Scribblings

Character Background

Exploring, getting new equipment, practising your skills and painting the world in blood to gain experience is not what defines role-playing. Role-playing is about your character interacting in the social structure in an internally consistent, believable, game world where everyone strives to make it easy to suspend disbelief and enjoy the time spent there. If you tire of the first four items - what is left to keep your interest, to make your character fun to play?

So, what kind of problems are we faced with here. One - keeping our character interesting for our own enjoyment. And two - having our character ease the suspending of disbelief for everyone for everyone's enjoyment. Now, what is the means to do this? Role-playing would be one suggestion. Keeping to ones character another. Social and psychological development and intelligent interaction within the game world are yet others. They are all right, of course, but to be able to do all these things we need two things; a well defined game world where the socio-cultural framework makes sense and a well defined background and personality to our character.

The character background is ours to create and elaborate on, while the game world is defined by others and - where role-playing MU**'s are concerned - available to us even before we create our character in some form. We should therefore use the detailed setting while making an effort with the background of our character. We use the detailed game world described for us to make the character fit into the setting. We also make the background to explain the psyche and what motivates our character. To explain family background, loyalties, and occupation. To define our character's goals in life.

This will be an aid to us in order to react believably to the situations presented to our character. It will be worth a lot to have a history with your character that works with the setting, that our character is not blank as we players take over the decision-making. We will also find it help the GM's understand how our character learned the skills and people (s)he knows, and to provide interesting situations based on our character's past. It will ease the suspending of disbelief both for us, and everyone else.

If we plan on role-playing a sociopath the need for a good background is even greater, since the sociopath is a very complex role which, if not well described, very easily turns into a game-abusive roll-playing thing. Game-masters (administrators or whatever your preferred term is; it will from here on be abbreviated as GM) are very careful to let that kind of a disruptive force into play. And this goes not only for the sociopath, but also for most roles involving all forms of power, be it political or otherwise. A good background not only sends the message to the GMs that we know the character, but also that our character is intended to stick around a while in the game, and won't stumble off and die in two days.

Some will tell us that "it is only a waste of time", "I like to explore my character in-game", or "background-crapground". It is not a waste of time to make a character more enjoyable for others and oneself. Creating a background is essential to exploring our character in-game, developing it and reacting to the situations around us. Do I need to address the third "argument"?

So, in order to have more fun while role-playing our character, give others a better time while doing it, and make it easier for everyone to suspend disbelief - what do we do? Many things, but we start with the creation and upkeep of a good character background!

Anders