What isn't CGen for?
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As the title says, this is about what staff should not try to do during Character Generation rather than what they are doing. I think we should steer away from going too far into the interface and more about what a game's staff might be doing wrong by trying to have it settled during CGen.
I'll start with a quote by Theno since I really liked it.
@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
I'm not interested in one more moment of making a character for you, staff. I want to make a character for me, and that means finding out what this character is about during play.
Here are some questions I'll throw in the mix. Feel free to add your own and we can discuss them. So should CGen require...
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... a background for the character? What should be a dealbreaker and what should not be? For example should you have to come up with who your Sire, Keeper/Fetch, were etc?
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... secondary sheet aspects detailed? Writing up Blood and Bone, statting Keystones, writing a Masque and Dirge?
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... all/most XP available to be spent?
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... justifications for high attributes, Renown, merits, etc?
Some of us sketch out a character in detail in advance and others do learn what the PC is about on the grid. What I'd like to discuss is how much of the CGen process is there to perform sanity tests, how much translates into improving the roleplaying experience, and how much should be optional or deferred to a future time.
Thoughts?
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I know a lot of people hate writing backgrounds. For me it helps a character gel in my head to write one so I'll do it even places they aren't required. But as a staffer mostly what I use it for is spotting places a character concept isn't fitting with my atmosphere / theme. Players with a shaky grasp of the game they're joining will do weird stuff in the background and it will give me the opportunity to catch that and guide them.
A lot of these questions seem WoD specific and I dunno. I've apped two different WoD games and never plan to do so again so I have no real input on that besides I hate WoD CG. >.>
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I'd just say don't excessively future proof characters. Don't ask questions for potentials that are unlikely to ever come up, and wouldn't be a big deal to resolve when they do by asking then.
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For things like Bone/Blood or Mask/Dirge, I've always been partial to making people choose at least initially and then allowing them to change later if it doesn't fit, without any hassle. Especially if new, custom ones are introduced into a game that fit the character much better.
For things like Sires, Fetches, adn background stuff like that, I am all for making that shit up in play if the player wants. That can be some of the most fun interplay between characters if you start interweaving your background on the fly (and also for plots--I love it when people let me play with their backgrounds in a plot so I can write something compelling).
As for justifications for high stats--nah. Look, if you don't want a stat to be above X at chargen, just cap it. Simple. Otherwise, let people take that shit.
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I've gotten to the point where if I have to do more than 3-5 sentences for a background I'm just not going to ever complete it. Much like the Theno quote about I tend to learn a character by playing, but a couple of sentences or at least demographic settings are all I need to anchor a character in the world.
The amount of games that are so concerned with "What was your childhood like?" boggles my mind.
I think I created someplace once that required a Bone/Blood or something.. I just put whatever I needed to make it past chargen. I might as well have left them blank for all it affected how I played, but i'm not an avid WoD player who cares about that sort of stuff
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@saosmash said in What isn't CGen for?:
A lot of these questions seem WoD specific and I dunno. I've apped two different WoD games and never plan to do so again so I have no real input on that besides I hate WoD CG. >.>
I'm a mostly WoD player and that's the reason - but you can add your own!
One of my long-term peeves about game running is the idea that we sometimes either inherit procedures and flows from past games without examining them, or we think we are working towards a goal by introducing a requirement, but we then have no metrics in place to tell whether it's achieved.
For example (and it's just that, I actually like writing BGs): What does a background give me, as staff? Some potential answers:
- A way to hook future plots. Maybe I'll use @Coin's Sire as an NPC villain!
Does that happen? I'm not being facetious, but does that happen unless staff is familiar with the player? Maybe the way I run the Sire isn't at all like her player envisioned it, or he had a different Storyteller in mind to use her.
Add the usual practical implications, too; staff changing hands (am I going to go back and read everyone's backgrounds when I sign up as the new VampSphere staffer?), backgrounds changing over time ("And then... @COIN'S SIRE WALKS IN! <big reveal>" "Uh, dude, my Sire was killed four months ago."), etc.
