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I don't know why I lose sleep over this, but I think I am addicted to creating PCs.
My question is: who ISN'T addicted to creating characters? And for Asmodeus' sake why not?
I spend more time making monsters or NPCs or writing stories, myself.
One of my players has (or had) a folder full of potential characters and is constantly coming up with new ideas.
Define addicted?
I keep a black book of about 10-15 pc ideas in the pipe, just in case.
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I can stop anytime I want!
It's just that I don't want to stop now. This is my deliberate choice and not an addiction!
Also, the new batch of characters to be made does not count! My laptop died and the previous characters are trapped on its HD until I take it out and manage to connect it to desktop.
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While I design characters, they are NPCs, not PCs. Took some time to learn to let them go when they fall in battle and not fuss over it - my players might never think about them as more than random villains, for me it's watching my grand creation fall, sometimes in a quick and embarassing way. Such is the life of the eternal GM.
I remember once, as a high school student, I started to create a group of CR 20 villains, and they were all kind of crazy. Had a notebook full of them. Good times.
Yes, definitely! I was up till 4am last night working on this sucker.
I have 96 characters statted out right now in my google doc. And more concepts that I haven't put stats to yet.
Hi, my name is Rynjin, and I'm...an Alta-Holic.
Yeah I make a LOT of character concepts (I call them "backups" but really they're too numerous at this point to be so), and I rarely get to use any of them.
Thinking of throwing a few in there as recurring villains for campaigns I'll run or something, spice Carrion Crown up a bit.
Actually I made a lot of characters ages ago. I have greatly reduced number of characters I make nowdays when comparing to late nineties and early 21st century...
I find character creation a fascinating exercise of creativity.
I wrote a book with 57 NPC stat blocks in it. That pretty much killed any desire I had to do any character creation for awhile.
Oh, heck yes. Not as bad as I used to be, but I love coming up with concepts and writing them out and statting them out. Some are fairly original, others are blatant devotions to a favorite fictional character (sometimes trying to find ways to put concepts together that may work in one genre but not well in Pathfinder and trying to make it work).
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My question is: who ISN'T addicted to creating characters? And for Asmodeus' sake why not?I spend more time making monsters or NPCs or writing stories, myself.
One of my players has (or had) a folder full of potential characters and is constantly coming up with new ideas.
Had. Deleted. It's full again.
...Well, it's not like I'm gonna learn how to play classes if I don't know how to build them.
Oh gods, yes! Quite addicted. Sometimes I think I apply for play-by-posts just to make another one.
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As the ridiculous ton of statted out alternate Aliases (most of which I made on a lark, to have NPC 'mentors' and 'rivals' for every Faction in the Faction Guide) I have on this board indicates, I love making new characters.
My particular favorite is superheroes. I've got hundreds of characters statted up for V&V, GURPS Supers, Aberrant and Mutants & Masterminds, and back when I was running Vampire games, I statted up the entire vampire populations of the cities I was running (Denver and Miami), as well as having a metric buttload of characters for my own use.
MMOs were my bane, 'though. I had just about one of everything in EverQuest, and multiples of several classes, just because I really loved certain races and / or starting zones. It got worse in Dark Ages of Camelot (three different *realms* of classes and races!), and then City of Heroes & City of Villains came along and I filled up a dozen servers, each with eight character slots, with different character concepts, some of whom I played to maximum level, and some of whom I just admired from afar.
COH/V was excellent in that each character had a 'page' that you could view when you clicked on them, on which the player could fill out their origin story or relevant information about them, which is something that many MMOs never bothered with. I think it greatly enhanced RP ability, and encouraged characters to be more than a collection of numbers and bonuses. I enjoyed filling those out, and reading the stories of other I was grouping with, and always found it a little disappointing when someone hadn't bothered to come up with anything for their character, or had filled that space with OOC stuff, like supergroup/guild advertisements or whatever.
There's a part of me that likes to tinker with builds, but it's way subordinate to the part of me that likes making characters, little fictional people, with their own backstories and social quirks and whatnot.
