On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:44:05 +1000, Ben Finney <ben@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>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.
Are the "new players" new to gaming, or are they more-or-less
experienced players who are just new to you as a GM?
>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.
I personally have a galloping allergy to games where the GM creates
the character for me. If any of your players have a similar allergy,
you'll have a problem with the "so that later I could create their
game stats" part.
>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?
Maybe ask: "What *kind* of fun are you looking for from the game?"
"What conventions in fiction (and in gaming) do your really like, and
which ones really annoy you?" "What do you see as your character's
place in the game world?"
One other thing you might need to deal with is the difference between
design-at-start and develop-in-play players. The latter might be
annoyed that you're trying to push them into doing too much work on
their characters at the beginning, when they'll need to run their
characters through a few sessions of actual play in order to get them
to gel.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
ErolB1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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