Talk:Character creation

Third-Party Publications?

I fear 3rd party publications are hard to find for this subject, especially regarding role-playing games. I am pretty sure the contents of this article is "common knowledge" among role-players, but I don’t know of any publication that discusses the subject in a game-independent manner. Does anyone have any tips? —TowerDragon (talk) 08:48, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Skill-based leads to "cookie cutter" characters?

It's possible I'm misunderstanding this, but I was of the school that class-based systems are the ones that lead to "cookie cutter" characters. Therefore, skill-based systems lead to broader possiblities.

As for lack of specialization, that's the fault of the players, not the system. --Bear Eagleson 16:21, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the term "cookie cutter" should be used at all. Besides, I don't agree that skill based systems can't be used to force specialization. (It's merely a matter of making it costly enough to be specialized in different areas. You don't need classes to do that.) I've rephrased that part, but this article still needs to be reworked in other ways... --Maggu 13:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

"Cookie Cutter" definitely has negative connotations. I hadn't thought of forced specialization in skill-based systems. The rewording looks nice, thank you. --Bear Eagleson 18:55, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Re-write

My draft of a complete re-write is at User:TowerDragon/Draft: Character creation. —TowerDragon 07:16, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I am still writing on it! — TowerDragon 06:39, 5 September 2006 (UTC), TowerDragon 23:45, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, now it’s your turn! This (the current revision) is the best I can do at the moment. :-) —TowerDragon 01:40, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Oops, I just noted the References section probably should be expanded with bibliographical data of the books referred to. I intend to add the data for Castle Falkenstein and Palladium Fantasy Role-playing Game within the next few days. — TowerDragon 01:50, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Any reason this is specifically for games?

I'm thinking that character creation could apply to a lot of other things, too, that it might be good to have a paragraph on. For example, what about character creation for fiction writers? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.86.208.255 (talk • contribs) 2006-09-04T20:11:44 (UTC)

Characterization has some non-game specific information, but is more about describing characters than about creating them. Other than that, it is just that nobody felt competent yet to write about the general subject. In modern video/computer games, e.g., character creation seems to be much more concerned about appearance than other things, and fiction writers, of course, are more concerned with other things than appearance or stats :-). — TowerDragon 06:38, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Character creation also relates to Animators, Filmmakers, Caricature artists, illustrators, comic book writers, music video directors, novelists, to name a few... All of which have commonalities with what makes up character creation. These commonalities are what should be written here under character creation... instead we have a mass of writing all about character creation for one genre, namely games. Whilst games is a valid genre for character creation, it does not constitute the whole meaning of character creation and its extremely focused descriptions cannot be applied directly to other genres of character creation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the games description is wrong... I'm just saying that it should be a sub-category or spin off.. it should be titled character creation for games, instead of pretending to be the whole description for character creation cause 90% of what is said doesn't apply to the other forms of character creation, really it should be titled: "Roleplaying game character creation"--1healm77 11:16, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can see, one could distinguish two more “fields of character creation” this article should be talking about:

1. visual design of characters (for caricatures, comic books, and illustrations as well as film, character animation, music videos, and video games)
2. character creation for narratives in general (especially literature (drama, prose fiction), but also films and pen-and-paper as well as computer role-playing games)

Regrettably, I don’t know enough about either to be able to write anything substantial about them (that’s why I didn’t :-). So if anyone is able to do it: go ahead!

BTW: The correct Wikipedia title would be Character creation (role-playing games) should the text be moved to a more specific page. — TowerDragon 00:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Note: The first ambiguity somehow mirrors that between character sheet (in the RPG / CRPG sense) and the character turn around for visual media such as comics or animation, including animation in video games. (See Talk:Character sheet#Illustration Character Sheet?) — TowerDragon (talk) 22:41, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

“Characterization links to the acting term, not to increasing stats”?

Please read the article about characterization before making such statements. It is a writing (as in literature) term as well as an acting term. And why do you think it should be about “increasing stats”?? It's about describing a fictional character, just as a character sheet contains a written (and mostly formalized) description of a role-playing character. — TowerDragon 10:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I have read the article. We are using characterization in two senses:

1. The writing/acting/role-playing sense - the sense used in the characterization article
2. The representation of characters through statistics

The two senses are mostly distinct - a player's characterization (sense 1) of a role is somewhat determined by the game's characterization (sense 2) of the character, but only very lightly, and there is a great deal which isn't. As such, a link from a paragraph talking about characterization in the second sense (in my summary: "increasing stats") to a page talking about characterization in the first sense (in my summary: "acting term") is unclear, so I replaced it with a clearer term: "representation". Percy Snoodle 11:23, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, the article makes my above point quite well - the character sheet records only the direct characterization of the character. The indirect characterization is not recorded. Perhaps we could mention that onn the page. Percy Snoodle 11:27, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Err — that’s what the article did before you edit it :-): “The result of character creation is a form of direct characterization …” (emphasis by me). — TowerDragon 11:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC) Sorry, that was complete nonsense. Just forget it, please :-} — TowerDragon 22:25, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Character advancement vs. character development

