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Ha. I love eye-catching titles. AD&D characters
are wonderful tools for anyone who wants to escape, write (fantasy or
otherwise), or act. They enable people to live out the lives of people
they can never be, and if your DM is up to snuff, you the player will be
forced to take the character beyond the level of simple numbers on paper.
A good PC should be a living, breathing person, with desires, concerns,
and feelings. At least that is the ideal. Unfortunately, we live in a
world of munchkins (people who manage every number to come out on top
numerically, and will never make any decision if the numbers are not in
their favor), power gamers (a little better than munchkins; but fuck'em:
roll-playing for experience and magical items is still attempting to make
a numerical gain on something that can be a far more spiritual
experience), and very shy people. Also, most gamers fall under
the unfortunate category of "male," and even more fall under its
tragic subset "adolescent male." Both groups are notoriously
uncomfortable with the idea of delving into their personas and living out
the frailties of the human experience in front of a bunch of other males,
who will, upon seeing the frailty, pounce on the offender, skewering him
with Doritos and pelting him with cans of Mountain Dew and Surge.
When you talk about your favorite series, what do
you talk about? The plot? The setting? Think really hard for few seconds.
How much different would the book have been if the principle character of,
say, The Magic Casement by Dave Duncan, had been a homely troll
who got his giggles by spitting on people randomly. The series would have
been a lot different, that's for sure. Or a more local example, what if,
in life, Strahd had been a hermit who liked poetry and felt awkward around
women? What if Raistlin had been content? What if Gandalf had felt he
needed to show everyone he met the limits of his powers? What if Drzz't
were just another Drow? Well, first of all, you wouldn't all look so dorky
for playing Drow rangers. The characters are what make the stories, not
the other way around. On a side note, this is why modules are, in general,
a little too restrictive to the development of a PC. When you make a
character for a dungeon crawl, for an evening's session, you are wasting
your Saturday night, in my opinion; go talk to some girls. If you make a
character for a night, you don't get attached to it; there is just a
simple, transient happiness that fades away. Maybe you liked the game
session, the sessions, and after enough time, the game in general. But you
lose your personal attachment to it, and the sense of your own identity
that is bonded to the game when you make new characters to suit every
crawl (I shudder to this day when I read the "character tree"
rules in the Dark Sun Revised rule book, which are about an inch away from
turning that entire beautiful world into a numbers game.).
Make a person. Every person in real
life has weaknesses that equal or overshadow his strengths. The
same must be said for PC's. People are bags of memories, motivations. So
should a good PC. Memories form background, and backgrounds are formed by
and form strengths and weaknesses, which predict the motivations of a
character. A story is no good if the people who are in it have no
motivations, something they want. When we do something, anything,
in real life, we do it because of some sort of desire, however subtle,
something which can be boiled down into an action verb or phrase.
Characters should have both overarching motivations and transient drives
that are patterned after the moments at hand. Being able to talk in
a cool voice is nice. So is being able to draw the person. Being able to
take all of that character's idiosyncrasies and still work with the party
is really nice. But more important than anything else, if you
want to make the game and each session memorable, is finding the nuts and
bolts of the character's persona: embracing the weaknesses, and revelling
in the quirks.
If you don't see how the title relates to the
material, I'm sorry.
-N
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