this approach, you’re not forcing the players to write more information that absolutely neccessary, so the players should think you’re a commie GM. Love this approach.

Must … resist … emo … comment.

“A (personality trait) (profession) is (personality goal).”

For example:

A forlorn air pirate is seeking the City of Gold.

A vengeful princess is engineering the downfall of the empire.

An out-of-luck sorcerer is looking for his true parents.

A tired gunslinger is waiting for someone to finally out-draw him.

A bored bureucrat is plotting the ultimate office prank.