Exalted Rework Part 5: Charms

Charms are really where the fun part of Exalted happens.  They're the powers you get that let you do all the over the top, insane things that you get to do.  They're a big part of what makes Exalted Exalted, and so any redesign must do its best to preserve as much of the flavor of them as possible while trying to remove the problematic elements of them.

What are the problematic elements?  Well, number one, the sheer volume of them.  Nearly every sourcebook had new charms in it, and the Manuals of Exalted Power had literally hundreds.  If a new player wanted to make an effective character, they had to read through all of them, understand what they all did and remember which ones they wanted when they came out the other side of that.  The other major problem was imbalance.  I don't propose that I can eliminate mechanical imbalance, in fact, due to the comparative lack of system, charms will likely be equally unbalanced in terms of how much power they give in step 2 of Conflicts.

There are, broadly, two types of charms in Exalted.  The type of charm that makes you better at things you can do naturally and the type of charm that gives you entirely new miraculous abilities.  While the former type were usually more effective, the latter type were the fun ones.  Due to the relative lack of system that we have, there is comparatively less we can do with the former type, and due to the strong narrative focus of the game, I feel that focusing on the second type is a better idea.

Let me quickly sidestep into Stunts because they will be necessary to discuss a major element of new charm design.  In core Exalted, Stunts were a great idea with very poor execution.  First of all, they provided dice bonuses for descriptions, which unfortunately made them into an extremely subjective popularity-contest kind of mechanic.  Second, they required description before success or failure was established, meaning you often described yourself being inhumanly awesome before just doing nothing.  Our new Conflict system eliminates both of these problems by, rather than having them provide mechanical benefit, instead being the point of the game, and being described after we know who wins.

Stunts in our new game are simply the expression of what our characters are doing, both in and out of Conflicts.  Unlike before, players are directly limited from performing certain stunts if they lack the charms or power to perform them.  Stunts are now divided into three broad categories:  Skillful Stunts, Improbable Stunts and Impossible Stunts.  All characters can perform Skillful stunts, defined as acts of awesome that a sufficiently skilled human could reasonably expect to regularly perform.  Improbable Stunts are more limited, and are the kind of things that even a skilled human could not expect to happen with regularity. Impossible Stunts require magic and blatantly break physics, biology or logic.

In general, our Charms and Powers provide either a mechanical benefit, specific Impossible Stunts (such as wall-running or the ability to maintain one's balance on anything wider than a human hair) or general access to Improbable (or Impossible) stunts within a category, such as offensive speed and accuracy.

I should add, since I don't think I'll get to Exaltation Powers this post, Solar Exalted with ignited Anima Banners can perform Improbable Stunts as an natural part of their inherent perfection.

Here's a short list of charms I've reworked so far (All Solar Charms, I'm going to try to make Solars playable first before I work on Dragon-Blooded or Lunars):

General Charms:  (You may take these charms multiple times, each time you do, pick a different category the Excellency can be used with.  Example Categories:  Combat, Physical Prowess, Social Perception, Social Influence, Applied Knowledge, Sorcerous Power)
First Solar Excellency - Essence Overwhelming:  (Essence 1) Active:  Pick a general category of endeavor.  When you engage in Conflicts of that category, you may spend 1 Essence to add +2 to your Skill.

Second Solar Excellency - Essence Triumphant:  (Essence 1) Active:  Pick a general category of endeavor.  When you engage in Conflicts of that category, you may spend 1 Essence to guarantee that your goal occurs, even should you lose the Conflict.  You may not do this if your Goal is Overpowering (ie. killing or overwhelming Motivation).

These are first drafts of the Excellencies, general charms that provide highly mechanical benefits.  I'm not completely sold on the design of the Second Excellency, both balance wise and general utility wise.

