2009.02.23
The problem of character generation
The party of player characters is at the center of all role playing games, whether they are the pen-and-paper or the computerized variety. Computerized role-playing games sometimes give the player a lot of choices in character generation, but often the player is restricted in some ways. An extreme example of this is a game like Final Fantasy IV, where the party composition is fixed at all times, and though characters join and leave the party, the player can never choose what types of characters he or she wishes to play. The storyline dictates who is in the party.
By contrast, pen-and-paper role-playing games tend to give the player nearly complete freedom to generate a character he or she wishes to play within the confines of the rule system. Character generation rules can be quite complex in some systems, but for the most part, they boil down to this:
- As a player, you have a fixed total of X points you can “spend” on your character.
- You spend these points to improve your character’s skills and abilities.
- In order to max out all of your character’s skills and abilities, you would need to spend Y points, and X < Y. Quite a bit less.
Let’s explore this concept using a sequence of graphs. In our fictional role-playing system, characters have 5 attributes:
- Strength
- Wisdom
- Agility
- Charisma
- Will
You assign points to them on a scale of 0 to 6, with 3 being a sort of “average” competency, and 6 being among the best in the world.
To “max out” your character would require 30 points. In this case, your superhero character that could handle pretty much anything would look like this:
Superhero Graph
But suppose you only get a more realistic 16 points to build a character, not 30. You could make a ho-hum character like this:
Ho-Hum Character Graph
Or you could go for the “big and dumb” archetype:
Big and Dumb Character Graph
Or perhaps the social butterfly:
Social Butterfly Character Graph
The problem is that any of these characters would likely fail if they had to tackle a role-playing scenario all by themselves. But look what happens if our big and dumb character hooks up with the social butterfly:
2-Character Party Graph
These two stand a much better chance so long as they work together.
In real role-playing systems, parties of 3 or 4 are often preferable to a party of 2, depending on the scenario being played. When I write scenarios, I often have a particular party size in mind, and for scenarios where there will be a very small party (for instance, only 2 player characters), the scenario has to be scaled appropriately so that the two characters at least have some means to succeed. For scenarios where high attribute or skill values for some things are all but required to succeed, the game master should be pre-generating appropriate characters and giving the players limited flexibility. For scenarios played with larger parties or where the skill requirements aren’t quite as high, more flexibility can be granted.
More experienced players can also be given more flexibility, but I feel that even experienced players should be given some suggestions when generating brand new characters to be used in a small-party scenario. Role-playing is supposed to be fun, and the last thing you want is to have the player characters’ party missing a critical aptitude which dooms them to failure from the start. Skilled game masters may be able to adjust things mid-game to make the game challenging but not quite impossible for the players should this happen, but it can be difficult to do this without resorting to deus ex machina in some scenarios.
A tool I use when writing a scenario is to generate a graph like the ones above, except that I use the point values for the skills and abilities required for a reasonable chance of success in the scenario. This graph is then compared with possible (or actual) player-character party graphs for the party, to see how they match up. Role-playing with a party that meets or exceeds all of the requirements will probably not be very fun. But neither will playing with a party that has too many deficiencies relative to the scenario. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and the final balance usually requires some adjusting on the part of the game master.
This sort of analysis is especially useful when using pre-generated characters in a scenario since it gives you an idea of how they will perform during the scenario without having to run the scenario first. It can also be useful when not using pre-generated characters, since it can give the game master some idea of how the party fits the scenario and how much adjusting might be required to keep things fun.
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