Storyboard: A man of many talents
Rejoice! After the columns of the last two weeks, the specter of relationships has been forever vanquished! (We're using "forever" in the same sense you'd see it in a comic book here. In other words, give it a month.) Diving back into the haphazard series on character creation, today we'll be taking a look at generating a character based solidly upon their abilities -- a method that seems a bit odd at first glance and almost ridiculously simple upon further consideration.
Think about it for a moment. If someone asks you to describe yourself, odds are excellent that you don't start with a recounting of your personality or your history unless you're on a date. Most times, you start with what you do -- hobbies, profession, and any other pertinent diversions on the road toward the grave. It's not a real cognitive leap from being accountants, clerks, and waiters to being warriors, mages, and rogues. The big question is extrapolating backward from the ability to figure out the sort of person who would go into the profession in the first place. Because it's such a broad field, in fact, I'm going to take a look at it from three different angles.
Fitting in
Skills in games, just like in real life, have certain prerequisites. If you're going to drive a tractor trailer across the country, you need to have a commercial driver's license and a job with a trucking company. By the same token, if you're going to use Ablating Strike in City of Heroes, you need to have some ability to handle a pair of swords in melee without chopping off your own limbs. Often you can develop a fairly solid handle on a character simply by figuring out what a character must have been doing to learn the skills they have in the present.
Most games include skills and professions that can come from anywhere along with those that have very specific backstories. Vana'diel's warriors and red mages both have vague in-game connections, but for the most part they're ubiquitous parts of Final Fantasy XI's setting. On the other hand, a puppetmaster requires training by a master puppeteer in Al Zahbi or somewhere within the Near East's empire. The craft simply doesn't exist outside of that setting.
In some ways, the latter type of class is more useful, as you have a built-in explanation for some holes in the character concept. (A puppetmaster must have spent time in the imperial city, for instance, and almost certainly knows a few important things about maintaining an automaton.) The former can still be useful -- almost anyone could pick up a weapon and fight, which is part of why warrior-type classes are so ubiquitous, but there had to have been a reason. Even if the character is relatively inexperienced, if he's swinging a sword around, he had to receive training from somewhere.
While using abilities to define a character falls more into the realm of backstory than personality, one usually springs from the other. If you know your character's abilities require time in religious institutions, odds are good that some of that religious instruction will have rubbed off. But if you're more concerned about personality than backstory, you still have plenty of options...
Filling roles
Outside of those of us who work at Massively, where we get to talk about MMOs all day and get paid for it, the odds are high that your job isn't necessarily the one thing you want to do more than anything else in the world. (We can empathize, really, since there are still no openings for Giant Robot Pilot, nor is there a Secretary of Party Time for the government.) Your character, on the other hand, might very well be happy with their job. Odds are good that even if they don't care for it, they went into it assuming things would turn out better in the long run.
Quite possibly, the adventuring portion of a character's life isn't what they spent all of their time doing, or it's not what brought them into the field in the first place. A warrior could be a former guard, a soldier, or even a young man who expected to be a dashing knight in tournaments rather than a front-line combatant. Mages might have started working with magic from a purely theoretical standpoint, not dissimilar from scientists in the real world. (Although few scientists start wandering the earth throwing fireballs.)
This might seem to be all a bit self-evident, but if you decide your mage got into his job because he wanted to work with theoretical magic, that suggests a bevvy of personalities right there. Someone specializing in ice magic might be more comfortable with theories than people, or might simply be convinced of his own superiority because of his solid grounding in principles. A specialist in air magic might be a brilliant researcher that's too easily distracted to work in academia, or perhaps prone to making leaps in judgment that wind up in entirely different locations than the prior evidence.
In real life, there's a logical chain to our progression in skills. We like music, so we start learning how to play the guitar. Figuring out a character from his or her abilities is simply working in the other direction, starting with the knowledge that someone has a guitar and concluding that they must have liked music when they were younger. But sometimes it's just those little gaps that stick with you...
Fleshing out
Character generation based on abilities is nice, but there's another aspect of it that doesn't get nearly as much screen time: filling in gaps in a character's story. Usually, we make new characters based on a hodgepodge of prior backstories and personalities, with abilities that logically fit into the framework... but there are always one or two things that don't fit. Like why your scrapper has Shield Defense, or why your violent paladin has a healing setup, or how your born-and-raised Vabbian Dervish is able to pick up on the arts of a Canthan assassin so quickly.
Extrapolating backward from abilities doesn't need to stop at character creation. If you run into something that your character needs to know or do in game terms but doesn't make sense from a story term, it's time to open up the backstory file and add in a few lines explaining how they wound up here. The scrapper didn't start with a shield, but picked it up and started training with it out of fear of injury. That violent paladin has a background in torture, and with that came a great deal of medical and healing knowledge (you can't properly torture someone if they die ten minutes in). Vabbi employs travelers from all over, and one of them happened to be a trained killer who made quite an impression on a younger version of your character.
Ultimately, abilities can work in both directions. Your character didn't develop their skills in a vacuum. Understanding where they come from allows you to add a great deal of detail and nuance over time, and it's worth keeping in mind as you try to justify something that makes better sense in system terms than character terms.
That's our column for the week, and you can look forward to next week's column being all about romance once again. Well, if by "romance" you mean "something distinctly unrelated to romance." Until then, feel free to send me a message at eliot@massively.com, or just let me know why I'm wrong in the comments.