- A way to catch problem players. Hey, maybe that new Vampire will try to claim he was a Mage before the Embrace!
Does that happen? I mean it could, but isn't it just as likely for that kind of unique snowflakeness to occur during unsupervised normal play, PrPs... anywhere at all? Furthermore isn't it overkill to burden every single person who creates with having to write this up just to catch that one guy who's going to pull something off?
- A way to encourage people to create in-depth characters.
Speaking for myself here, although I enjoy writing backgrounds... I don't really get much traction out of them in actual play. Maybe for the first couple of scenes, but once I get into a character that stuff rarely comes in handy, and what I come up with in collaboration with others around that PC is what actually fleshes out his past and gets used as a hook for future growth. Now, that of course doesn't mean some people can't/don't get more out of BGs but... again, should they be optional?
And so on. Personally I like short, easy and more than anything quick CGen flows - get the player to the grid so they can start playing the game as soon as possible, and if they aren't very well versed in the system it's better to teach them through play than to require it upfront. I'm curious to see where y'all stand on this.
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All the relevant sheet attributes that need to be explained should be:
Mostly merits or spends pertaining to background like Allies, Sire, and so on. While some of that can be abstracted like Contacts can be - there are some that need further explanation beyond stats on a sheet.For example, I handled a chargen where a person had a 1 dot Mentor who gave them a 5 dot Relic item on a game. That required more in explanation than just 'he really liked me.'
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For me, the primary reasons for CG review are to:
- Protect existing players from disruptive influences - like people who seriously don't understand the theme or are making characters who just don't fit.
- Minimize issues with theme and/or system misunderstandings.
There are those who'd argue that the former can be handled on-grid, but by the time you identify the problem, damage has already been done. Dozens of players may be impacted and retcon may be needed. That's just awful. I think staff owes it to players to do a better job of preventing those headaches.
The second bullet is what I see the most issues with - even in a system as simple as FS3. "Why does your schoolteacher have Demolitions?" "Did you really mean to take Violin at virtuoso levels for your marine?" "You can't make it to Major with only 2 years of service." ... stuff like that. It's usually just a minor misunderstanding of the theme/system or something they forgot to mention in their background, but shaking that stuff out in advance saves RP issues down the road.
So while I respect that some players don't like to write backgrounds or flesh out their characters in advance, I view it as a necessary evil for keeping a game running smoothly.
But not everything needs to be carved in stone either. If three weeks in, somebody says: "Hey can I switch my hobby from basketweaving to chess?" then as long as they haven't done a lot of basketweaving scenes, I'll switch the points around. Similarly, you don't need to detail every year of their lives; there can be room for adding more information later, connections to other players, etc. Just don't try claiming post-chargen that oh-by-the-way you're also a millionaire and won the medal of honor.
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I primarily use cgen as a way to make sure that characters follow the format for their appropriate template. This means making choices based on what is and is not allowed. It takes all the "Is this systemically legal?" Type questions off the hands of staff and allows the to spot check the sheet for implausibilities -- such as Major in two years, Master @ Violin on a die hard Jarhead, etc. It also allows me to spot players who game the system or do not know the system and make sure, in the case of not knowing the system, that they are aware of what they are getting into or lacking to help make their playtime better for them. Failing that I have a 5 XP rule. As long as you haven't earned 5 Character XP on the character you can request staff alter your sheet post chargen to fit expectations better.
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Backgrounds are always the part, as a player, where I feel like I have to either apply my professional bullshitting skills and write half a page of copy that sounds like it has a lot more content than it does or risk staffers wanting to know why the character isn't more fleshed out.
The problem there is that I really enjoy characters for whom the story is what happens on-grid, not what came before. Going from sheltered suburbanite, unsophisticated farm boy or crude thug to something more is a fun journey and there are only so many ways you can say, 'And then not a lot happened' before even the most disinterested staffer notices.
Places that do bullet points or ask for two or three formative experiences are so much less of a pain in the ass.