Combat Charms:
Sandstorm-Wind Attack: (Essence 2)  Passive:  While your Anima Banner is ignited, you never run out of ammunition and your weapons never break.  You can create bolts or arcs of energy (with any sort of cosmetic effect you desire) with your weapons rather than striking normally, and you may throw melee weapons and have them return to your hand.
Flashing Vengeance Draw: (Essence 2)  Passive:  Your attack speed and precision is not restricted by reason, you may perform Improbable stunts of this type even when your Anima Banner is not ignited, and you may perform Impossible stunts when it is.  You can strike opponents on opposite sides of you simultaneously with a single weapon, or carve your initials in an your opponent’s flesh before he has time to bleed, or strike your opponent five times while he’s mid-blink, returning your sword to its sheath before he opens his eyes.
Iron Whirlwind Attack: (Essence 3, Flashing Vengeance Draw)  Active:  You may spend 1 Essence to defeat all Extras with any reasonable chance of engaging you in combat, in addition to forcing a Moderate Injury Complication on all Exalted or Heroic enemies in the area.

These show the general intent of modern charms.  Note how only one of them has any mechanical power, the others simply allow a character to further define their combat style.  Aside from the Excellencies, mechanically beneficial charms will usually require these power-description charms as prerequisites.

Physical Charms:

Graceful Crane Stance: (Essence 2) Passive: You are supernaturally graceful and can leap great distances.  Your gymnastic agility is no longer limited by reason.  You may now perform Improbable acts of agility while your Anima Banner is down and Impossible Acts while it is ignited.  You can walk tightropes on your hands, gracefully flip out of a wagon rattling down a mountainside land on your feet or roll smoothly back to your feet after being thrown by an ogre.  Additionally, your jumps carry you great distances, approximately five times your normal jumping distance.

Lightning Speed: (Essence 2) Passive:  Your mobility and agility surpasses the speed of mortal eyes.  You can move Improbably fast with your Anima Banner down and Impossibly fast with it up.  You can move so quickly as to appear to teleport, and you may travel at great speeds over modest distances.

Feather-Foot Style: (Essence 2) Passive:  Your effective weight and traction are no longer limited by reason.  You may perform Improbable Stunts of this type with your Anima Banner down and Impossible stunts with it up.  You can walk or run surely on snowflakes, falling raindrops, water, lava or a floor of writhing maggots as well as run on vertical surfaces or upside-down (though you cannot stand still on them, movement is key).  You are also capable of gaining traction on thin air, though only long enough to jump.

Racing Hare Method: (Essence 3, Graceful Crane Stance or Feather-Foot Style or Lightning Speed) Passive:  You can travel long distances quickly under your own power (how the travel occurs is up to the player, but it is not impeded by any obstacle short of the Great River).  Doing so is tiring, requiring a night’s rest after the travel is complete unless you spend 1 Essence.

The Athletics charm tree is near and dear to my heart, and I considered the original versions of Monkey Leap Technique and Graceful Crane Stance to be essentially must-pick charms.  I have tried to split these into very clearly different categories of physical agility and speed.

Thanks for reading once again, tomorrow we'll talk about Exaltation Powers and maybe try to write out an example Conflict.

Exalted Rework Part 4: Essence

I keep doing these kind of late at night, I should start doing them first thing in the morning so I'm not so tired when I do them.

Today we're talking about the much more coherent Essence System, as well as Anima Banners.  For readers who are unaware, in original Exalted, the equation for figuring out a character's Essence Pools were very mathy, ex: (Essence x 3 + Willpower) + (Essence x 7 + Willpower + Sum of all Virtues).  Essence was also split into "Personal Essence" and "Peripheral Essence".  Personal Essence was 'invisible', allowing Exalted to use their powers without fear of detection, where Peripheral Essence raised a character's Anima Banner, a glorious and terrifying expression of their supernatural might.

