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I fear 3rd party publications are hard to find for this subject, especially regarding role-playing games. I am pretty sure the contents of this article is "common knowledge" among role-players, but I don’t know of any publication that discusses the subject in a game-independent manner. Does anyone have any tips?
—
TowerDragon (
talk)
08:48, 8 August 2008 (UTC)reply
Skill-based leads to "cookie cutter" characters?
It's possible I'm misunderstanding this, but I was of the school that class-based systems are the ones that lead to "cookie cutter" characters. Therefore, skill-based systems lead to broader possiblities.
As for lack of specialization, that's the fault of the players, not the system.
--Bear Eagleson 16:21, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the term "cookie cutter" should be used at all. Besides, I don't agree that skill based systems can't be used to force specialization. (It's merely a matter of making it costly enough to be specialized in different areas. You don't need classes to do that.) I've rephrased that part, but this article still needs to be reworked in other ways... --
Maggu13:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)reply
"Cookie Cutter" definitely has negative connotations. I hadn't thought of forced specialization in skill-based systems. The rewording looks nice, thank you. --Bear Eagleson 18:55, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm thinking that character creation could apply to a lot of other things, too, that it might be good to have a paragraph on. For example, what about character creation for fiction writers?
—The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
24.86.208.255 (
talk •
contribs) 2006-09-04T20:11:44 (UTC)
Characterization has some non-game specific information, but is more about describing characters than about creating them. Other than that, it is just that nobody felt competent yet to write about the general subject. In modern video/computer games, e.g., character creation seems to be much more concerned about appearance than other things, and fiction writers, of course, are more concerned with other things than appearance or stats :-). —
TowerDragon06:38, 5 September 2006 (UTC)reply
Character creation also relates to Animators, Filmmakers, Caricature artists, illustrators, comic book writers, music video directors, novelists, to name a few... All of which have commonalities with what makes up character creation. These commonalities are what should be written here under character creation... instead we have a mass of writing all about character creation for one genre, namely games. Whilst games is a valid genre for character creation, it does not constitute the whole meaning of character creation and its extremely focused descriptions cannot be applied directly to other genres of character creation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the games description is wrong... I'm just saying that it should be a sub-category or spin off.. it should be titled character creation for games, instead of pretending to be the whole description for character creation cause 90% of what is said doesn't apply to the other forms of character creation, really it should be titled: "Roleplaying game character creation"--
1healm7711:16, 16 February 2007 (UTC)reply
As far as I can see, one could distinguish two more “fields of character creation” this article should be talking about:
Regrettably, I don’t know enough about either to be able to write anything substantial about them (that’s why I didn’t :-). So if anyone is able to do it: go ahead!
BTW: The correct Wikipedia title would be Character creation (role-playing games) should the text be moved to a more specific page. —
TowerDragon00:02, 9 March 2007 (UTC)reply
“Characterization links to the acting term, not to increasing stats”?
Please read the article about
characterization before making such statements. It is a
writing (as in
literature) term as well as an
acting term. And why do you think it should be about “increasing stats”?? It's about describing a fictional character, just as a character sheet contains a written (and mostly formalized) description of a role-playing character.
—
TowerDragon10:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
I have read the article. We are using characterization in two senses:
The writing/acting/role-playing sense - the sense used in the
characterization article
The representation of characters through statistics
The two senses are mostly distinct - a player's characterization (sense 1) of a role is somewhat determined by the game's characterization (sense 2) of the character, but only very lightly, and there is a great deal which isn't. As such, a link from a paragraph talking about characterization in the second sense (in my summary: "increasing stats") to a page talking about characterization in the first sense (in my summary: "acting term") is unclear, so I replaced it with a clearer term: "representation".
Percy Snoodle11:23, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Indeed, the article makes my above point quite well - the character sheet records only the directcharacterization of the character. The indirect characterization is not recorded. Perhaps we could mention that onn the page.
Percy Snoodle11:27, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Err — that’s what the article did before you edit it :-): “The result of character creation is a form of directcharacterization …” (emphasis by me). —
TowerDragon 11:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC) Sorry, that was complete nonsense. Just forget it, please :-} —
TowerDragon22:25, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Character advancement vs. character development
Percy, your statement about the RPG/CRPG use of character advancement vs. character development is simply wrong. As I said in the edit summary:
GURPS, for example, uses exclusively the word development.
