The Gaming Den

This is the survey I have all my players fill out for their characters, the entire idea behind it is to help them seed their backstory with leading questions, it helps reduce the number of mysterious loners (literally) without a past that show up to the gaming table. I stole some of the questions from places I can't even remember, and made up others. My players have given it generally good reviews so I thought I'd share it and see if anyone has good ideas to improve it.

RPG Character Questionnaire
1. Name (include nicknames, aliases, and the like)
2. Age (relative if lifespan deviates significantly from human)
3. Occupation/specialization
4. Physical description (any significant clothes/equipment/insignia?)
5. Describe this character in one sentence.
6. What is the most important thing to know about your character?
7. What distinguishes this character from others?
8. Why are you playing this PC? What about this PC interests you?

9. What kinds of arts, entertainment, and recreation does your character prefer?
10. Does your character have any hobbies?
11. What is your character’s sense of humor like?
12. How does your character see him/herself?
13. How does your character want to be seen by others?
14. How is your character actually seen by others?
15. What does your character love?
16. What does your character hate?
17. What scares your character?
18. What is your character’s secret?
19. What is your character’s philosophy in life?
20. What does your character have?
21. What does your character want?

22. Where and in what circumstances was your character born?
23. Where and how was your character raised?
24. Name one special thing about your character’s childhood.
25. How was your character trained, why?
26. Who is your character’s best friend, why?
27. Who is your character’s greatest enemy, why?
28. Name one important thing this character has already done.

29. Please choose (at least) one picture you feel is representative of this character and include it as part of this questionnaire.

While I generally consider this sort of thing unnecessary, experience tells me better. not bad.

My players would drop this. Too many questions, too much lazy.

11. What is your character’s sense of humor like?
12. How does your character see him/herself?
13. How does your character want to be seen by others?
14. How is your character actually seen by others?
28. Name one important thing this character has already done.

I'm not a big fan of these five. In theory the first four can tell you a lot about a person but unless you are a very good writer or give a really long-winded and careful answer you're stuck describing fairly ephemeral concepts in absolute terms despite the fact that those four traits are dictated by context and group dynamic to a large degree. Gene Wilder isn't an obvious pick for the caretaker and de facto leader of a group but that really depends on what the other three people are like and whether they're motivated, which makes knowing what a person is like in a hypothetical "normal" group becomes somewhat irrelevant, since whether he ends up feeling long-suffering or invigorated by his new role may depend a lot on the feedback you get. So with that in mind I'm personally OK with someone needing a session or two to find their legs and get a feel for what existing in a certain play space is like before assigning themselves too many quirks to live up to. The fifth one I'm ambivalent about simply because I'm totally comfortable with the campaign being the biggest thing that has or will happen to a character.


Play style and system matters too, of course. If we're just playing a high lethality bug hunt then keeping it short and sweet is fine.

The older I get, the more I hate the idea of take-home tests for games.

Firstly, there's the time-requirement. Older gamers have jobs, spouses, kids and Reserve commitments - which are obligations that make even the 4-8 hour game slot itself tricky and the time involved in that slot precious. Adding additional time commitments atop that makes it harder for people to play in the game and/or more likely that they will ignore said commitments.

Secondly, I've always had the issue that requiring in-depth character background before exposure to in-depth world background and interaction with the other PCs is all but guaranteed to result in major inconsistencies and/or a square peg, round hole situation team wise. To some degree this can be mitigated if everyone is together and backgrounds are roughed out as a group - but doing that eats into session time (see above) and ruins any chance for dramatic in-game revelation of details about your past.

As a subpoint to the above two, there's seriously like a 50/50 chance any given game will make it to the third session, which makes doing this sort of above-and-beyond preparation fairly likely to be an outright waste of time with the perspective of another 2 weeks.

Finally, even if everyone does show up with a detailed personality and background and all of them mesh - how much of that effort is actually going to show up in the play sessions? Sure, maybe your character has a repressed childhood trauma that colors his philosophy -- but unless it's going to be common for him to espouse that philosophy and recount circumstances surrounding that trauma in game sessions, it would have been more efficient to detail the aspects of the character that do get screen time. Do we really fucking care whether Han Solo was an orphan or just had parents who were distant? Do we care what planet he was born on? No, but we fucking care whether he shoot first, because that establishes his character. As they say in film school "show, don't tell". The same applies for RPGs and character backgrounds.


This sort of thing works much better if kept very brief, the focus is on things that show up in-character at the table, and finer details are allowed to be added as the game goes on. It also helps if any sort of characterization minigame has components small enough that a player can come up with usable ideas during their own downtime within a session.

