Hopeless at creating characters

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m not very good at creating characters for tabletop roleplaying games. I don’t mean I’m not very good at rolling them up, but I mean that when given a blank canvas, I struggle to come up with an interesting character concept and backstory.

For example, recently I played in a Star Wars game (using Fate Accelerated). The premise of the game was that we were a couple of guys in a spaceship in the Star Wars universe. So did that mean we were bounty hunters? Criminals? Traders? Rebels? Imperials? Something else?

The GM really didn’t mind - it was up to us, the players.

So between us we created a small crew of a trading spaceship and we set off in search of cargo to trade (and inadvertently running the risk of turning the game into Traveller).

But I found it hard to create a character I was interested in.

Story not sandbox

I think the problem for me is that I want to see a story, not just a sandbox. In fact, I’m not even sure I particularly like sandbox play (if I understand the term correctly).

I really want my games to have a beginning, middle and end. And I don’t want that middle to be wandering around the game world poking the scenery with a sharp stick to see what happens. (Okay, that’s perhaps extreme, but I’ve seen it happen. That’s not the case as far as our Star Wars game goes.)

And when there’s a strong story, in my experience you need characters suited to that story.

I think my gaming history has lead me in this direction:

• Call of Cthulhu: I played (and wrote) far too much Call of Cthulhu in my early, formative years. And as Cthulhu tends to be all about the mission/scenario, I kind of have that in my blood. (I can’t imagine a Call of Cthulhu sandbox…)
• One-shots: These days I play in (and run) a lot of convention one-shots. They tend to be mission-focused, due to the nature of a short, one-shot game. They also tend to have pre-generated characters designed to suit the scenario. (At least, the best of them do - but I’ve talked about that before.)
• Freeforms: I play in (and write) a lot of freeform larps. Freeforms are often little more than a bunch of pre-written characters put in a setting and told to get on with it. So I’m either used to being given a character that suits the game, or I’m writing characters that I know will be fun to play given the game I’m writing.
• Sandbox inexperience: When I look back, it turns out that I’ve not played in many true sandboxes. There has always been a point to the adventures. (And the last sandbox I played in was over 20 years ago.)
• Short games: I prefer short games. I’ve never run or played in a long campaign - 10-12 sessions is the absolute most I’ve played or run, and 6-8 is probably more common. I don’t think I’d want to play in an epic campaign - there are too many games out there that I want to play.

Solutions

I like it when a GM gives me some guidance as to what sort of character suits the game we’re going to run. For the Star Wars game we did some collaborative world building, but looking back the key bit we missed was to define the issues that the game was about. We didn’t follow the Fate Core or Sparks process, and maybe if we’d done that I’d have a clearer idea of the character I wanted to play.

And I really like pregenerated characters, although that’s more work for the GM. And it’s nice to be able to tailor a pregen, so the PbtA playbooks are pretty close to perfect, and I’ve started using that basic idea when writing pregens for my games. (Some excellent examples here for Fate.)