After playing Exalted several times, I've come to believe that the existence of Personal Essence and Peripheral Essence creates a very inappropriate expectation in players: namely, "So long as I restrict myself to only Personal Essence, I am safe from people knowing I am an Exalt."  The problems with this are threefold.  One, Exalted is not a game of self-restriction, it is one of doing what must be done.  Two, by allowing one to act magically without showing one's Anima Banner, it made showing one's banner a primarily negative thing, and therefore something that GMs would use to keep their players under control.  Finally, by creating an expectation that raising one's anima banner was a negative act, they downplayed the strong element of their own mechanic.

Our changes to Essence are, therefore, aimed at eliminating the twin problem of heavy math and inappropriate expectations of the in-character visibility of characters.  The former problem is simple, we decrease the size of a bite of essence from one 'mote', a very small amount, to a 'point', which for our purposes is approximately equal to 12-15 motes and probably Willpower as well.  Characters will have a number of points equal to their Essence Rating, with more traditional methods of essence regeneration providing the ability to regain Points of Essence when they run empty.

Anima Banners require a slightly more thorough reworking of the system.  The original game had a sliding scale of how brightly glowing the anima was, we will dispense with this necessary sliding scale.  Instead, Anima Banners have two states: 'down', in which they are invisible, and 'ignited', in which case the character is unmistakably an Exalt.  The exact level of the banner's flare can be left up to whatever is attractive to the story, the point is that nobody will mistake the character for an Exalted.  Spending Points of Essence will always ignite one's banner, but all Exalts can also ignite their banners as a reflexive action.  Like in canon, Ignited banners cannot be 'switched off', but they will usually go away at the end of a scene.

Now that we know the general states that Banners occur in, let's talk a little bit about why one would want to risk igniting theirs.  Since there is no longer such thing as 'tiny' essence expenditures, like one or two motes, any such expenditure is essentially now free.  This dramatically opens up Exalts' freedom to use their supernatural abilities.  In order to provide a sense of character growth, there must limiting factors.  I choose subtlety, in the form of lowered anima banners, to be one of these.

In short, characters with their Anima Banners ignited will often gain both stunting and mechanical benefits.  The Anima Banner, for our purposes, is your game face, taking off the training weights of appearing mortal, explaining that you weren't left handed.  An Exalted who wants to disguise their power can still do so and be effective, but in order to act at their maximum potential, they must reveal themselves in all their terrible glory, inviting the world to see them for what they are.

Intelligent GMs will adapt to this change by taking the more common route from late second edition Exalted that the Wyld Hunt is mostly powerless, and that most people outside the Realm and the near Threshold care more about the sincerity of the help being offered than who is offering the help.  Insisting on 100% perfect secrecy at all times means you're not really playing Exalted, anyway.

Next time we'll FINALLY get to talking about a few basic Charms, like the Excellencies, as well as the Core Powers of the Solar Exalted.

As always, feel free to leave questions or comments.  Thanks for reading!

Exalted Rework Part 3: Assets

So in canon Exalted there are a large number of character elements all of which serve to be non-dice based bonuses to combat power.  In general, these had the severe problem of imbalance, and nowhere was this more visible than in Backgrounds.  Two points of Contacts gave you two people who you could seek information from, assuming you treated them well and did favors for them occasionally and a 2-die bonus to find others like them.  Two points of Artifact gave you a magic sword that dramatically increased your combat potential.  These two were from a character point value perspective identical.

Artifact weapons are by far the most unbalancing part of original Exalted, but hardly the only one.  There was also the persistent problem that some Backgrounds were only worth taking if taken at 4 or 5 points, most notably Resources and Influence, though Followers was another problematic Background.

Part of the intent of a simplified system is to remove the complicated power-calculus of Bonus Points and reduce character customization to a more straightforward matter of what they can do and cannot do.  For this purpose, we now have a set of 'Asset Slots' that characters receive in the place of bonus points.

