My big character creation pet peeve

[McBeardly]

It really bugs me when a DM tells their players not to communicate about character concepts before the game starts or says that the PCs cannot have known one another ahead of time. It is possible to have a very interesting adventure focusing on the party meeting one another, but I rarely if ever actually see this happen instead its the same old "you all meet at a tavern" setup. Even worse is when they say this is to avoid the "MMO raid party setup", if you distrust your players that much why are you playing with them?

It seems like this just creates setups where the characters have no reason to work together let alone trust each other with their own lives. It tends to either devolve into none of the party working together and all splitting up, or them inexplicably developing an instant desire to travel with a person they met 5 minutes ago.

[zook1shoe]

Check out this thread, it goes along those same lines...

 http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=178.0

[nijineko]

i have little problem with players having characters knowing some of the other party members. makes more sense if character a, b, and c all know each other to some degree, b can vouch for d, c can vouch for e, and so on.

also, whenever someone wants to join or leave a campaign, i work in "entry points" and "exit points" some of which are there before hand, others worked in as we go. these consist of plot logical situations which would account for a particular character being present and having a join opportunity, or reason(s) for leaving.

[Raineh Daze]

I can't say I understand it--some character concepts might very well need the association to even be talked to by some characters, so vetoing all prior knowledge entirely...

Unless the plot expressly hinges on being a bunch of strangers, I don't think it makes sense.

[linklord231]

My DM doesn't like us to talk to each other about our characters because he wants us to "make the character we want to make, not the one we think the party needs."  Understandable, but it gets annoying.  In my case, I'm by far the best optimizer in our group - if someone else and I both decide to make skillmonkey type characters, the other person's halfling rogue is going to feel small in the pants compared to my Necropolitan Whisper Gnome Factotom with FoI, Darkstalker, and Lifesense.  I want to know what the other people are playing so that I don't step on any toes.

[phaedrusxy]

It's just dumb micromanagement. Hell, I love it when players in my games write up intertwining backstories. It means they're at least interested in the story part of the game, and their characters as "real people", and not just numbers and/or hack and slash.

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

This is actually a thing DMs do? Eesh. This seems like a horrible idea that is likely to make any potential imbalance worse at best and yield an effectively unplayable party at worst.

[McBeardly]

This is actually a thing DMs do? Eesh. This seems like a horrible idea that is likely to make any potential imbalance worse at best and yield an effectively unplayable party at worst.

Yes I've had multiple DMs do it. Worst currently was a DM doing a modern game and told me point blank that he would be killing everything from my backstory in the first session. If I ever actually attend a session he is going in the horrible Gm thread.

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

Killing everything from your backstory? As in, "no you may not have a backstory" or "all characters mentioned in your backstory die"?

[McBeardly]

Killing everything from your backstory? As in, "no you may not have a backstory" or "all characters mentioned in your backstory die"?

As in "I want you all to have really developed backstories and become really invested in your characters" and "I will kill them during the first session". He does not seem to understand how these two things would conflict even when told point blank. He also seems to think you get invested in your character as a consious effort when your DM tells you to. He tried to start this campaign as a way to "get real roleplaying out of this group" unaware that we have all got super into a roleplay heavy game while he was absent from the ground for several months, that we really don't want to include him in.

[Kasz]

I encourage my players to work together during character creation, I usually start them off as knowing eachother. My latest game makes them all initiates of the same cult, having known eachother for at least a few years... even if it's just in passing. Two characters trained under the same master and thus have a lot in common and are friendly rivals for their master's approval. One of these and another party member have never spoken a word to eachother and I described their relationship as "You've both seen eachother in passing but your paths have never crossed in any really meaningful way" but during the first session One healed the other whilst he was in negative hit points, so they bonded.

Now (second session) I have a party of players who have bonded and would put themselves at risk for eachother, even though they're all of Evil alignment. I prefer this in leaps and bounds compared to say... a party who've all just met, are suspicious of eachother and might backstab one another.

