A journal about a character’s creation and career. Ryan Costello starts at the ground floor of his latest character, Daitora, the sumo brawler.

Without characters, RPGs are just board games. I am a big fan of board games, of course, and I own and play a wide variety of them, some of which even include game pieces and avatars with personalities and powers that come into play and allow me to embellish at the table, but even the most evocative board game characters are at best a caricature of the experience of playing a roleplaying game. Whether I’m playing Amanda Sharpe in Arkham Horror or the thimble in Monopoly, there is only so much material I can draw upon to create a persona, so much time to explore their motivations, and so much reward for getting to the bottom of a thimble’s motivation to own real estate.

For some players, that is also true of RPGs, and I am not faulting them for their play style. If anything, seeing how mechanically some players approach Pathfinder versus how theatrically others do inspired this blog. There are many different ways to approach a roleplaying game, from trying to build the fightiest fighter or sorcerous sorceress to putting Shakespeare to shame with the depth of tragedy Rudeo of Passivemoore sustained in his trialed life and journey to his first die roll as an RPG character. I feel I am more interested in creating and playing a character’s personality than making sure he (or, admittedly more rarely, she) is effective in combat. Mostly. I gave up my first Carrion Crown character, Tembin Lawest, a perfectly competent elf stonelord paladin, because I wasn’t enjoying roleplaying him, whereas I endured in my first attempt at Kingmaker as Hrosh, less-than-capable lawful-evil half-orc monk, because I enjoyed playing him, but I was bummed every combat in which Hrosh failed to deliver. And there have been characters I rolled up with a mechanical concept before a personality. As such, I decided to start a character creation journal, detailing the resources I use, the thinking behind the decisions I make, and my feelings as the character progresses. This will help demonstrate to others that there is more than one way to build a character, share tips that I might not be aware are not common knowledge, and maybe even make myself aware of things I do unconsciously.

A character does not exist in a vacuum. I like every character I play to be different in some way beyond mechanics from my other active characters. The rub is that I have a lot of active characters. Off the top of my head:

·Valter, lore warden/inquisitor in Carrion Crown. Valter is a lovable sociopath who either broke his empathy after cutting down his family, who had succumbed to irreversible madness, using a ripsaw glaive, or was the kind of guy who would cut down his whole family with a ripsaw glaive when they succumbed to madness because his empathy was broken.

·Baroness Jeralyte Ciampini, time thief/noble scion in Kingmaker, who has one good round of combat in her every day, but an endless supply of snobbery. Somehow she is so entitled that people listen to her and follow her, despite not particularly liking her. Also, she has an oracle of dreams cohort, but my GM mostly handles roleplaying her. At once the exemplary princess and yet one without compare.

·Ovaripe, goblin cleric in Skull & Shackles, a sadistic ankle-biter who is happy to follow the flow of chaos wherever it takes it. An easily confused bully who throws icicles like they’re dogslicers in a kennel.

·Stonethrow, dwarf mad dog barbarian, and Joey, his kangaroo companion, in PFS. For a Sczarni, and a barbarian for that matter, Stonethrow’s a pretty friendly dude. He doesn’t fuss, he asks questions but rarely makes accusations, and keeps a level head until he’s sure violence is the answer. The quickest way to get him to draw that conclusion is to hurt, or even just threaten Joey, who he’s had since he found the wee hopper in an abandoned storage crate and personally nursed with a bottle of imported milk.

·Brother Jaymon Falcobe, tiefling staff magus in PFS. Jaymon is as blunt as his weapon of choice. His only regard for feelings is disregard. Still, the outsider appreciates the home he’s found in the Society and does his best to keep Society enemies at bay.

·Mauven “Peacebringer” Gild, halfling cavalier in PFS. Baldheaded, exotically armed, and densely armoured, Mauven is ready to tangle it up tooth and nail with whatever gets in her face, but she has one thing: if she can talk it out, she talks it out. There are a lot of good people in bad situations, and she doesn’t believe they deserve to die. Like Apex, her wolf, who she saved from a goblin whipper. Under other circumstances, they might have come to blows. As it stands, she has no ally she trusts more.

·Calep Lo, half-elf summoner in PFS. Intrigued by the great old ones, this xenobiologist set out to create his own. He leads Madness into battle, his own little C’thulhoid.

Calep is the only character I have no intention of returning to, although Mauven is on hold for the time being. That still means five active characters I need to differentiate my new character from, and two other characters I should keep in mind to try to stay away from familiar territory.

I also think a character’s personality should in some way reflect the assumed personality of their race and class. A character doesn’t need to adhere to the stereotypes of their race and class, but those stereotypes need to in some way be acknowledged. A dwarf doesn’t need to be a dour, ale-chugging miner, but if he’s a chipper, wine-sipping jester, then he’s a gnome.

That said, here are the initial decisions I have made for this character:

1.It will be a male;

2.He will be a PFS character;

3.He will be a brawler, a new class from the Advanced Class Guide playtest;

4.He will use this miniature from the Chronoscape line:

5.He will be human.

I will go into the reason behind each decision in the next installment of Building Character.   Part 2