Part of your role as the GM involves stewardship of the game as a whole, and that includes your players’ characters. The goal is to make sure that each of your players creates a character that will be fun for them to play, while at the same time not treading on anyone else’s fun.
There are five main ways to help your players achieve that goal — let’s take a look at them.
First and foremost, remember that your role here is to help your players hone their PCs, not tell them what to play. If they need more help — like a player who’s new to gaming probably would, and a player who’s new to the system might — you should certainly provide it, but don’t impose yourself on the process.
A players’ character is their single largest investment in and contribution to the campaign. Done in moderation, helping your players make wise choices improves their investment in the game.
If you take any of these approaches to the extreme, you’ll be this GM — or worse yet, this guy. Keep your players’ best interests in mind, and all will be well.
Be Clear About the Nature of the Campaign
The first and most important step in helping your players create fun characters is making sure everyone’s on the same page about what kind of campaign you’re all going be playing. (How you get on that page is up to you, and outside the scope of this article.)
That allows your players to avoid poor character choices up front, and prevents you from winding up with a hodgepodge party that doesn’t play nice together.
Create Characters as a Group
Group character creation is one of the single greatest weapons in your GMing arsenal. You can run a fun campaign without doing it, but your chances of doing so go down (at least in general — your group, of course, may vary).
Group chargen helps to ensure that every PC has a well-defined role in the party, works well with the other characters (nothing spoils a game like a group of parentless social outcasts who stick together solely because they’re the PCs), and — best of all — has connections to the other PCs as well.
Steer Your Players Away from Bunk Choices
Most RPGs have at least a handful of decidedly sub-par character options (abilities, skills, etc.), and sometimes those options don’t look sub-par at first glance. When a player makes a poor choice in this department, they often won’t realize it’s a poor choice until much later on — and when they do, they’ll be bummed. If you bring up why a particular choice might not be the best option, they’re still free to take it anyway, but they’ll know what they’re getting into.
Suggest Things that Look Like Fun
Unless a player is incredibly well-versed in a particular system, chances are they’ll overlook character options that might be a lot of fun. As the GM, you probably have at least as much (if not more) experience with the game you’re running as your players do — so use that experience to help them out.
Once your players are done with their characters, give them all a once-over and see what jumps out at you. They’re likely to appreciate your suggestions.
Allow Changes After the Game Begins
As a rule of thumb, you should always allow your players to revamp, rework or even completely chuck out their characters between the first and second session of play. If you employ preludes (a highly driftable White Wolf game element), the prelude session makes a great test run for new PCs.
You can also allow character overhauls later on in the game, although this presents it’s own set of challenges (see Un-Fun PCs: When Retconning is Good for discussion on this topic).
What tricks and approaches do you employ to help make sure your players have fun with the PCs they create?
As a GM, I try to create challenges for the party as created. If there’s no traps-and-locks specialist, then all the traps and locks can be dealt with in other ways. If there’s not a D&D Cleric, then the undead will be designed so they can be dealt with instead of turned.
I try to explain this to the group, but there are always one or two players who assume that the party has to be “balanced”. Sometimes these are the same players who gripe about “having to play the cleric/rogue again”. (No, I can’t explain that particular phenomenon; I’d be a very rich Dr. Phildo if I could.)
Obviously, in a premade adventure, a balanced group beats a party of Halfling Barbarians any day, but if that’s what my group wants, that’s what I’ll write for.
This is a pretty fundamental division in GMing styles, and I’m glad you highlighted it. I used to GM from the “You need a balanced party” standpoint, and looking back on that now I just think “What the fuck was I thinking?”
That approach might make sense for competitive events, but for home campaigns it just seems wonky.
Group chargen helps to ensure that every PC has a well-defined role in the party, works well with the other characters, and — best of all — has connections to the other PCs as well.
Martin, I take exception to your language used here as both you and I know this not to be true.
Yes, it helps but creating characters together doesn’t ensure anything… 😉
Steer players away from choices that minimalize the contributions of other players:
Years ago I ran an underdark humanoid campaign. One of the characters was a goblin theif. One of the other characters was a kobold specialty priest of the night god (instead of the normal cleric perks, got very low power thief skills). Problem was that with the kobold priest’s Dex adjustments on thier “minor” thief skills, they were a FAR better thief than the thief with better skills and a smaller Dex bonus. Don’t let this happen to your campaign. If two players want to play a similar concept, let them but make sure they specialize differently. Not only does it add flavor, it makes the party stronger as a whole and it stops the characters from spotlight theft.