In 'old Exalted' terms, an Asset is worth about 7 Bonus Points.  Charms in this system cover the space of two or three original Charms, though I will be working toward rebalancing them, as some charms were straight up more useful or more effective than others.  Similarly, an Artifact Weapon will be a single Asset Slot with a near-permanent substantial bonus to combat.  For Background-based Assets, we will say that a barony or duchy which makes the character quite rich, provides access to a handful of Heroic Mortal lieutenants and functionaries and the temporal influence such power implies is worth about a single Asset.  Likewise significant position in a major city or organization would also qualify.

I haven't worked out the exactness of starting character balance, how many Assets a starting character should have access to.  My estimate is, in addition to the powers inherent to their Exaltation, Five Charms and two Bonus Assets, but I'll work on that later.

Since it's late I guess I'll get to Essence next time.  Thanks again for reading!

Exalted Rework Part 2: Core

Today (Tonight, I guess) I'm going to talk about the core conflict resolution I've developed, as well as justify a few decisions and talk a little bit about the parts that make up a character in our new system.

First I'm going to talk a lot about my biggest and probably most controversial decision.  Exalted has always been a game about powerful characters.  A starting Solar Exalt could expect to walk into a village and take over it by the end of the day.  Where in some RPGs a starting character might be afraid to wander out into the wilderness for fear an average wolf would just kill them, in Exalted a beginning character was very capable of taking over an entire city, solo.  Given this level of power, Exalted is very much a game about what characters choose to do rather than whether or not they can do it.  Even with the intense complexity of the original system, success was almost always a foregone conclusion unless the task was absurdly difficult or you were being opposed by an Exalted.

The cleverer among you will see where I'm going with this and will likely feel like they're about to hit a brick wall and try to bail out of the ride, but I'm seeing this through.  Exalted is not a game about luck, it's a game about choices, about will and virtue.  In short, it's a game that doesn't need dice.

That's a big decision with a lot of baggage, most notably that the game will need other mechanics to provide a sense of suspense and risk, but dice rolls almost universally allow random failure, and that especially feels awkward in Exalted, so ultimately I find dice as a mechanic ineffective for generating risk and suspense in a game like Exalted.

So what is our core mechanic?  How do we make conflicts meaningful and suspenseful?  Well, I could talk a lot about how I came up with it, but let's start by outlining it.  It's a four step system.

Step 1: Define the Conflict.  Who are the participants?  Maybe a Solar facing off with her Lunar Mate, or two Deathknights dueling for the favor of their master or a Dragon-Blooded monk engaged in mortal combat with an Anathema.  For now let's assume that conflicts occur between two individuals.  What are their Goals, that is, what do they get if they win?  And finally, how and where will the conflict be expressed?  Perhaps the Lunar and Solar are engaged in a fierce debate in their manse, the Deathknights are fighting using their supernatural martial arts in a ring of bones beneath the grey sky of the Underworld, and the Dragon-Blood and the Anathema are battling to the death atop a shattered glass tower above Chiaroscuro.

Step 2:  Compare relevant Skills:  We'll get into Skills later, but basically they represent Dice Pools from the original game.  Whoever has the higher is winning, but it's important that both sides know what number the other is dealing with for the third step.

Step 3:  Charms and Complications:  Starting with whoever's losing, characters trade off activating Charms or accepting Complications.  Charms and Complications provide bonuses to a character's skill.  Without getting into the numbers too much, if you're willing to accept setbacks, make sacrifices and penalize yourself, you do better than someone who isn't willing to.  Since you don't know what your opponent is willing to sacrifice to achieve their Goal (but you do know their goal and their base skill), there is a human unpredictability to the conflict system from this element.  When both sides are no longer willing to accept greater complications, whoever has the higher total wins the conflict and will achieve their goal, the other character will not.  If there is a tie, neither character will achieve their goal, the conflict will be a standstill, though other characters may intervene.  I haven't worked out that system yet.