[McBeardly]

I encourage my players to work together during character creation, I usually start them off as knowing eachother. My latest game makes them all initiates of the same cult, having known eachother for at least a few years... even if it's just in passing. Two characters trained under the same master and thus have a lot in common and are friendly rivals for their master's approval. One of these and another party member have never spoken a word to eachother and I described their relationship as "You've both seen eachother in passing but your paths have never crossed in any really meaningful way" but during the first session One healed the other whilst he was in negative hit points, so they bonded.

Now (second session) I have a party of players who have bonded and would put themselves at risk for eachother, even though they're all of Evil alignment. I prefer this in leaps and bounds compared to say... a party who've all just met, are suspicious of eachother and might backstab one another.

I usually do similar things when I DM; you're all from the same youth gang, you're old friends who haven't seen eachother in a while, you're in this crusading army.

[Bloody Initiate]

When another game does something better I copy it.

In one RPG I play the players are typically contacted as a team because they're known for functioning as one (Kinda like a security firm).

In another (Shadowrun) typically only one player gets the mission pitch and they recruit the others from their contact list or otherwise (Sometimes the NPC assigning the mission has their own specialists they want you to bring along, these are other players).

In multiple other systems you begin as members of an organization. You are typically "recruit" level characters and you're on a first assignment that will turn out to be bigger than anyone expected.

In D&D we've gravitated toward a "disaster brings exceptional individuals together" scenario where there is no NPC in a tavern with a mission, we're just all around an area at the same time something tremendous happens and we band together to fight it off. Even large Medieval cities won't have been THAT big, and so it's not too strange to have a few exceptional individuals within ear-shot of a zombie attack.

Typically we make characters with the other characters in mind, and while I don't mind a scenario in which we haven't met each other I get irritated when players or the GM don't appreciate the anti-catalytic nature of such a meeting. As another RPer once put it "If you guys don't work together, we don't have a game." So as long as players are willing to put aside stupid things like the idea of elves and dwarves hating each other, then this type of approach can work. If everyone starts roleplaying too hard too early though then you really don't have a game, and for those of us who never gave a shit about fluff (Me), this can get annoying.

My pet peeves at character creation are:

Wanting backstories on entry-level characters. "My backstory is I just graduated from fighter college and I'm about to spend the rest of my life hating myself for it." I can't stand the idea of people having epic back stories when they've never been on a single damn adventure yet.

Now if the GM was willing to back up their demand with an Exp reward between 0 and 1000 for a good back story (With a limit on length), then it would make sense. Instead of "Yeah some orcs killed my family but I fought them off when I was 12" from a level nothing punk, I actually like the idea of "Yeah so I killed some orcs once, but I made it sound cool in my backstory, so now I'm level 2 bitches. Suck it!"

That gives you a more diverse group experience-wise (believable), satisfies the backstory fetish, and gets players who have a knack for storytelling a leg up. I'm very big on rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. If you simply set yourself up to "train" people, they'll all learn very quickly what works and what doesn't. Any power discrepancy gets sorted out over 1-2 sessions.

Another pet peeve of mine is players who make decisions at character creation which will adversely affect everyone else's options. I got to my group one night and we were supposed to be playing some WoD game, and the first two guys there had chosen to play hunters. That meant all of us had the choice of also playing hunters who were weak, or playing something supernatural that the hunters would hate. That pissed me off.

I like freedom, I like choices, and I like variety. So when someone else at the table is making a character with an attitude of "if they don't like it, to hell with them" they're putting the whole group in a tough situation. I played a Ravenloft game where the sorceror character decided ahead of time to be evil and to be greedy about every bit of power we found, our characters fought multiple times. In another game the same player wanted to play a rapist, you can guess how well that went. In another he played a child-rapist, which he argued none of us should have had a problem with because we were all evil characters that game, but if you go to prison for raping children that's the one offense all the other bad guys won't tolerate. That player as you can imagine was a consistent source of dischord within the group, especially with me.