Percy, your statement about the RPG/CRPG use of character advancement vs. character development is simply wrong. As I said in the edit summary: GURPS, for example, uses exclusively the word development. — TowerDragon 10:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Since I'm at work, I won't be able to quote examples back at you - but the less statistic-oriented RPGs do tend to draw the distinction I'm making. Would you accept "some RPGs" in place of "RPGs usually"? Percy Snoodle 11:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I don’t know what you mean by “less statistic-oriented”. Something like “story telling-oriented”? — TowerDragon 22:47, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. The more I look around, the less clear-cut the distinctions appear to be. I have seen the term character development be used in several senses now:

• Fleshing out the character (during creation), as seen, for example, on the d20 Design Enhancement forums (“getting into the storyline of your characters”) or The Art of Character Development.
• Designing a character that is to appear in a game (not only in the context of designing computer games) by changing (and improving) the description several times before the character is actually being used. This, of course, includes “fleshing it out”.
• Characterizing a character indirectly (through role-playing). (The “acting term”.)
• Improving or otherwise changing an existing character that has already been played, by spending experience points or otherwise. (As in GURPS, for example, where gaining a disadvantage or trading one trait for another one of equal character point value is also covered under this term — hence “otherwise changing”.)

Perhaps we should just point to character development in the “see also” section and in this article use the term character advancement, although it would IMHO be a misnomer because it does not clearly include negative or even neutral changes. In any case, a modified version of my above list should probably be added to the character development article to make things clear(er).

I’d still like to know what you mean by “less statistic-oriented”, though.

— TowerDragon 00:14, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Games in which the focus is on something other than the statistics, usually on roleplaying - storytelling-oriented is a fairly good way of putting it. I suppose some would say narrativist games, though there are could be stat-light gamist games, I suppose. Percy Snoodle 07:49, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I would think a stat-light gamist game would be more like a wargame, thus still not interested in detailed descriptions of the characters, so narrativist or story-telling oriented would probably clearer. What do you think of my proposal at Talk:Character development? — TowerDragon 10:11, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

For stat-light gamist games, I was thinking more along the lines of an Amber DRPG throne war with the stats known only to the GM - it would played to win, but mostly through politicking without reference to stats. However, such a game would have little room for character advancement, so it's a bit of a moot point. I've responded at Talk:Character development. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Percy Snoodle (talk • contribs) 10:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC).

Roll

I was disappointed to not see the slang verb form of roll anywhere in this article. I was hoping for confirmation that "roll" is modern-day slang for character generation, going back to when random attributes were created by rolling dice. I've only really heard it in MMOs so I can hardly say it's fact. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.83.48.251 (talk) 10:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

NPC Creation

Technically, isn't the act of a DM creating an NPC an act of character creation. Unless this article changes its title to Player-Character Creation, NPC creation should also be discussed. There would be a lot to discuss. For example, a DM might choose to create and NPC according to the same rules as the PCs or according to different rules. Further, the NPC might be created to serve a function in the story (that function could be anything from antagonist to quest-hook to Deus ex machina plot device) or simply to exist in the world, with the understanding that the PCs might interact with the NPC and cause the NPC to react but no true purpose behind the NPC. I think there's a lot there, and it bears exploration. 98.231.219.116 (talk) 05:04, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Maintenance notes

As requested by TowerDragon, I am providing a few notes to help improve the article so that the various maintenance issues can be resolved:

• Inline citations. This is a biggie. At present, there is a list of references but NO citations in the text. Casual verification is difficult.
• Content. Several issues here:
  • Section: "Making decisions" reads like an essay. Rhetorical questions should be rephrased as statements. Text layout needs to be wikified.
  • Section "Determing numerical values" reads almost like a rulebook. Please try to generalize the content or, if the details by nature are too minute, remove the content as it qualifies as gameplay instructions.
  • Section "Templates and classes" is generally okay, but the tail end of it seems to tack on game-specific trivia. The relevance of these games' implementations should be discussed (if applicable) or removed as mere name-dropping. Of course, every game is going to have some variations on character creation, so that alone is not enough to warrant specific detail.

I hope this provides some insight about how to fix up the article. Ham Pastrami (talk) 02:14, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Automated Peer Review

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

• Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Wikipedia:Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.^[?]
• Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
  • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
• This article needs footnotes, preferably in the cite.php format recommended by WP:WIAFA. Simply, enclose inline citations, with WP:CITE or WP:CITE/ES information, with <ref>THE FOOTNOTE</ref>. At the bottom of the article, in a section named “References” or “Footnotes”, add <div class="references-small"><references/></div>.^[?]
• Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, FM [ talk to me | show contributions ]  18:26, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: English Composition 1102

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