Make sure that players’ concepts aren’t detrimental to the group as a whole:
We’ve all had “That thief” in our group, the one who scouts ahead, steals all the loot, and defends it as “Role playing”. Some of this is just asshattery and no amount of before game pep talk will stop them from playing how they damn well like. Other times this is simply a matter of choosing an archetype that’s dramatically problimatical for group play. Keep an eye out and a sharp ear for concepts like “greedy rogue”, “Brooding loaner”, or anyone that writes “evil” or “chaotic neutral” on their sheet somewhere. These types of concepts are in no way de facto bad, but they require a player who keeps group play in mind and finds ways to express their concept within those bounds.
Make sure that everyone gets a fair chance at every role:
There’s about two people in every group that play the same cookie cutter character in every game. It could be the monosylabic warrior, the sneaky rogue, the ranger, or the guy who always tries to get you to allow his favorite off-the-wall race. That’s fine to an extent, but what happens when someone other than the guy who always plays the monsylabic fighter wants to play the monosylabic fighter? You can get creative about this by encouraging concept or mechanical differences (Bob the monosylabic fighter is a inpenatrable tank, whereas Roberto the monosylabic fighter can’t take nearly so much damage but carves through orcs like butter or Bob is a monosylabic fighter and Robert is an arstocratic fighter who looks down on Bob for his simplicity) but in some cases people won’t want to shift their concepts or there isn’t “room” for two similar characters. What then? In my mind, this is simple: you encourage the guy with the cookie cutter character to try something new and let someone else have a turn. Your group/players may think differently however so approach this one cautiously. At the very least though, be clear that ANYONE can play ANY role and if someone wants to play a given role, they should speak up. Nothing sucks more than having to wait indefinately cause the guy to your left always hogs a certain role.
My current game we did group character creation. It worked incredibly well. I also asked each player to define their character’s primary and secondary role within the group. I printed off a page with each player, character name, primary role and secondary role, as well as some of their Technicolor information. I find the players now pull out those sheets and kind of suggest someone else try something, then offer to help out. There was big group cohesion with our last session, and they each communicated a whole lot more. That might have been because I encouraged them to communicate out of game if it didn’t reveal stuff that they didn’t want revealed.
I think sometimes all it takes is making some of that stuff visible to every player, and eliminating some of those perceived in-game barriers.
Telas:
My problem with “writing for what you’ve got” is that it tends to feel rather weird in certain cases. Ie: the party with no theif for some reason never runs into any dangerous traps. If you write adventures in such as way as that makes sense, great! But other times it makes very little sense.
That aside, I think some players have a problem with the “write for what you’ve got” concept because they play to “win” as much as have fun and when the DM writes specifically for the group, not using challenges that “should” be present it feels like they’re being handed a win rather than earning it. Ie: “There was no way we could have detected/defeated a trap that was good enough to protect what we were hear to find, so the DM just took it easy on us and threw a monster at us instead.”
This all depends on your players of course. Some groups may not have “that guy”. If you can’t seem to figure out why one of your players always insists on balancing the party then gripes cause he’s stuck with it, chances are he’s “that guy”.
We’re currently in character creation for my campaign, and it’s off to a bit of a slow start. We spent a lot of time the first session hashing things out, and everyone had a concept by the end, but I get the feeling that some folks aren’t as happy as others.
I will remind them about flexibility in terms of re-working (or re-doing!) their PCs, but I still fear that the less vocal/forward guys will end up being the doormats who a) aren’t playing a class they’re interested in, and b) don’t have a PC background they’re invested in. I suppose for some players that’s just the way it goes, and you can’t expect everyone to be as integrated as the over-the-top psycho-drama role-player across the table.
I think the concept of a “balanced party” really gelled during the early days, when most DMs (to use the old lingo) were using published adventures. These modules were designed for balanced parties and a group could get royally screwed if they lacked balance.
It’s really a chicken or the egg argument. As a GM, if you’ve already plotted a campaign, then you know what the challenges are and you can communicate that to your players during chargen. If they don’t listen, then you’re justified to nail them during the campaign! 😉
On the flip side, if characters come first, then your job as GM is essentially to make sure that the PCs don’t step on each others areas of expertise. You can then craft the adventures with the character sheets in hand, making sure that all challenges can be overcome.
