jl8e

From a conversation yesterday about character creation for RPGs:

When creating a character, you need to be able to answer the following questions for them:

1. Who are you?
   
2. What do you want?
   
3. Why are you here?
   
4. Where are you going?
   

If you don't have an answer for some of them, the character's likely to fail to function in play, usually because a situation comes up where the character ought to react, you poke the concept in your head, and it doesn't do anything.

(OK, that's not necessarily true for everybody, but it's true for me. It's my main failure mode as a player.)

The answer to #4 may not actually have relevance to play - the GM and other players will probably throw plenty of spanners into the works, so you can't plan out the character's destiny - but it's useful to know anyway.

They overlap heavily enough that being unclear on the answer to one of them will probably work, but two or more is going to bite you.

The character doesn't need to know the answers, as long as you do.

The answers don't have to be good ones. My character in drcpunk's Sorcerer game started out with his answer to #4 basically being "Nowhere. I'm stuck in a holding pattern." That's a fine answer, as long as the holding pattern is unstable. And it was. In essence, most of his action throughout the game has been because of his refusal to deal with his problem.

Most NPCs can get away with a lot less detail. Mostly, you need to know what they want, and everything flows from there. Only the major players may need more fleshing out.


Really, all this is just as applicable to writing in general, but it came up in an RPG context, and I don't pretend to be qualified to muse upon the craft of writing, anyway.