The simple pleasure of rolling a character

[The Oz]

I always tried to use the year-by-year character histories created by the advanced chargen systems to tie my PCs together, explaining just why these people were working together in the first place.

While you rarely could put them all in the same place at the same time, it was pretty easy to tie them together in pairs, and then tie those pairs together one way or the other.

 

[Whipsnade]

II challenge those present in here, to create a character, and keep track of his experiences.

Hal,

I do that quite regularly, especially after CT introduced advanced chargen with it's yearly terms. Coming up with a back story for a campaign's recurring NPCs is vitally important for the GM. Unlike the players who have one or two characters to wrangle, GMs are juggling too many roles to keep them straight.

This is where tools like life event and connections tables or TNE's personality cards can greatly help the GM. They've so many characters to breathe life into that any way to suggest personalities and life stories helps.

I still believe that players should come up with back story details on their own. PCs should be far more nuanced and detailed than NPCs and, if the players create that themselves, they can play the PC more naturally. Life event tables and the like smack too much of D&D's treasure tables IMHO, they can help GMs but players should never see their contents.


Regards,
Bill