GMs have to be realistic about their demands on players at character creation, and players need to keep in mind that the other people at the table are as essential to the success of the game as they are. GMs have the power to reward and punish players, other players have that power as well as the power of their characters who are actually within the game (So if players dispense justice and save the GM the trouble, the GM doesn't lose face. Unfortunatey group-wide punishment denies the punished player a scapegoat, so they don't handle it nearly as well).

[McBeardly]

To me the disaster drawing people together or other means of grouping up for the first session is fine, but it is vital that the players communicate during the creation process so they are all playing people who are willing to work together even if thy haven't work together before.

[Unbeliever]

To me the disaster drawing people together or other means of grouping up for the first session is fine, but it is vital that the players communicate during the creation process so they are all playing people who are willing to work together even if thy haven't work together before.

Pretty much.  And also for the niche protection issue that someone else brought up above. 

We always talk about our characters ahead of time, though.  It seems pretty ridiculous not to, or, better said, to forbid people from doing so.

[Bloody Initiate]

To me the disaster drawing people together or other means of grouping up for the first session is fine, but it is vital that the players communicate during the creation process so they are all playing people who are willing to work together even if thy haven't work together before.

Pretty much.  And also for the niche protection issue that someone else brought up above. 

We always talk about our characters ahead of time, though.  It seems pretty ridiculous not to, or, better said, to forbid people from doing so.

It doesn't seem as ridiculous when you are interested in the intrigue of strangers working together or if you just want to make things easier on your players RP-wise (AKA roleplaying strangers is easier when you start out as such). I've played in game where one of the members was a plant and she attacked us part way through the adventure, that was very memorable. I don't think it's necessarily the best way to do things all the time, I just think it's a legit way to play a certain style of game. Overall I think most strange ideas can work if you do them right and so long as your plan is for everyone to have fun. A good GM with a good group of players can make almost anything work.

Similarly a good director can make it OK to strangle one of their actresses. It sounds ridiculous from every angle, even when you see that everything turned out OK it seems ridiculous, but someone made it work and no one actually got hurt.

The important thing is to have an objective for your strange-ness and to focus on making sure it's still fun for everyone. Not knowing what everyone did can be fun and can change how you approach situations, it's challenging and engaging. However it's also very easy to spoil the whole thing, which can and does happen. Get the right group and the right GM though and it's just more territory you can cover with your team of badasses that other groups never knew could work. A group that's played with each other a long time gains a lot of competence just from knowing and working with each other for a long time. If they devote the energy and the focus though then they simply have more playing power than a less-experienced group. My group that I've been playing with for years can just do MORE than other groups because we know where we stand with each other.

[Unbeliever]

I'm pretty sure I was referring to it as a general practice.  Although even in niche cases I am skeptical:  if the goal is "play the intrigue of strangers working together" it's by no means obvious that having the PCs be strangers to each other actually helps achieve that end.  It seems to be importing method-acting principles into a forum that they're not well-suited.  Playwrighting and directing are very different from the pseudo-improve that is RPGs. 

The players themselves are very unlikely to be strangers, and the "working together" part of the equation involves having motivations that coincide.  Otherwise, they are just strangers.  They might work together, they might not -- but in the latter case the story falls apart or someone has to abandon their character concept to shoehorn them into it, neither of which is ideal. 

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I'm actually pretty firmly against the moles/plant structure for a tabletop group.  Mostly b/c it goes against the core conceit of such a game.  There are X number of people sitting around a table.  And, you pretty much have to work with them.  Otherwise, someone is sitting around doing nothing, which is a waste of their precious (real world) time.  You can't simply abandon them, etc.  Putting a PC mole into a game takes advantage of that, just as it takes advantage of the "PC" label that is naturally attached to every PC. 

That's not to say I'm against interparty conflict.  I actually like it quite a bit.  But, it's more of the Fantastic Four or X-Men type of conflict:  these are people who feel the need to work together and have loyalties to each other, hence why they don't just up and leave or straight out murder each other.  And, achieving even a groundwork for those kinds of relationships and conflicts usually involves some kind of pre-planning.  You can, and perhaps often if you have a good and comfortable gaming group, get lucky and achieve the same ends without out it.  But, that's no reason to forbid the most natural means of achieving it. 