This also, unfortunately, leads to me having lots of characters that I'll never play, since the visual or the theme or the aesthetic of the character really sang out to me and refused to let me sleep until I wrote them down / logged on and created them, since they were too beautiful not to live, but I have zero desire of ever playing the class / using the mechanics of the concept. :)
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add the following to your character creation process:
step 1: roll 17d6+5 inches to generate physical height
step 2: determine ability bonus to be divided among physical stats (str, dex, con)
8'x"= +3
7'x"= +2
6'x"= +1
5'x"= +0
6'x"= -1
3'x"= -2
2'x"= -3
1'x"= -4
so now you can play a three foot tall ogre or an eight foot tall dwarf...
Webstore Coordinator
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I've yet to succumb to the "addiction" of character generation for Pathfinder.
However, I did once have my mom called into school because of my "devil worship."
Here's the story (going to be a little lengthy, I apologize):
It starts with a trip from Ann Arbor, MI to NW Ohio. My mom had been dating a guy from Ohio, and this was our first trip to meet him and his kids (two boys, seven and five years older than me). I was six, my brother four.
When we arrived, my brother and I paired off with his sons. His younger son was really excited to show me these really cool books that his dad had. They were a collection of AD&D rulebooks. Monster Manual I, Monster Manual II, Player's Handbook, Deities & Demigods, Legends & Lore. I had no idea what I was seeing, but if this older kid was so excited about them, I knew it had to be cool!
Over the course of the next few months, weekend trips to Ohio became a lot more exciting. The two-hour ride flew by as I thought of cool character ideas. I was slowly learning how the rules worked, and how it was like this really awesome fantasy novel a group of people made up on the spot. I had yet to actually played the game, but that didn't stop me from filling a 200-page notebook with characters. On the front of the page, I would write out the character. STR, INT, WIS, DEX... On the back of the page, the character's story. Who was he, who was his family, and why was he going into all these crazy dungeons looking for dragons?
On Christmas break during my second grade year, it finally happened. My mom's boyfriend (who I now call Dad), had come up with a one-shot dungeon for us to go through. He was the DM, his sons, my brother and I were the PCs. It was one of the most memorable moments of my childhood. Here was this guy, taking the time to run a D&D game for a bunch of kids. He didn't dumb it down for us either. He did make it more lighthearted than his regular games, but we were expected to know the rules, know which dice to roll, and know how our characters were supposed to be played.
I was ready. my fighter, Bilbo (I had just finished reading The Hobbit) was prepared to slay any dragon that stood before him. It was amazing. We ran into bugbears, goblins, ascomoids, Papa Smurf, the Jolly Green Giant and even Asmodeus (who was summoned by my step-brother as he was taking a leak. Nothing like demon pee in the face to make your first dungeon memorable!).
After playing for the first time, I was hooked. I filled more notebooks and graph paper sheets with dungeons and stories. If I wasn't writing in those books, I was reading more about the game. This was right about the time we got an assignment for class. My second grade teacher gave us a project to find a hobby or sport we enjoyed, and teach a bit to the class.
I had the best hobby ever! So when it was my day to show the class my favorite hobby, I knew exactly what to do. I went to the front of the class, notebooks in hand. I grabbed a piece of chalk, and began to write in giant letters on the board: STR, INT, WIS, DEX... I taught my second grade class how to create an AD&D character sheet.
I was of course totally oblivious to the fact that even though it was the early 90's, D&D still had a pretty negative stigma associated with it. I was just a naive second-grader trying to show this cool thing I learned how to play. I was also oblivious to the reasons my mom's face turned so red when she was called into the school's office for a chat.
The principal of the school was EXTREMELY religious, and was mortified that a student so young would be exposed to the evils of role-playing. But credit to my mom, she stood by me, and saw D&D for what it was, a game that encouraged a healthy imagination. In the end, I got a stern talking-to by a close-minded educator, and a silly story to tell years later.
