Making A Character For The Game You're In

One of the statements I hear a lot of is, “just let the player make whatever they want.” One of the practices I see very often is that GMs let players make characters before they come to the table. What I see happening with this a lot is that players end up with characters that don’t fit the game.

 Maybe your ranger has goblins as a favored enemy but because there was no discussion as to what the game would be about you had no clue you were never going to see a goblin in the game. Maybe you’ve come up with an enchanter you wanted to play but you were unaware that the game consisted of a lot of mindless undead and constructs thus making your mind-effecting powers ineffectual 90% of the time. Or maybe it’s as simple as you come to the table with a desert dwelling druid, and the game takes place in the arctic region of the world.

I know this isn’t an issue for folks who play a super sandboxy make it up as you go along campaign, but a lot of GMs have an idea they are going to work with even in homebrew, and there are very specific things that go on in a module or one of the Pathfinder APs (adventure path). So today we are going to talk about making a character for the game you’re playing.

One of my first suggestions is don’t let players make their characters alone. At the very least the GM should sit with the player when making characters. This allows the GM to make suggestions based on their knowledge of what will happen during the game. If the GM knows there are never going to be goblins but undead are going to be a heavy theme he may suggest the player switch his rangers favored enemy. No player likes having an ability on their sheet they’ll never use. But beyond that it helps connect the story.

I run the Shattered Star AP and one of the first things it says is that the players are working for the Pathfinder Society, they are aspiring or junior Pathfinders. By giving this piece of information you can help the player make a character that will from the start fit into the game. I can't even count the number of times at the beginning of an adventure when a GM sets out the initial plot hook and a player says, “My character wouldn’t be interested in that.” If your character wouldn’t be interested then why did you make that character?

One of the things I love about Paizo’s APs is that each AP has a Player’s Guide. A short PDF which Paizo offers for free on their website. These Player’s Guides, give a lot of information on what to expect,  the region play will start in, and they even give campaign traits which help start the player with a connection to the AP that also gives a mechanical advantage to the character.

When I do run homebrews I try and keep all of this information in mind as well, and I work with my players to make characters that will be both fun for them to play and connected to my scenario. I’m running a group of strung together modules right now, with some interspersed original ideas and I sat over the course of a week or two with each player making sure their characters were prepared for my the game I wanted to run, and so far it’s been a blast.

I think however things are easier to understand if given an example. So today we’re going to create a character for one of the APs I’ve never played or run before, Carrion Crown. First thing I’m going to do is download the Player’s Guide from the Paizo site.

To start we get our plot hook all the characters somehow knew a man named Professor Petros Lorrimor, a famed scholar, explorer, and teacher. We know that all the characters will have traveled to the land of Ustalav to attend the funeral of the Professor and that each of the characters was named in his will, so our character is probably assumed to have been close to the professor. This gives us a huge starting point to attach our character to the game.

Now the Player’s Guides all give campaign traits and as a player I almost always take one of these as they give the character a stronger connection to the story. As a GM I require the players take a campaign trait. Looking through them I’ve decided on the On The Payroll Trait;

“Whether he needed a bodyguard in a rough neighborhood, a guide to an isolated archeological dig, or information on a specialized topic, Professor Lorrimor was never shy about hiring professionals to help him attain his goals. Over the course of his long career, thousands of people throughout the world served his needs and benefited from his generous wages (usually covered by his academic benefactor at the time). He had contacts in most areas of expertise in every corner of the known world, a knack for recognizing talent, and a desire to be surrounded by the best and brightest at all times. Whatever job the professor originally hired you for, your performance captured his attention, and he hired you many times throughout your career, sometimes even for jobs away from your home, always paying your expenses and compensating you well for your time. In your area of expertise, you are among the best.

Benefit: Your years of hard work have paid off, granting you an additional 150 gp in starting wealth.”

This trait gives us a lot of leeway on the character choices to be made and extra starting gold is always a nice benefit for doing so. Next up I’m going to think about class a minute, each class is listed in the book with suggestions on roleplay aspects and some mechanical recommendations. I’m going to play a ranger I think both because it’s one of my favorite classes but also because the mechanical recommendations highlight a point I made earlier about not choosing abilities that may be worthless.

Here are the recommendations for ranger.

“Suggested ranger archetypes for the Carrion Crown Adventure Path include Guide, Infiltrator, Skirmisher, and Urban Ranger. Good favored enemies include aberration, animal, construct, humanoid (human), and undead. Rangers with the favored terrains of forest, mountain, swamp, and urban will find their talents most useful during the course of the campaign. See the druid section for suggested animal companions.”

And the druid section on animal companions says this;

“Any animal companion native to temperate land environments would be appropriate for this adventure, particularly cougars, falcons, owls, and wolves.”

I’m getting a picture of a rough and tumble type here. Maybe a bodyguard hired on by the professor when he would move through the darker parts of Ustalav. Before I delve to deeply into what I’ll do with the actual ranger class I must decide on a race. Everyone has their go to race, mine is usually human, and to that end as a way of playing something I don’t usually, I’m going to go half-orc on this one.

Looking at the suggest archetypes none of them really stand out to me, there is a corpse hunter archetype but I don’t like that either. So I’m thinking the Skirmisher archetype, since I don’t like spell casting, with a wolf pet.

And honestly that would be enough everything else, the mechanics can be molded around the basic story. A quick look at a map of Ustalav and the pathfinder wiki page for it and I’ve got an even clearer picture.

A Half-orc from the county of Canterwall where Ustalav abuts the Orc held Belkan hold. Distrusted because of his parentage he spends a lot of time wandering especially into the haunted wastelands of the prison county of Virlych. He was a guide to the professor on a number of occasions when he was investigating something or another in the area. The Half-Orc has become quite adept and fighting off the undead that plague the region.

After that you can play fill in the blanks and write a much longer background, I know I would. But even this is enough to satisfy any GM that you’ve made a character that fits into the campaign that you’ll be playing. He’ll be happy he won’t have to fight you tooth and nail to go on the adventure he’s planned.

How do you make a character when starting a new game? As a GM how much information do you give your players?