Developing Character(s)

Ah, the fine art of character creation. It is an art in many ways, and I fear I am lacking my muse. Part of my longs for the days of being able to put together a D&D character as, literally, a collection of stats and abilities and then going from there. Personality and niche develop out of play, dependent on the rest of the group and the campaign itself.

More and more, I've seen games pushing for starting with the character of the character and working stats secondarily to match. That's not invalid by any means, and I could argue it's a better way to do things in order to make a character worth playing. But it also leads to a total roadblock when lacking creative ideas.

Most of my characters of the last ten or fifteen years have come about in one of two ways.


First, there's the inspired method. Here, I have an idea of the character to start with. Often it comes to me as a mental image that conveys their personality. I don't always get all the details at once, but I get enough to know a general idea of what they can do, how they do it, and how they're likely to feel about it - easily enough to fill in the Concept or High Concept blank on a character sheet. Of course, sometimes my imaginary ambition overreaches and I have to tone things down a little for a starting character when it comes to stats, but that's generally the hardest part.

Second, there's the forced method. If I know there's a game coming up, and I just don't have any ideas, I try to sit down with the rules and throw something together. Sometimes this has the benefit of meshing better with a group in the sense of ability overlap, as I can tailor to fit a certain niche. Usually if I go this route, though, I will have little in mind as far as motivation or personality. This leads to me being less into the character and the game, and less enjoyment in general. Sometimes such characters will develop into something more interesting to me, but even under the best of circumstances, it takes a while.

I think I can safely say I always prefer the first method if I can get it, but it's dependent on whim and imagination. Sometimes, I just can't come up with anything that grabs my interest.

Unfortunately, I've not been truly inspired for a major character in a while. A while back, I was shown the Dresden Files RPG with some suggestion of maybe an online game. Shortly after, several of my offline gaming group sunk their teeth into the PDFs and started getting hyped to play. So now I have one or two possible games coming up and I feel like I've got nothin'. Most of the archtypes actually feel overdone to me. As much as I like the novels, the characters there seem to cover a good range. I don't feel inclined to copy them, so what's new? Potentially anything, but very little grabs my attention. The fae courts seem a little overdone (and really, the books make it out like their whole world exists in the shadow of Chicago). Mages, I feel a little played-out on in general. Vampires just don't terribly appeal to me for whatever reason. I don't feel particularly inclined to play a character of a real faith...

The only raw idea I had was to start with the Emissary template to make a servant or scion of some power. But what? Outsiders? Waaay too dark for the game. What's left in the setting? Umm... dragons? Big, bad, mysterious, and ill-defined. Well, that seemed a possibility, but I haven't been able to pull an idea together beyond that. What "dragony" powers would be conferred? Well, they're known for strength, toughness, sometimes fire breathing/trailing, sometimes water (more in Eastern mythos), they're sometimes guardian beasts (going back to Greek-era), and in more recent interpretations (such as Dresden) they are accepted as heavy hitters in knowledge and magic. ...
Potential shapeshifting with physical augmentation abilities, potential sponsored magic. Not quite everything in the book, but it seems like most things could be written in under "dragon gift." So I really haven't narrowed things down as far as powers, and I haven't gotten any real feel for motivation or personality along the way.
This makes me say "ugh."

I'm actually almost leaning toward sitting out this offline game just because I don't have any idea what to do with it. And that's a shame, since it's one of the few excuses I have to get together with people socially on anything approaching a regular basis.