—
TowerDragon10:54, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Since I'm at work, I won't be able to quote examples back at you - but the less statistic-oriented RPGs do tend to draw the distinction I'm making. Would you accept "some RPGs" in place of "RPGs usually"?
Percy Snoodle11:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)reply
Hmm. The more I look around, the less clear-cut the distinctions appear to be. I have seen the term character development be used in several senses now:
Designing a character that is to appear in a game (not only in the context of designing computer games) by changing (and improving) the description several times before the character is actually being used. This, of course, includes “fleshing it out”.
Characterizing a character indirectly (through role-playing). (The “acting term”.)
Improving or otherwise changing an existing character that has already been played, by spending experience points or otherwise. (As in GURPS, for example, where gaining a disadvantage or trading one trait for another one of equal character point value is also covered under this term — hence “otherwise changing”.)
Perhaps we should just point to
character development in the “see also” section and in this article use the term character advancement, although it would IMHO be a misnomer because it does not clearly include negative or even neutral changes. In any case, a modified version of my above list should probably be added to the
character development article to make things clear(er).
I’d still like to know what you mean by “less statistic-oriented”, though.
Games in which the focus is on something other than the statistics, usually on roleplaying - storytelling-oriented is a fairly good way of putting it. I suppose some would say
narrativist games, though there are could be stat-light gamist games, I suppose.
Percy Snoodle07:49, 31 January 2007 (UTC)reply
I would think a stat-light gamist game would be more like a wargame, thus still not interested in detailed descriptions of the characters, so narrativist or story-telling oriented would probably clearer. What do you think of my proposal at
Talk:Character development? —
TowerDragon10:11, 31 January 2007 (UTC)reply
For stat-light gamist games, I was thinking more along the lines of an
Amber DRPG throne war with the stats known only to the GM - it would played to win, but mostly through politicking without reference to stats. However, such a game would have little room for character advancement, so it's a bit of a moot point. I've responded at
Talk:Character development. —The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
Percy Snoodle (
talk •
contribs)
10:52, 31 January 2007 (UTC).reply
Roll
I was disappointed to not see the slang verb form of roll anywhere in this article. I was hoping for confirmation that "roll" is modern-day slang for character generation, going back to when random attributes were created by rolling dice. I've only really heard it in MMOs so I can hardly say it's fact. —Preceding
unsigned comment added by
204.83.48.251 (
talk)
10:22, 5 March 2008 (UTC)reply
NPC Creation
Technically, isn't the act of a DM creating an NPC an act of character creation. Unless this article changes its title to Player-Character Creation, NPC creation should also be discussed. There would be a lot to discuss. For example, a DM might choose to create and NPC according to the same rules as the PCs or according to different rules. Further, the NPC might be created to serve a function in the story (that function could be anything from antagonist to quest-hook to Deus ex machina plot device) or simply to exist in the world, with the understanding that the PCs might interact with the NPC and cause the NPC to react but no true purpose behind the NPC. I think there's a lot there, and it bears exploration.
98.231.219.116 (
talk)
05:04, 31 January 2009 (UTC)reply
Maintenance notes
As requested by TowerDragon, I am providing a few notes to help improve the article so that the various maintenance issues can be resolved:
Inline citations. This is a biggie. At present, there is a list of references but NO citations in the text. Casual verification is difficult.
Content. Several issues here:
Section: "Making decisions" reads like an essay. Rhetorical questions should be rephrased as statements. Text layout needs to be wikified.
Section "Determing numerical values" reads almost like a rulebook. Please try to generalize the content or, if the details by nature are too minute, remove the content as it qualifies as gameplay instructions.
Section "Templates and classes" is generally okay, but the tail end of it seems to tack on game-specific trivia. The relevance of these games' implementations should be discussed (if applicable) or removed as mere name-dropping. Of course, every game is going to have some variations on character creation, so that alone is not enough to warrant specific detail.
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic
javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.
Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at
Wikipedia:Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on
WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.[?]
Watch for
redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's
redundancy exercises.)
Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
This article needs
footnotes, preferably in the
cite.php format recommended by
WP:WIAFA. Simply, enclose inline citations, with
WP:CITE or
WP:CITE/ES information, with <ref>THE FOOTNOTE</ref>. At the bottom of the article, in a section named “References” or “Footnotes”, add <div class="references-small"><references/></div>.[?]
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