Step 4:  Tell the Story:  We now know who wins and who loses, and what complications there are for both sides on the way.  Now for the fun part: telling the whole story, as a group.  This is Exalted, this is really the fun part.  Take as little or as long as you like, but this is the part where you get to do all your stunts and have all your fun.

It's a fairly basic system, but as I develop greater detail for what Charms and Complications add to Step 3, I think it has the potential to be a decent narrative game system.

Now, briefly, let's talk about the bits of the character sheet that we're keeping from the original version.

Name/Title:  Every Exalt deserves a badass title.
Concept:  Being able to sum yourself up in a few words is very handy.
Motivation:  I actually really like Motivation as a defining, semi-mechanical principle, especially in games that are so much about why someone does something, like Exalted.
Type/Caste:  Since we're keeping the canon Exalted, it's gotta be there
Anima Banner:  It's one of the most recognizable elements of the original game.  I'll be messing with it a little bit, but we'll talk about that when we get to Essence and Charms.
Permanent Essence:  Essence 'rating' is good.  Essence pools were annoying.
Intimacies ?:  Still undecided on if to thoroughly borrow the mechanic.  Definitely has some narrative value but might be too complex and list-y.  May just replace with 'things the character cares about'.
Skills:  Notably for our purposes, Skills represent dice pools used for things, and are character named to give both player and GM a greater sense of why the character has the skill and what they use it for.  A Dawn Caste might have "Iaido Badassery" as their combat skill, where a Night Caste might call theirs "Hail of Knives".  Their effects are basically the same, but each conveys something about the character and how they use their skill.  Skills will go from 0-3 for Heroic Mortals and God-Bloods, to 4 for Terrestrial Exalted and to 5 for Celestial Exalted, while otherwise being limited by Essence.
Assets:  These are the meat of the new system, including what were once Backgrounds, Advantages, Charms and Sorcery.  Many other, more general mechanics are treated like Assets, such as Anima powers and (in a uniquely negative way) Limit Breaks.
Resonant Virtue:  "Primary" virtue doesn't sound as good, so I used "Resonant."  The Four Virtues are actually very core to Exalted's setting (especially the Fair Folk, but several other elements as well) so I would feel odd removing them entirely.  However, they are being intentionally redesigned as primarily a method for encouraging heroic behavior and (in the case of Resonant Virtue) punishing one flavor of negative behavior.  May decide to allow characters to have multiple resonant virtues, for double the benefit and double the penalty, in which case you will have a Primary virtue that defines Limit Breaks but is also Resonant.

Next time I'll try to talk about Assets as a new mechanic, as well as Charms and Essence expenditure.

Exalted Rework Part 1: Intent

So I'm dusting off this blag which I haven't written in in a couple of years to talk self-indulgently about a current side project of mine.  A couple of days ago I saw a sign in the window of a music school that said "You don't have to practice every day, only the days when you eat."  As someone whose work ethic falls somewhere between lazy and nonexistent, I found this quietly inspiring and have been trying to push myself to practice the skills I want to improve daily.  One of those skills is game design, and so I've begun this little side project.

I love Exalted.  Many gamers do.  I have a long history with it, I picked up the first edition core book in the latter part of my senior year in high school when the only books you could buy for the game were the core book, the storyteller's guide and the Book of Three Circles.  I immediately understood that there was something categorically different about it compared to most of the RPGs I was used to at the time (Revised edition old World of Darkness, 3rd Edition D&D, 3rd Edition Shadowrun, even 7th Sea), but it would be several years before I could fully articulate it: scope.

Exalted characters are so powerful within the setting that they have a sort of gravitational effect on the world around them.  Their personalities force the world to change to fit them, and they are of such significance that they reshape Creation simply by taking action.  The only other genre of game with characters of this scope is the Superhero RPG genre, and, unlike characters in Exalted, Superheroes tend to be forces of stasis, saviors and protectors of a world that is more or less fine the way it is, preventing negative changes, very much the opposite of the Age of Sorrows.