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@jaded said in What isn't CGen for?:
All the relevant sheet attributes that need to be explained should be:
Mostly merits or spends pertaining to background like Allies, Sire, and so on. While some of that can be abstracted like Contacts can be - there are some that need further explanation beyond stats on a sheet.For example, I handled a chargen where a person had a 1 dot Mentor who gave them a 5 dot Relic item on a game. That required more in explanation than just 'he really liked me.'
IF HE LIKED YOU THAT MUCH WHY ISN'T HE A HIGHER MENTOR RATING HUH HUH HUH??????????
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@bad-at-lurking said in What isn't CGen for?:
Going from sheltered suburbanite, unsophisticated farm boy or crude thug to something more is a fun journey and there are only so many ways you can say, 'And then not a lot happened' before even the most disinterested staffer notices.
I think that's a good example of what chargen shouldn't do - judge people by arbitrary length requirements on backgrounds. If your character has nothing unusual/exceptional about them, then there's really not a lot to say. As app staff, I'm more interested in "what he doesn't know is that his dad was the famous jedi Anikan Skywalker..." than I am four paragraphs about his boring life as a moisture farmer living with his aunt and uncle.
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@bad-at-lurking said in What isn't CGen for?:
Backgrounds are always the part, as a player, where I feel like I have to either apply my professional bullshitting skills and write half a page of copy that sounds like it has a lot more content than it does or risk staffers wanting to know why the character isn't more fleshed out.
Back when I bothered with games that required backgrounds, I would copy/paste a standardized background and change the name to the new character. Then, once through CG, I would promptly ignore the background and develop the character through play. Most of my successful and memorable characters had no meaningful background when getting to the grid.
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Obviously, given his daily routine in the most recent movie, he was battling a crippling lifelong addiction to "specialty" milks. That is a fascinating tidbit to me.
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It might just be coming from the style of table top groups I have been in but I have no issues with a background I mean I usually have at least he equivalent of a page or two in my head before starting the mechanical c-gen process anyway.
Pretty much every TT I have been in required a background anyway, not often a written out on but pretty much the GM pulling you aside at some point during the c-gen session and going tell me about your character. You don't have to nail down ever detail and I don't with MUSH backgrounds either but a few paragraphs detailing the important bit oh how they got to where they are today and how they fit into the game world in broad strokes is pretty much a necessity for me. -
I'm with @saosmash and @faraday on most of this. In my mind, Chargen is to set what a character can do, and a BG is to make sure that the player understands the setting to some degree and has a character that fits into it (this is most important in non modern-day settings, not so much in WoD). I would also add that I want to make sure that the most awesome parts of the character's story aren't behind them -- I want characters who do awesome things on grid, not brag about the awesome things they did in their background.
I'll sometimes add some guiding questions to a Chargen wiki page (or in-game help files), but I certainly wouldn't require them to be answered in the BG, they're just there if someone is stuck for details on the character.
I like the idea of unspent points being available after Chargen, to encourage people to build the sheets they want rather than the sheets they think they need, but it just doesn't work well in some systems -- especially those that don't use the same resources in Chargen and Advancement.
I think that Chargen should NOT require that a player have a full understanding of their character before they hit the grid (allowing sheet tweaks for a couple of weeks after approval is great for that), but I do think that it should require that the player have some understanding of their character besides what they do mechanically.
I don't think that justifications for high stats mean that characters can't take high stats, I think it just means, like @faraday mentioned, you want to know how and why their schoolteacher is a professional demolitionist (were they a guerilla until a couple years ago, or have they become one recently?), or their pilot is a martial arts black-belt (was their mother a Marine and pushed them into it, or were they beat up a lot as a kid?).
As a Staffer, I do love having hooks built into BGs, but Staffers in general (myself included) don't use them nearly enough to justify an expansive BG just to provide them. I'm also totally in favor of bullet points for a BG. Don't give me a lot of fluff that doesn't actually tell me what the character can do and how they learned to do it.
