October 23, 2000
It's Alive! (Notes on Character Creation)
I mentioned in the blog over the weekend that I was deep in the throes of character creation. It's a fascinating process for me. Unfortunately, I can never do it for its own sake. Most gamers I know have character after character already finished, waiting for a chance to play them. I can't do that. I can't get myself through the often-frustrating birthing process unless I already know I'm going to have a chance to play that character.
This often leads to me having far more MUSH characters than is strictly wise or advisable. A current count: I have seven on Something Wicked This Way Comes -- Jake, Chloe, Toby, Rowan, Marisol, Samantha, as well as a storytelling persona that can take on any of several characters for any given plot. I have three on my own MUSH, Once On This Island, which isn't even open yet -- Aislinn, Elizabeth and Mama Yetunde, who'll be my NPC character. Then I have two on the also as yet unopened Tribe 8 MUSH -- Colette and Hanya. And two staff characters (who don't play, but do solely administrative stuff) as well. I desperately need to update my MUSH page, I think.
This doesn't even count the characters I play in various tabletop games or inactive MUSH characters either. I can think of at least 24 other characters that I've played with varying degrees of success in the two and a half years I've been seriously MUSHing. It can get noisy in my head at times. They've varied widely in age, gender, race, personality. I've noticed I seem to follow certain types most closely, however -- but that's a subject for another journal entry.
Samantha's the baby of the group. She came into existence last Friday, and I haven't even been approved by staff on Something Wicked yet. I thought I'd try to walk through and break down the character creation process as it happens in my head.
Friday morning, James and Brand and I were sitting around talking about things that are going on with our various characters. We realized that the three of us hadn't had a chance to play together as a group in a long time. Our characters seem to be more antagonistic towards each other. That can be fun, but sometimes it gets old. "We need a group of characters that like each other." I can't remember who said it, Brand or James, but we started thinking of character concepts -- like any of us need more characters to play.
Brand came up with the idea of a mage-based rock band. If you know Mage at all, the likeliest character concept to come out of that is a Cult of Ecstasy mage. They're stereotyped as the 'sex, drugs and rock and roll' mages, hippies, rebels, etc. (Toby is actually going to be one eventually, because I like playing around with perceived stereotypes of the different White Wolf groups -- but this is getting way too esoteric for non-gamers.) Once again, I started playing around with the stereotypes.
Simple enough to start off, which is how it always begins. Whenever I write a character's history, I usually try to write it in first person. It gives me a feel for what their voice is like. I wrote her history up on Friday. (If you want to see how that turned out, click here. There's a lot of Mage jargon there, though.) She came out as sort of a cross between Zack de la Rocha (lead singer for Rage Against the Machine) and Gwen Stefani (lead singer for No Doubt). What that means, for you folks not up on popular music, is that she's a Southern California girl with a lot of energy and big political ideals.
Once I'd gotten the history written, it was like Dr. F. putting the electrodes to his monster. She got up and started walking and talking. And damn, was she loud. I went home and picked out some MP3s of mine that suited her, put them on repeat, then did some research, mostly through my Mage sourcebooks. Stats -- those nifty numbers that go on the character sheet that a lot of gamers can get obsessed with -- are usually the last things to come to me.
After writing in her voice for a while, and talking to Brand about mythology, I found a few other links to who she is. Mages all have a spirit of sorts that guides them. It can be a mythological figure, a ghost, a totem spirit, any number of things. Sam's Avatar (to use game terms) is an obscure Etruscan goddess named Feronia, the goddess of fire, freedom and fertility. A lot of her motivations and flaws and personality quirks come from that simple fact. Once that piece fell into place, figuring how the rest of her character, like stats and how she relates to and uses magic, was easy.
And that's usually how it goes. I start with a seed of an idea, sometimes as simple as "I want to create a completely non-stereotypical Cult of Ecstasy mage" (Toby) or as complex as "What if a famous historical figure were actually an eshu -- a form of changeling -- and were still alive today? What would she be like? What's she been doing for the past three hundred years?" (Elizabeth) From there ideas come willy-nilly. Sometimes the personality comes first. Sometimes a name. Sometimes a history. It's an incredibly organic process and I can never quite predict how it will turn out -- a lot like all of my writing.
There's one thing that always, always has to happen. At some point, the character has to come lurching to life. I've started to recognize that. If that doesn't happen, it doesn't matter how much I write, or how often I play them, they fall over lifeless at some point, never to move again.
The most interesting thing about this to me is this: it's helped with my writing. Immensely. The characters I create for stories that aren't gaming-related go through a similar process, only without the stats. Learning to recognize a 'live' character from a 'walking dead' character keeps me from wasting time writing and writing about a character that isn't going anywhere -- and by default, a story that isn't going anywhere.
Now if I could just learn how to do that with a journal entry! ;-)
Posted by Lisa at October 23, 2000 02:26 PM