I think that this categorical difference of scope is a primary reason people get so attached to their Exalted characters, because the choices the player made when making their character and designing their personality matter so much to the world that character exists in.  It's a magical thing, to get people so excited about these little creations of theirs, to make us remember exactly what they were like despite years of not playing them, no matter how much we may not have liked the way the game was run, or of the drama that broke the game up, we loved our characters because of what they could do.

But I've long known that Exalted's system is a very flawed thing.  This is not the first, or even the second time I've set forth to try to gut and replace the Storyteller System with something more organic, more fitting to the world that was created, but I feel like this time I have a better starting point.  Recently I had the epiphany that the real problem with Exalted is the dissonance between the game's intent and its mechanics.  The game's intent is to be a massive-scope high-power savage fantasy, the mechanics it uses are extremely minutiae-driven.  Put another way, Exalted wants to be about the choices characters make, but its system forces them to worry about the exactness of what the characters can do.

The system is also overburdened with complicated, mathy decisions.  For any given dice action being taken, you must know your base dice pools, consider the possibility of spending willpower or channeling a virtue, understand any internal penalties you are under or external penalties that may apply, in addition to probably multiple relevant charms you could modify the dice pool with, limited by the maximum bonus dice from charms, and this is not even taking into account theoretical bonuses from artifacts, or, in the case of attacks, Speed, Rate, Damage (which might be Bashing, Lethal or Aggravated), the target's Soak, Multiple Action penalties, Onslaught penalties, your Yards per Tick movement and the ever-present math of essence mote costs. And then you were supposed to gain a dice bonus for the stunt, assuming your GM could even remember how you described what you were doing after doing all those calculations, and then whoever you were doing it to probably had to do the exact same thing.

The system was something that you worked through or around to get to the fun part of the game: describing the why and the how of what your character was doing, and chances are your GM understood that and let you succeed, except when you were facing things he had planned for you to fail against.  In those cases, the sheer randomness and weight of dice that were being rolled often had to simply be ignored for the sake of the story.  And a system that must regularly be ignored because it weakens the game, a system that many players will not understand the majority of and will turn to the handful of obsessives who bothered to plumb its secrets to tell them what they can do, a system that stands in the way of the fun rather than being the tray that the fun is carried around on is a bad system.

So, my project. A radical reworking of Exalted's system, trying to minimize change to the "fluff".  While there are certainly things about the setting I would change if I could, I am forgoing those changes to focus on the mechanical work of creating a system that gives players the ability to play the same characters they do with the original game, but allows them to focus their time on describing what their character is doing, why it is awesome and what it means to them.  My design goals are as follows:

1)  Create mechanics that are simple and play fast, leaving as much time to focus on story as possible.
2)  Create mechanics that encourage and support interesting narratives and meaningful character decisions.
3)  Preserve the setting and style of canon Exalted.

I'll try to post more about this project every day or so, though most of what I write about will be several days past when I did it, to give me time to point out problems I come across with decisions I've made.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to ask questions or leave comments!

On Character Creation

It came up in a discussion 'What skills make a good player?' and, recognizing blog-fodder when I see it, I started thinking and writing.  I found my list of applicable skills growing out of control, so I stepped back to simply character creation, perhaps the quintessential act of tabletop gaming.  After some thought, I have set making a character down into six parts: Concepting, Setting Integration, Group Integration, Characterization, Backgrounding and Optimization.