Rick, I understand your point, but what you’re really describing is a lack of communication. If the players really think that the GM is going easy on them because they lack a thief, then they’ve been aware of that from the beginning. It’s up to the GM to point out “hey, you guys really need some thief skills” OR “hey, thief skills aren’t really necessary in this campaign.”
There are a number of ways to deal with the common issues like traps; I’m not saying they should all be omitted, just that they should be the type that can be dealt with using “other methods”.
My barbarian made a pretty good trap-finder…
Click, twang!
“Ow! Hey guys, there’s an arrow trap here…”
Click, twang!
(Trap Sense goes off) “Hey, that was close! Um, it reloads, too!”
Our group is going through Shackled City (heavy on the dungeon crawling) without a rogue. We’ve definitely found some traps the hard way, but no game-stoppers. (Yet.)
Rick,
I think there’s a clear difference between PCs lacking a skill set to overcome challenges (the proverbial “lack of a thief” argument) and the PCs just not playing smart (prepping up for the big vamp hunt).
By the way, there is an Option 3:
(3) Make it a learning experience.
Allowing the vampires to “layeth the smackdown” on the PCs because they didn’t do their homework, but stop short of killing them, is a good way to train them to be better prepared next time.
In both cases, the DM does one of two things:
1) “Nerfs†the encounter so that it’s defeatable
2) Lets the PCs die because they didn’t plan well
If they had their thinking caps on, the PCs would find themselves an NPC thief-for-hire. Why should the DM exclude a great element like traps? Granted, an NPC shouldn’t be a crutch, and there should be consequences to such an arrangement. Maybe the hireling bilks them out of a large portion of the treasure, or raises his fee at the last minute, or is in league with one of their enemies.
Next time they’ll save themselves the trouble.
To me it isn’t an issue of how they plan their characters that should get them around challenges, but of how they play their characters. That to me is the limit of some systems. Once cast always cast. When I ran DND I would always allow people to take skills cross class (shoehorn), or encourage multi-classing (viable if the player is up for it). To me if you have a trap, and the players choose to find some other way around it through creative thinking or careful planning (bingo!), then I’ll find a way to make the system work to allow it. I hate to leave it up to an NPC to round out the party, because no one but the GM goes “that was sweet” when an NPC overcomes something.
Abulia: I used “helps to ensure” on purpose, rather than just “ensures” — you’re right, it doesn’t ensure niche preservation and compatibility. But it does help. 😉 It sounds like you have a recent example in mind, though, and I’m coming up blank on that — what is it?
(John Arcadian) I hate to leave it up to an NPC to round out the party, because no one but the GM goes “that was sweet†when an NPC overcomes something.
Amen to that, at least most of the time.
A few years back, I wrote an intro adventure that required the party (D&D) to track a band of hobgoblins away from the scene of the crime. No one in the party had tracking, and I knew that. My “plan” was that my players would realize they needed a tracker and hire one. It didn’t work, the adventure tanked and (not solely for this reason) I nixed the game. It was a terrible idea, and a dreadfully boring way for me to start a campaign. There may be groups where this approach works, but I just don’t see it.
Conversely, though, my group’s current Stargate game has featured two NPC party members (one replaced the other) almost since the beginning, and they’ve worked out well. They each have skills that none of the PCs possess, but our GM is careful not to steal the limelight — and the stuff they do (archaelogy and linguistics) isn’t exciting to us anyway. They’re also very well developed as characters, and the PCs care about them. I can’t imagine the game without them.
That was John A’s quote, but it’s a good one. I have used NPC specialists before (a hunter with Tracking, who could fire arrows when absolutely necessary, etc), and even NPC healers, but they’re purposefully built not to steal limelight.
Which is an interesting topic: “Good vs bad GMPCs…”
Fixed — thanks for catching that, Telas!
And you’re right, GMPCs would be a good post topic. I think I’ll take that one out for a spin soon. Thank you for the idea.
Martin wrote:
They each have skills that none of the PCs possess, but our GM is careful not to steal the limelight — and the stuff they do (archaelogy and linguistics) isn’t exciting to us anyway.
These are two keys to good GMPCs: they never (or very rarely) look better than the PCs, and what they are good at are things that the players don’t really care about.
In the few times I’ve had to run GMPCs, I’ve specifically built them as non-combatants. Filling in for missing skills is one thing, but having a GMPC get the final hit on a BBEG just doesn’t feel right to me.
