How do I write characters for a Characters-Provided Event?

After participating in one of the events I helped co-wrote, such as Barbarian Lives, people often ask me, "How did you come up with those characters!"

I've learned a lot about doing it over the years, and I thought I would share the process that I and my co-writers (such as Daniel Llewellyn) have used in the past when creating a cohesive party of characters for a convention event.

This article is the companion to Plotting Character-Provided Convention events

You want to craft a set of characters that the players care about, are interested in, and can quickly step into. You also want characters that interesting things can happen to. Here are my goals when creating a set of PCs for a character-provided event.

1. Interesting. The PCs should be interesting. It should be clear from the sheet what they are like, and what makes them unique. They should have enough familiar elements that people can identify with them, which enough new stuff to stir the players up.
2. Capable. The PCs should be useful during the scenario. 80-90% of their skills, spells and equipment should have the opportunity to be useful during play. Their classes and races should not hamper play unless you specifically design an encounter to engender Role-Playing around this issue.
3. Playable. Characters who are "quiet", "shy", "submissive", "not much for talking", or so on are very difficult to play. Again, I've seen world-class Role-Players? do wonders with such PCs, but in general, you want each PC to be able to verbally contribute to play. You also want a well-enough defined personality that the player has something to work with, but not such a weird or hard to understand personality that the player is at a loss on how to play them.
4. Connected. The PCs should have a connection to their environment (such as the campaign setting) and to each other. Off-camera dependents, relationships, businesses, and other responsibilities are a good way of connecting the PC with their world.
5. Complete. The PCs should have backgrounds, histories, recent event summaries, personalties, and opinions of other PCs, as well as full stats, equipment, spell lists, etc..
6. Accurate. Try and eliminate all rules errors prior to play. Find your friend the rules weenie, and have him look over the stats. Most importantly, make sure that all the prose is accurate - accidentally leaving the "and this PC will get mind-controlled later" note on the character sheet is a big oops.

The Process

Here is the process that I typically use when developing a set of PCs.

This isn't a set-in-stone process, but these are the general steps. They don't always go in this order, either. Sometimes figuring out one step congeals enough things to fill out all the info for another step.

1. The kernel. Often, this is a theme. Such as they party are all :
   • Members of a family
   • From barbarian tribes
   • Spies
   • People who once had a part of Vecna grafted to them
   • Baby red dragons, raised to be good
   • Students in a wizard/cleric school
   • People who lost prized magic items to Disenchanters
   • Survivors of Orc raids
   • About to achieve a prestige class
   • Fallen paladins
   • Pirates
   • Were all in love with one of the other party members who is now a vampiress
2. The recent past. Where are these people at in their lives? What has happened to them recently that shaped them?
   • This is where you tie into the plot of your scenario
   • Environmental events (earthquakes, rain, purple skies, third moon appears)
   • Changes in relationships (marriage, divorce, new love, new resentment)
   • Political events (Struggles for thrones, wars, border tension)
   • Local mood (racial tension, worries about crops)
3. Why are they together? What has brought, and keeps this set of characters together? Why, despite personal differences and individual agendas, are they loyal to the group?
   • An old adventuring group
   • Forced to work together by a government group (weak, avoid)
   • Someone saved someone's life
   • Have a secret that keeps them here (secret relationship, need, etc.)
   • Parents told them to protect each other
   • Good friends all exiled at the same time
   • Childhood friends
   • Family
4. Gender Balance. How do we make a group of 3 females and 3 males? (We typically use this balance, along with an extra male PC that isn't present in all the rounds, but your mileage may vary).
5. Race/Class Balance. What type of races/classes would we like to see? How can we make a balanced group that will be useful in the environment they are in (or will be in)?
6. Relationships. How does every character feel about every other character, the world, and their situation? I usually use a bubble diagram, with a bubble for each PC, each major existing NPC, and other important nodes, and then draw relationship lines between all the bubbles, labeled with a description of the relationship. See this blank character relationship diagram.
   • Parent/Child
   • Husband/Wife
   • Life Debt
   • Love
   • Hatred
   • Resentment
   • Jealousy
   • Admiration
   • Respect
   • Loyalty
   • Luke, I'm your father
7. Secrets. Each PC needs at least one secret that will probably be revealed during the course of the adventure. Nothing in my experience as consistently engenders great role-playing moments as when an in-game situation forces the revelation of a secret.
   • Relationships
   • Businesses
   • Past deeds
   • Current deeds
   • Disease (lycanthropy, etc.)
   • Love
   • Hate
   • Dreams
   • Phobias
   • Current/Past lies
   • Equipment
   • Motivations (secretly looking for the Eye of Ra while party is looking for food)
8. Something Unique. Each PC needs to have something about them that is unique. This may have gotten covered above, check it now. Would you want to play each of these PCs? Equipment can count for this, but should rarely be the only unique thing for a PC. More like personality, class, relationships, secrets, etc.
9. Tournament Balance. Is each of these PCs equally playable? Is there one that is clearly "better" than the rest? You are trying to look for "quiet" characters, or characters that "always do what the leader says". You need to make each character equally strong, so that people don't feel that one (or more) of the PCs is the "winning PC" that they "have to play". In our experience, truly great players can make the most of any PC, but effort spent on this step will save you complaints from players later.
10. "Can't we all get along?" Often, I see parties that are made up of PCs that all hate each other's guts. The truth is, unless you have a massive plot hook, why would anyone put their life on the line for a bunch of people they hate? You need to make sure that each PC has a reason to be there, and if they are unlikable, that there is a compelling reason for them to be there. You covered this in step 3 - check it again.
11. Cliche/Stereotype Check. Make sure that your PCs aren't overly cliche, stereotyped, been-there-done-that. If they are, find some way to tweak them a bit to make them more interesting.
12. Connectedness Check. Are each of the PCs connected to the world, the story as you know it, each other, and to themselves? You need to make sure that the PCs aren't on the periphery of the story – they need to be in the thick of things.
13. Detailed Personality. Write the detailed personality for each PC. You need 3-4 major personality traits that people can take advantage of during the course of the scenario. "Easily distracted by green books" is not a good personality trait if there are no green books in the scenario. You need 3-4 so that people can pick an aspect of the PC to make their own. One master trait is important, when you are writing the opinions of others about each PC, you don't want things to be all over the map.
14. Stats. Write up the character stats at this point, including a first pass at equipment. I highly recommend using PCGen or something equivalent - it saves oodles of time and errors.
15. Usefulness Check. Is everything about the PC going to be useful during the course of the scenario? Did you give them a bunch of stuff they won't use? Make sure that each PC has useful skills, abilities, languages, equipment, spells, traits, weapons, etc..
16. Recent events. Write up a first pass at recent events that the PCs have experienced.
17. Opinions of other PCs. Write up what each PC thinks about each other PC. Keep it simple at this point. Later passes will add more detail.
18. Playtest. If you can, now is the time to playtest. If you don't have that luxury, I suggest you at least have someone else look them over at this point.
19. Do it all again. At this point, you make successive passes at the PCs, refining things. You should also be writing the scenario by now, so you might need to adjust the PCs to better fit the scenario. Did you write in a pit trap? Do the PCs have rope? Do you want them to? The hardest thing to keep correct is relationship stuff - if you make a little change, you need to check all 36 entries for how PCs feel about each other to make sure nothing else needs to be updated.