These aren't really 'steps' as much as they are bases that you should hit at some point, parts of the greater whole that is making a fake person for you to romp around with, whatever that may mean to you.  Some people like coming up with their optimization first, then their characterization.  Pay close attention to the second and third, though, because these are things that people very often forget to do, but a character without either of them will feel as awkward and inappropriate as a character who is poorly optimized, or a character who is poorly characterized, or a character with no background at all.  So, without further ado:

-Concepting:  The first step of creating a character is to come up with an appropriate idea.  Usually, a concept is a handful of words, your quick pitch to your GM about what you want to play.  Sometimes it will involve mechanics, sometimes it will involve personality, sometimes it won't have anything to do with anything at all.  A few examples from my own past:  "Kung Fu Jesus," "Amnesiac Penitent Assassin," "Murder Artist," "Bubbly Telepath," "AAA-Grade Badass Murder Machine."  This is also the step that you should get used to doing, because of that second to last word: it's very easy to come up with ideas, but the ideas have to be appropriate to the game.  Run your idea past your GM.  If they hesitate at all, it's best to let that one lie rather than going 'No, no, I can make this work,' even if you can.

-Setting Integration:  Making the idea work within the game that you're playing.  This begins immediately after Concepting but will continue through character creation.  Obviously, this requires at least passing familiarity with the setting you're playing in, which can be an awful lot of work if you're playing Exalted or Legend of the Five Rings or any of a number of games with settings that are extremely divergent from settings that you're naturally familiar with.  However, it's still your responsibility to have some idea of the world you're playing in, so in these cases, if you're the kind of person who falls asleep on the fourth page of the setting chapter, your best bet is to talk to your GM extensively about the world and your character's place in it.  While this dialogue should open shortly after the concept is created, it shouldn't stop until well after the game is underway, especially if you're not particularly familiar with the setting.  Ask about things you should know, and try to find time to ask such questions while you're not at the gaming table.  Setting Integration should interact with every other step of character creation, and should inform a lot of decisions: Characterization should be appropriate to the world, Backgrounding will require knowing a bit about the world, and your game mechanics will need to fit with the setting as well.

-Group Integration:  This step is often overlooked, forgotten or not even considered.  Role-playing is a group activity, and you should make an effort to make your character fit with the other characters that are being created.  Ideally this should begin about the same time that you're doing your Setting Integration, but depending on how on the ball you are compared to the other PCs, you may not have the opportunity.  Group Integration, like Setting Integration occurs in conjunction with every other step of character creation: make sure your concept and characterization aren't too much like any other characters', take the opportunity to interweave your background with the other characters, know a few people they know, maybe you met once and so have preconceived notions about each other.  Make sure that, mechanically, you're not stepping on each other's toes.  This will make that first session a bit less awkward and will give all the characters a slightly greater investiture in each other and the game itself.

-Characterization:  When people talk about writing characters, this is usually what they're talking about, in addition to Backgrounding and Optimization.  This is the nuts and bolts of what you'll be playing: personality, likes and dislikes, relationships, hopes, dreams, and so on.  Nearly every game book will have a section on characterization, so I won't waste all their efforts and repeat them here.  If you're new to gaming (or are assisting someone who is), don't discourage them from taking the easy route out: just make yourself or one of your favorite characters from fiction or history with a couple new additions.  It's easy for those of us who've been gaming or writing or acting for years and years to be derisive of this style of character creation, but it's really as valid a method of characterization as any other.

-Backgrounding:  Backgrounding is a related but separate art from Characterization, and while I put it after Characterization, some players like to begin with the background and work out where the character sits in the 'present' from there.  Backgrounding involves sussing out everything that happened to the character before the game begins.  Most GMs will ask for a single piece of Backgrounding that you need to do, usually a written piece of fiction about the character, introducing them.  Some people get super creative with these, writing them as journal entries, in the form of a story told by them or about them or a dozen other ways.  However, unless it's an exhaustive description of absolutely everything your character's ever done, (which it shouldn't be because nobody wants to read that), that is not all that Backgrounding is.  Writing little anecdotes of things your character's done can give you something to talk about in-character during dull moments while your GM is looking up rules or hitting the restroom, and can add a lot of little personal quirks that add a lot to a character.