While I in the past justified GMPCs as niche fillers, these days I’m starting to question that. I think something is wrong with the game system or the campaign if a particular niche is so important to the success of the game that an NPC must fill that niche if a player doesn’t, yet the niche is boring enough that a player will choose to play the second fighter instead of the thief.
Now sometimes this may be an issue of the players not totally buying into the genre of the game, in which case the GM should consider how to modify the genre to fit the players better. It may turn out that an NPC filling the niche is the easiest way to handle it. On the other hand, a cleric can be dispensed with by easing up (but not eliminating) undead, providing plenty of access to healing potions and such, and perhaps by allowing other caster types to have healing spells also.
Unfortunately, a niche filling NPC will occaisionally steal the limelight. If it steals the limelight often enough, perhaps a player will realize that niche actually could be interesting.
Other reasons for NPCs (and potential GMPCs) that don’t really relate to this topic are:
– increasing party size because the number of players doesn’t produce enough PCs for effective play.
– giving the GM a “voice” in the game (dangerous in a narativist game, quite possibly totally acceptible in a simulationist game, might work or not in a gamist game)
– giving the GM an opportunity to “play” in a game that doesn’t give the GM enough of the right triggers (D&D from modules may be an example here, the GM may not get much creative input, also, the GM doesn’t get the opportunity for long term strategic planning – though he does get to look forward to using more and more cool monsters as the PCs rise in level).
– stabilizing the size of the party when player attendance is variable
Ars Magica is an example of another solution to the boring, but necessary, niche problem. Rotate the duties among the players.
In the end, I think the GM needs to use a combination of:
– mentoring players during chargen
– modifying the campaign to fit the players desires
– providing filler NPCs or other mechanisms for missing PC niches
– letting the chips fall where they may
Frank
(Frank) I think something is wrong with the game system or the campaign if a particular niche is so important to the success of the game that an NPC must fill that niche if a player doesn’t, yet the niche is boring enough that a player will choose to play the second fighter instead of the thief.
Coming back to my Stargate example, it isn’t that this niche is boring or mission-critical from a game design standpoint — it’s the fact that to emulate the feel of Stargate, you kind of need a Daniel Jackson character, and none of the PCs fit the bill. I think that’s a great reason to fill a niche with a GMPC.
Hmm, I’d still question what is going on, why a niche that is critical to the game (in this case the feel of the game – which suggests that this might be a simulationist game [per Ron Edwards’s Big Model]) is not interesting enough for a player to play. Now it may not be a matter of being interesting enough to play. It may be that there are more niches than players.
Hmm, another possible niche for a GMPC, the “commander.” Let’s say you’re playing Star Trek. You decide to focus on bridge crew, which means Scotty and McCoy are legitimate NPCs. But perhaps you don’t want to put a player above the others. So you decide Kirk will be an NPC. But clearly Kirk will be a foreground character, and will act more like a PC. Now other bridge crew that the players don’t play as PCs may well be able to be a regular NPC (play won’t focus on their niches).
(I’ve never seen Stargate, so I don’t have the reference, but I get the idea being raised).
A more general Star Trek campaign of course has to have Scotty, McCoy, Kirk, Sulu, etc. And then there may very well be more niches than players, and you still want to focus on engineering issues some, so Scotty becomes a foreground NPC, a GMPC if you will.
Frank
Definitely when playing in a themed game there is a need to fit niches with characters and NPCs. With a licensed property you are “generally” playing to the property’s theme and thus it is helpful to have the things they plan for. Those kind of NPC’s I prefer to keep in the background. I used to (back in youth of my DND days) always have a healer NPC travel with the party. Now instead of that I make sure that healer services are available “in town” or “back at the camp” instead of providing someone to molly coddle the party. My play style has changed greatly since those days, so the necessity to have someone to patch up the PC’s isn’t that necessary anymore. Still if I have to use those kind of NPCs then they are rarely more than a shadowy presence to the characters.
The discussion here has been largely mechanical — let me throw out something from another game system that helps with the -character- part of character creation.
Everway has built in a round of questions that the players ask each other, more or less in-character. Each character is able to ask one question of every other PC.
The questions are usually based off of some short blurbs the players write about the characters, but the results -really- help get a better handle on how the character is going to function.
That was something I liked about Everyway, except I never really figured out how to play Everyway, and those questions seemed to not result in anything.
Dogs in the Vinyard is a better example of this idea, though the cooperation among players during chargen is more informal. However, it is also followed by a formal “initiation” that focuses on one character at a time, and both helps introduce the game mechanics, and also allows the player to help define his PC.
Frank