[Unbeliever]

...
Wanting backstories on entry-level characters. "My backstory is I just graduated from fighter college and I'm about to spend the rest of my life hating myself for it." I can't stand the idea of people having epic back stories when they've never been on a single damn adventure yet.

This is part of why I find it very difficult to play 1st level characters (or their equivalents, depending on the game).  I either need to make a blank slate, which (i) isn't very interesting, and (ii) gives me, the player, nothing really to grasp onto.  There are no motivations there, yet. 

Or, I need to create a backstory.  Which, I really need in order to even make sense of the character.  Otherwise, every adventurer (talking about D&D, since in a lot of other games even starting characters are veterans of one form or another) would just be like Bilbo Baggins:  you'd adventure a bit, earn enough wealth to live like a king, and then retire.

Someone who is actively going to seek out adventure is going to need some motivations.  A criminal needs to kill their parents or something.  Alternatively, you can treat 1st level characters as a cut above ordinary folks, which arguably is the approach in later editions of D&D. 

Another pet peeve of mine is players who make decisions at character creation which will adversely affect everyone else's options. I got to my group one night and we were supposed to be playing some WoD game, and the first two guys there had chosen to play hunters. That meant all of us had the choice of also playing hunters who were weak, or playing something supernatural that the hunters would hate. That pissed me off.

I like freedom, I like choices, and I like variety. So when someone else at the table is making a character with an attitude of "if they don't like it, to hell with them" they're putting the whole group in a tough situation.

From what I understood, just this kind of behavior is the kind of stuff the OP (and myself, for that matter) were complaining about. 

[Bloody Initiate]

You changed your posts around, and I had a big reply. I have truncated it, the spoilers are unnecessary.

I basically see that every group is different and what works for one often won't work for the other. We obviously discuss things in terms of "most" games or "average" experiences, I simply suggest that those circumstances aren't nearly as prevalent as we think. A "general practice" may seem like a good measure for things, but I've learned without doubt that one size does not fit all in RPGs.

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This just seems tautological, good = good.  The question is whether it's a good practice in general.  And, the answer, which I'll stand behind, is "absolutely not."

For the most part I agree, I was noting the exceptions because they end up being relevant. Every group has its own dynamic, and what we tend to talk about here is much closer to "etiquette" because you can't really be sure of anything where people are involved.

I don't recommend hoping for certain exceptions, I just think it's important to be prepared for the likelihood that you are unprepared. If you enter a new group with a healthy philosophy about how to handle things and a good attitude, you will likely find things work out most of the time. The problem is that "most" can be as little as 50.000001% of the time. In the presence of more than one option the "most prevalent" can be infinitely smaller, just so long as the other options are smaller than the "most prevalent" still.

So you may see it as forcing a sort of method-acting on the players, but for all you know that will not only WORK but it will work well. It's not such a horrible thing to have a bunch of level 1 characters with some overlap, because they have lots of room to grow apart. It's also not so horrible to have a group that is extremely strong in one aspect of the game while weak in another, that just means you emphasize it when you work together. Method-acting works for some actors, not for others. Roleplaying that way works for some players, not for others. You don't have any idea what kind of batch you have until you've played with them.

Do I think it's a good idea all the time? No I don't, I just don't think it's as bad an idea as people are making it out to be, if only because players and groups can be so wildly different from each other. I've played with multiple groups of all-jokers, not one of them took the game seriously or even knew how to do so. I've also played with players who took the game way too seriously. How much fun I was able to have had a lot of variables, and while I do my best to have proper etiquette, sometimes it's not necessary. Sometimes it will get you left behind because the obvious thing to do is keep your mouth shut, other times it gets you way ahead because the group wasn't going to work well until you got there with your correct way of doing things.

"MOST" of the time things may work a certain way, but anyone who plays a dice-based game should be very familiar with how much one game can be different from another. Statistically a 51% chance of success isn't much better than the 49% chance to fail, it's BETTER for sure, but not so easily controlled as we'd hope.

