Perverse Access Memory: WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters
Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with? Do you find that your preference correlates with a preference for elaborate initial backgrounds or with background development in play? If you’re a GM, do you find unique-concept characters easy or hard to GM for? What about playing alongside them?
I tend to steer clear of games where the PCs fit into strong archetypes; I haven’t played a DnD campaign for years! None of my three current on-line PCs really fit into traditional archetypes, but they’re not really far-out concepts either.
Ivor Tregonning is my character in STD, a game based on Stephen King’s The Stand, a book I’ve never actually read. The original request-for-players asked for people to play characters strongly based on themselves; but after the first few submissions arrived the GM (David Edelstein) decided he had received enough IT geeks. So I wrote up a train driver with a hobby of studying Cornish history and mythology.
Karl Tolhurst of Ümläüt has been mentioned before; lead guitarist of a goth-metal band, he probably does conform to an archetype, if not a typical gaming one. The original version was for a Call of Cthulhu game in which the band had murderously self-destructed when the singer reached zero SAN and then some; Karl was a tragic figure who’s life had disintegrated before his eyes. I’ve resurrected him to a pre-tragedy version in a quite different game, but this one doesn’t quite have the emotional depth.
Quibbp is very archetypal, a stubborn, otherworldly mad scientist. He just happens to be an octopus, part of exploration term of undersea dwellers exploring the surface world.
From the GM perspective, I’ve had a real mix of player character types; some have quite detailed back-stories despite being fairly conventional concepts; others have been, well, different. I’ve got a agent of the secretive technology guild who’s also a powerful psionic acting as an undercover agent disguised as a beggar. I’ve had a spoilt rich noble acting as a clueless bimbo. The most far out one (which too a lot of effort to integrate into the campaign) was Kalnyr, who’d lost his memory and was occasionally possessed by a ‘demon’ that turned him into a berserk killing machine. He was entertaining at times, but very difficult to integrate into a party with any other PCs. I ended up with him in thread of his own much of the time, only meeting with other PCs occasionally, and then sometimes as an adversary.