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What I want. Demonstration of a very basic grasp of theme and where their character fits into it. Minimally basic. If you’re trying to app a Lord of the Rings-style wizard on a Game of Thrones MUSH, you want to have a conversation about why that won’t work upfront. If you’re trying to app a space smuggler on a game where all of the RP is centered on the starship Enterprise around Federation officer PCs, same deal, people will try to do it and it’s easier to hash out those issues before stuff is happening on the grid. I don’t think this requires more than a couple paragraphs, though I generally write more for myself as I play the character. Also, if you’re apping a person who fit a pre-existing role in a military hierarchy/noble house/pack or survival group, you want to think about how they got there and what they do in it, though you can hash that out through conversation with your faction head as well as you can in bg.
I’ve staffed on games that used backgrounds as a weeding process for handing out feature character roles, and required fairly detailed write-ups (a couple pages in a Word doc is my view of detailed, I never went in for the novella-length games). I’ve staffed on games with no background requirements. The quality of RP, on average, was not terribly different. CG definitely isn't an effective gate for quality or how well or poorly a player will do with a role.
I have more difficulties with +sheet skill and stat mechanics than I do with backgrounds, because it’s very easy to do stuff ‘wrong’ in a way that’ll impact your play long-term simply due to unfamiliarity (I can bang out a BG in a theme I’m not ultra-versed in in a weekend, but sheets are where I tend to bail on a new game). Though ideally staff is liberal about re-speccs for newbs.
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@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
I would also add that I want to make sure that the most awesome parts of the character's story aren't behind them -- I want characters who do awesome things on grid, not brag about the awesome things they did in their background.
I really don't mind characters having done awesome things in their background. I more mind somebody who wants to do All The Awesome Things. They were a child-savant mathematician from a rich family who got their third degree black belt by age 12, were top student at the naval academy, top gun at flight school, and earned the medal of valor for saving a shuttle full of schoolchildren on their first mission out.
Yeah... no. (And I actually have seen backgrounds almost as bad as that.)
@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
a BG is to make sure that the player understands the setting to some degree and has a character that fits into it
My favorite arguments for backgrounds... there was this one guy who was trying to play a literal Vampire on a straight-up historical Wild West MUSH. He did a lot of weird stuff before staff caught on to what he was doing.
Also on B5MUSH (which didn't have bgs in the early days), I was in this scene once with a Pak'ma'ra character, who was posing like there was more than one of him. Puzzled, I looked at his desc, and realized that he was described as having three bodies. I was all: "Dude, why are there three of you?" "Because the other four died." "..." He honestly thought that the Pak'ma'ra were some kind of symbiotic pack organism, heaven knows why.
If wacky BGs were a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence, you might be able to get away without them. But they really aren't. Many players come to games with honest misconceptions about the theme or really unsuitable character concepts.
@thatguythere said in What isn't CGen for?:
Pretty much every TT I have been in required a background anyway
Interesting - the TT games I've been in have never required backgrounds. So I can understand how it can be a foreign concept to some.
@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
I don't think that justifications for high stats mean that characters can't take high stats,
Yeah, totally. I don't really care if you want your marine to be a virtuoso violinist due to some interesting quirk of their background (or a scientist, like @Ganymede's char). Mostly I'm just interested in continuity: Is there a sensible reason for it, or was it just "I didn't realize what the numbers meant".
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I like backgrounds, they help finalize a character for me in the head, help me find their voice.
I also like bulletpoint backgrounds that answer the questions that are relevant to the character and the staff.
I got compliments on my background on my changeling from Staff so, I guess I am hitting those notes.
That said, I prefer Cgen that has very few barriers to entry, so that people can get in and /playing/ especially on games where character loss is going to be a thing. Chargen shouldn't be a punishment.
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@faraday said in What isn't CGen for?:
Mostly I'm just interested in continuity: Is there a sensible reason for it, or was it just "I didn't realize what the numbers meant".
This sums up my response.
Whatever system you put in place should be responsive to whatever staff is looking for in a PC. My preference is for PCs that fit the theme and setting. I don't care for min-maxing, as long as the player understands that doing so within the system's limits will make their PC weak in areas which they probably shouldn't. Almost every person I've approved understands that I nitpick only to confirm that they understand what they've built, and to make a decision as to whether the PC is going to fit into the game.
