Howdy all,
I'm hoping to start a new campaign with a bunch of new players soon,
and am thinking about ways to encourage their creativity in building
fun characters that they have a personal investment in, yet are
coherent and fit well with the setting and premise of the campaign.
The situation I imagine is, having chosen a setting we'd like to run a
campaign in, we get everyone together and hash out the characters
independent of any game mechanics. The rule books would be present,
but hopefully never opened during this session; the important part
would be for the group to decide *as a group* what the party is in the
setting.
I imagine asking things like "What story role do you want to play?
What do you want your character to be good at? How, in the setting,
would your character have become that way, and what else would have
happened as part of that process? How do you know the other main
characters?" and recording the answers so that later I could create
their game stats.
What kinds of questions should I be asking? How should I be asking
them?
Also during the setting I'd want to get a good idea of what kind of
game style they want. I know of many knobs that can be tweaked on
GMing and play style, and I'm painfully aware of the trouble that
ensues when everyone has different expectations of how those knobs
will be set. However, with new players, I don't want to bore them with
questionnaires or discussion of terms they're not even aware of yet.
What good methods can people suggest? What approaches should I avoid?
--
\ "I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept |
`\ locking the keys in the plane. They caught me on an 80 foot |
_o__) stepladder with a coathanger." -- Steven Wright |
Ben Finney
|