-Optimization:  At last we get to the part of the character where you put the numbers to the personality and the history.  I list this last not because it should necessarily be done last, but because it is the least interactive and thus requires the least input, aside from the aforementioned Group Integration and avoiding stepping on the other players' toes (IE: pick one of you to be the pickpocket, let the other one be the fast-talker, don't both try to do both).  Now, I do think that being able to optimize your character is an important skill.  Some people might call this min/maxing or power-gaming.  I acknowledge that such things exist, but creating a character who is effective in the role that I have written for them is not doing so, unless I create a character who is dramatically better at their role than anyone else is at theirs, in which case I have not simply optimized, I have hyper-optimized, and that is a problem that needs to be addressed.  When creating a character, resist the urge to get out the ruler and prove that your stat-penis is bigger than everyone else in some way.  It's really hard, I know, and anyone whose gamed with me also knows that I could stand to take this advice as much as anyone, but that direction leads to hyper-optimization and mechanics breaking down.  Someday I'll write a post about the issue of combat hyper-optimization vs mental or social hyper-optimization and how they're not at all balanced, but not today.

Let me also mention that Character Creation does not end when the game begins.  Characters grow and learn and at the very least they get more powers, so at least one of these sections will continue after the game begins, and that means at least three will, because Setting Integration and Group Integration are part and parcel of all three of the final steps.  Keeping in mind whether or not your planned upgrades are appropriate for the game the DM is running and the group that you are a part of is an easily overlooked part of making yourself not only a welcome addition to your local games, but also an effective member of your party, even if your character is someone who doesn't get along with the others.

Rules and What They're For

I've become quite a cynic in my time designing RPG systems.  For the most part I'm picky enough in my players that I don't get people whose express purpose in coming before my DM screen is to break games.  That I nevertheless feel like if I don't create airtight rules they'll be abused may be due to my own paranoia at all the people I don't deal with, or maybe it's due to the way in which the players who do come to my table (and myself, as well) discuss the ways we could be breaking systems but don't that, when I finally started making my own games, I was extraordinarily careful to observe corner cases and the way in which things are abused.

I see a lot of games with cool ideas but deeply flawed rule sets, the kind of games that are very easily taken advantage of and 'broken,' creating unbalanced characters or situations.  Often character options are not balanced against each other very well, if they can be said to be balanced against each other at all.

The stance these game seems to take is "Rules exist to create a consistent and fun experience for all participants." And I can get behind what they're trying to say, but I can't help but think that it's very short-sighted.  My personal thesis for the purpose of Rules (in any context) is the following:

"Rules exist to encourage behavior."

And the part that's really easy to overlook is that they will encourage behavior whether you want them to or not.

I'm going to use a video game analogy because it'll prevent me from pointing fingers.  In World of Warcraft, how do the designers know what the best damage-dealing build is?  It's not by looking at the numbers they created: it's by looking at what their players use to kill their toughest bosses the fastest.  What is popular is what functions best at accomplishing the goal, what is poor at it is underused.  The designers are unintentionally encouraging players to use the powerful builds, but they are encouraging it.  Tabletop games are not MMOs, but so long as players want to be effective at accomplishing their goals, they will follow the same model: they use the rules to be as good at it as they possibly can.

This is also visible in disadvantages, especially in point-buy systems.  Such games encourage players to downplay the weakness and attempt to avoid any statistical failing if not just outright ignoring the weakness' very existence, after all, the player was rewarded for putting it on his sheet (that's what he got the points for), not for keeping it there or making it a part of the character.

This is the single best way to integrate your system and your setting: create a system in which the most effective way for your players to achieve their goals is one that fits with the world you've created.  This applies in GMing too: if your players learn that when they leave their defeated enemies alive that their enemies will consistently stab them in the back or escape, you're encouraging your players to kill the enemies they defeat, and that will affect the flavor of the game you're running.

This thesis is a cornerstone of my gaming theory, and I'll call back to it often: "What behavior does this encourage?  Is that the behavior you want to encourage?"