Even when "most" means more than 51%, or 61%, you're still talking about people who are extremely variable.

As for "plants or moles" within the party

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I also tend to agree normally it isn't a good idea. It worked in the game in which I experienced it though, and unlikely things like that color my perspective thereafter. My primary group at college was made up of weirdos and they enjoyed things that seemed impossibly boring or even offensive to me. I've played with groups of strangers at Origins and every experience was different. I have willingly attacked and killed other players' characters, had one of my coup de gras'ed on the order of my best friend's character, and had a session end after a yelling fight but the group came back together the next week. I've had the GM take visible pleasure in ending my long-lived character's life, complete with taking my character sheet and folding it up with relish.

The point is not that I've seen conflict, it's that I've seen people doing it differently every damn time. The "typical" adventure, the "general practice," the "average game," all of it barely exists in my experience. I just used the more striking experiences as an example, because they're all so varied. I'm far from the most experienced RPer, but I have been doing it for years and while I have yet to regret coming to the table with a sense of how I should behave in "most games," I've often found my restraint unnecessary or even damning on one or two occasions.

I get tired of playing entry-level characters as well, but eventually I've learned to sort of welcome their expendability. I can't get attached to them either, but that ends up working because they either die or live long enough for me to build a connection to them. This has caused me to invest less and less in the character at chargen, because I find myself much more invested after playing them. I don't even name them half the time anymore, which seems ridiculous - because it is - but I've often been so much more thrilled with a name that came from the game.

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I was playing a shapeshifter in Shadowrun whose primary trick was to turn into a heavily-buffed giant tiger. I couldn't think of a name and was looking online with my phone at different languages to use for his name, I had finally decided on one and was writing it down when a fellow player started talking OOC. The party was about to enter negotiations with someone, he was saying that if the talks went south then "it's Tiger Time." I perked up right away, that was my name. It was goofy, but the character was goofy, and it just fit. The character's name became Tiger Time, and as with all of my Shadowrun characters I became very attached and fond of him.

My Warforged characters also rarely begin play with names. One ended up going by "Construct" because he was the only one in the party and that's what people called him anyway (I think he even started with a name), another went by "The Machine" because the names they received seemed so much more valuable than their serial number or whatever they might have gone by otherwise.

I have to play into a character's value, they don't usually start with much until they've earned it in-game. If people demand certain investments of me (Like a backstory, or the very reasonable demand that I name them) I don't mind, but I end up playing them all the way that feels right anyway, so having a backstory to live up to just seems like a hassle. In one particularly challenging years-long PbP game I find myself shedding almost every bit of the character's "identity" just to get my team through the missions alive. He was originally supposed to be selfish and generally a bit of loner (many of the characters were, it's an evil campaign) but very often I've had to ignore that RP to keep us from getting crushed as a party or to at least keep the GM from having to dispense too much mercy. The GM might have even hinted that he'd like more roleplaying from me, but he's good at making the fights tough, and my only salvation so far has been to keep him guessing.

For me I'm there to play, not write stories by myself or ponder personalities. I'm not the best at playing a character other than myself, but only because in my experience a lot of energy spent focused on your own character is a lot of energy you could have spent away from the table without taking other people's time.

This causes me to streamline my chargen and focus a lot on the party dynamic instead of my own character. Since this kinda works for me, I tend to find it frustrating when people haven't learned the same lessons I have. It's fine to have a different preference, I just place the table above the person at all times and prefer other people do the same.

[Raineh Daze]

If my character was almost entirely determined by everyone else, I'd gradually just stop taking part. By that point, my presence wouldn't be needed at all, so why bother?

Someone who is actively going to seek out adventure is going to need some motivations.  A criminal needs to kill their parents or something.  Alternatively, you can treat 1st level characters as a cut above ordinary folks, which arguably is the approach in later editions of D&D. 

Most of the character creation rules will leave you with ability scores higher than the general population, and PC classes are distinct from NPC classes, so... yeah, they definitely are superior, at least in 3.X