It Slices! It Dices!

The WISH of the Week asked...

How do you like to build character backgrounds?

I dabble with character backgrounds. I need to know my characters before I can play them well, but that doesn't always mean I know everything about them from the start. Characters develop in play for me. I can write down a few things that I know to be true, but until I get a chance to see what my character wants to be like, I'm not going to hold myself to it.

Jelica, my character based off Damascus, in Dave Terhune's "Phoenix Exodus" campaign, is very much an example of putting that process in play. I knew she was ridiculously strong. I knew she was more instinctive than "bright." Her smarts were kinesthetic, an intuitive knowledge of cause and effect rather than, say, being able to tell you how things worked together. I knew she could be a brute. I knew she could have a temper...

I didn't know she had one.

What forces shaped her? To start out, I had no clue. We knew she'd been forced out of her kingdom by a curse and an evil Grand Vizier. Love story? I decided she'd like people to think so - but she turned out too practical for it. She knew he was bad, she just hadn't the political savvy (or, it turns out, the personnel) to oust him. I decided then and there that she was young... if there HAD been someone else, they WOULD have taken over in regency.

She was strong... the GM asked me where her powers came from, saying he'd prefer it to be supernatural. I managed to work this in with learning more of the campaign: since her country was on the borders of the Forbidden Desert, I asked Dave if her family could have been put in place to keep the Desert's creatures from spreading farther... which seemed to work well with the campaign we were playing in, itself.

I can't imagine any character quiz that would have told me so much about her... I can answer character quizzes all day. (Even the ones _I_ design.) I could tell you what she shaves, what she dyes, what colour crayons she'd eat, and if she was an apple, who she'd want to pick her. But who knew to ask for any of the reactions she ended up having: how to handle a dragon-girl who's mad at her? How to wake up with the smell of cheese wafting past her face? Does she cheat at tic-tac-toe? Would she really eat a minion?

Marius, of House of Cards is very similar. I think I decided in taking over the character that all his previous answers were true... but the quiz (as long as it took me) I don't think necessarily asked the questions Marius is struggling with right now. I use the quiz answers to kind of guide the GMs' (love that possessive) view of Marius...and align my perspective.

Now, as a GM, I use the quizzes for G&G all of the time. When there's any doubt as to if someone can do something, or what the consequences are, the quiz is the answer. Same thing was fairly true of SWtE, too. On the other hand, the stories Caine's player has written can override the quiz when Caine needs to do something: that's the benefit of contributions.

I'm writing a diary for Jelica for no points... but it helps me put the actions of the adventure into Jelica's perspective...and I hope it also adds to the GM's knowledge of the character and what I want out of the adventure. That's the important thing for character backgrounds and questioning and the like: where are you as a player coming from? What's your initial premise?

Everything else will change.