I can guarantee that when my wife and I decide to have a child, they will be encouraged to use their imagination to the fullest. That includes introducing them to pen-and-paper RPGs at a young age.
Whenever I get a new RPG about the first thing I do after reading it over is creating a couple of characters for it. Some of the NPCs that appear in the games I GM come from the more interesting character concepts from these experiments.
I think if the rulebook can't get people excited enough to create characters for the game it would be a mark against it.
Every time I get a new game system or variant, I make a bunch of characters. It is how I get a feel for a game's character creation system. Some of them end up NPC's, some of them PC's, and some of them sit idle. I do enjoy the process of making characters, and it does help learn a system.
With Hero Lab it makes creating characters so much easier.
And yes, I have made way more characters then I could ever play, ever.
We ran into bugbears, goblins, ascomoids, Papa Smurf, the Jolly Green Giant and even Asmodeus (who was summoned by my step-brother as he was taking a leak. Nothing like demon pee in the face to make your first dungeon memorable!).
love it!
I've got a bunch waiting to get plugged into a game:
-A halfling urban barbarian/ninja based on Joe Pesci's character in Goodfellas
-A goblin beastmaster ranger who rides a dire bat. I'm picturing strafing runs featuring tossed stingchucks, brewed reek and nets on people. Thrown bolas and maybe lassoing people and dragging them off behind the bat or other companion beast would be fun, too!
-A half orc "torch singer" diva bard (Though I might go Barbarian//Scarred Witch doctor with this one in our gestalt game and keep her perform: sing up!)
-A juju oracle//sandman bard who talks like the guy from the old Seven Up commercials.
I love coming up with characters! I just wish I had the time to play them all.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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@Rick Kunz,
I was playing D&D in school in the 80's. My parents went to bat for me when the school started whining. Then again my father is Awesome.
Tangent
My dad's reply? "You're the authority here. IT's your job to protect the kids. Tell you what. On my way to work every day at four in the morning, I'll swing by your house and beat the hell out of you. Either you can call the cops. Or you can 'toughen up.' Which would you do?"
G_d, I love my father.
Yes, I've used rpg books to make more characters than I ever used to PLAY rpgs. The old TSR Marvel Game was my introduction. My brother and I would sit around randomly rolling dice and coming up with sheet after sheet of superheroes. On the now defunct City of Heroes I never got a character past lvl 5 because I'd be into a new one I'd made, and i bought extra slots for more!
Almost as much as I like reading about other people's characters/concepts. I mainly bought the old TORG books because most came with cool pregenerated characters in the back. Maybe it's ADHD.
I used to be addicted to creating tons of characters, but that slowed down real quick when my group started edition-hopping and splitting up. Then, a run of just bad luck and crappy work schedules, every time I make a character I half-way give a rat's ass about, the game ends either that session or the very next. Literally, like 8+ campaigns in a row; I make this awesome character I am all about playing, game goes belly up.
Now I have this complex, where I strictly create a character to fill whatever roll the party is missing(healer 95% of the freakin time). It's pretty much destroyed my creativity and not very fun.
I miss all the characters I used to roll up. Had 3-ring binders full of them. Now I can barely think of what I even want to do with the character I'm currently playing.
I enjoy the creativity of making characters. I have like 5 or so in my head right now.
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Addicted? No. I only have ten or so character concepts with no upcoming games for them, some of which are so complex that they takes days of research and a spreadsheet to keep track of them.
...eheh.
i always have a minimum of 5,000 characters going on in my head at once. it's just that my groups like less than 1% of them so i tend to get shoehorned into recycling the same 8 in a cycle. because the others are either, not viable enough, too powerful, have too many flaws to be an adventurer, are too creepy, or are just too evil.
Addiction is a mighty strong word. I can stop at any time.
I think.
Though really I only really build up characters in Herolab when I'm curious about a mechanical point of the rules and thus to see how it flows.
Of course this makes for a lot of characters.
Hmm, that IV line about Herolab is likely spot on.
