The first thing I do is examing the world or the group I'm in... is there any skill that they need that I can offer? A doctor? A fighter? A mechanic? I try and pick a character that's got something to contribute to the group instead of being more of the same or someone who'll weigh the group down. If I'm playing solo I think about what I can do that I haven't
done before. Is there an interesting job nobody's tried to take before? Is there something I haven't ever done that I'd like to try? I make a point of never playing 'myself'. This is because if I do the same thing over and over again it just seems less interesting. What's the point of starting something new if I just resurrect the same old dead ideas constantly? Now, this isn't to say that I don't draw from personal experiences and such, but none of my
characters are 'Gen in blahblah setting'. Once I have a basic career of 'what the character does' laid out I start building the framework. What do they look like? Where are they from? How were they raised? Things like physical looks play a lot into a character's personality. Is my character fat or skinny? Old or young? What's their hair color? Clothing preference? Once I have the basic shape in my mind I start developing the
personality. How would that background have affected their outlook on life? A good example of this process would be my newest character, Piper. Piper was born out of the desire to play a character who wasn't bogged down with great titles or family obligations like some of my other PCs had fallen into. I wanted someone without too much intimidation factor and someone who could meet other PCs on an equal or lesser level than them. So then I hit the
books. All of my PCs until this point were older than me, some of them by almost ten years! So I decided I wanted him to be young... but not a child. Piper would be fourteen years old. I also decided that his profession would be an animal exterminator, a skill that could get him dragged all over his world on adventures. For the world he was in I had to pick an animal species for him to play... and after a lot of thought I decided to make Piper a dog -- a mutt from the
land of Gallis where the purebreds rule and the mongrels are filthy peasants. I decided that he could have left his land at the age of ten and managed to scratch out a living in another country, eventually establishing himself as an exterminator because of his keen nose. I was poor growing up, so for his personality I drew an exaggerated parallel to what I knew. that being that when you're young and poor you don't realize it. Piper didn't think he had it too bad in
Gallis and saw all the horrible things that happened there as just being the natural way of things. Just like how he hunts his animals. there's no malice in the act, it's just what he does and what he needs to to do survive. So Piper became a wide-eyed youngster eager to make friends and very very gullible. His name came from his skill at playing the panpipes which he used to lure animals with as well as to entertain. See.. the process isn't so hard, and
it's much more fun than playing "me" over and over and over again. | 