A rule of thumb that my friend works to that I find works pretty well is "the TV show test". Imagine your campaign is a TV show. Would the trait / power / background be something the audience would pick up on, or would they never know unless it was explained to them? If its the latter, what's the point of having it?

Usually we try to give characters one or two interesting character traits and background details to start with, and then elaborate from there as the campaign progresses. This way the characters have some room to change, and as not all the details are hammered out it makes it easier to slip in the evil cousins, old flames and worried parents that tend to crop up

Whipstitch wrote:In theory [11-14] can tell you a lot about a person but unless you are a very good writer or give a really long-winded and careful answer you're stuck describing fairly ephemeral concepts in absolute terms despite the fact that those four traits are dictated by context and group dynamic to a large degree.

It's true that these three questions are, collectively, skipped more than everything else combined. The feedback I get from my players, though, is that whichever of these they do answer gives them immense help in figuring out their character.

Whipstitch wrote:So with that in mind I'm personally OK with someone needing a session or two to find their legs and get a feel for what existing in a certain play space is like before assigning themselves too many quirks to live up to.

I don't require a finalized document before play starts. I gently suggest that they fill them out beforehand, and usually start insisting I get them by the 5th session, when they should have a significant idea of who their character is.

Whipstitch wrote:[#28] I'm ambivalent about simply because I'm totally comfortable with the campaign being the biggest thing that has or will happen to a character.

I put that question in as a lark, and it's turned out to be a surprisingly powerful way to call out each character as an individual. And whatever they put is almost never more important than the thing they do on even the first adventure It could just be my players, but they've never put "Defeated the Tomb of Horrors in an afternoon using only a toothpick and a piece of string". They usually put things akin to Luke Skywalker running Beggar's Canyon in his T-16, or Boromir having a vision that he should ride to Rivendell. Usually the first adventure they do ends up being more important than whatever they put as the answer to that question yet it gives their backstory a surprising amount of heft, especially for the "mysterious loner with a mysterious past" type characters.

Josh_Kablack wrote:The older I get, the more I hate the idea of take-home tests for games.

Pretty much. In a current game our MC has been wanting everyone to email him backstories so he can set stuff up for next session. After a month only 1 person had sent one in. Eventually I stepped up and did mine and my wife did hers maybe a week later. So out of 7 players, 3 done in 2 months.

It's just hard to get motivated to do that kinda stuff anymore.

Still, perhaps having the list as a suggestion of questions for forming your notion of who your character is could be handy.

part of the reason I made toys series of questions is to reduce the time commitment of making backstory. 8 of the questions are standard name/age/appearance that I don't think count, and I purposely kept the rest at 20 to keep the workload low.

You know, as much as I like to buck the convention when I've got to fill out paperwork to express my character's oeuvre, the schematic for a character application does help me overcome to tendency to procrastinate when I would otherwise have only a blank sheet of paper and a compulsion to use prose if it's going to be seen by anyone else.

I think I'm happiest with applications and character creation when I can have a private, two-way conversation with the DM about my guy is going to fit into his game, and then have the opportunity to pen a little vignette or some in-universe letters for the other players to see which are in a more literary style but don't give everything away. The other players need a mental hook on which to hang my guy, but none of them really need to know that he has an estranged half-brother who left the family to join the Church of the Silver Flame until that guy actually shows up and, whoops, turns out he's got Lycanthropy or whatever. It is, in fact, a better experience for everyone involved if only the DM and I saw that one coming.

1. kcossut
2. Middle aged.
3. Fightan-man.
4. Strong!
5. CN.
6. #1
7. #3
8. Is this a trick question?

9. Ale & Whores.
10. #9
11. #10
12. #5
13. #4
14. #3
15. #9
16. #16
17. Fear itself.
18. Not telling.
19. #5
20. Starting equipment.
21. More.

22. Vaginally.
23. Coddled.
24. Survived it.
25. You're using training rules?
26. The Cleric.
27. The BBEG.
28. Been created.

29.

Well done, that's some of the most detailed background I've ever been bothered with. Can we play now? I bought chips.

Normally, I write a page to a page and a half of background, for my characters. But in this new gaming group I'm in the character backgrounds are 1 sentence or less.

My background:
A Fey Noble from the Wild Lands sent out to become a Hero and come back when he's made something of himself.

The half elf bard/elven monk combo their background is:
I'm the bastard he's the legitimate one (said by the monk player)
The Halfling Wizard:
I like to gamble.

I don't tend to write down my character's backgrounds unless I'm playing online and a GM requests it. I usually just have a general idea of what he's like and it gets fleshed out from there as people do/don't try to discover my character's motivations.

So, given that my players are increasingly making me feel like they don't give a shit about game worlds or fluff and just want to pound monsters and get loot, I'm stealing this to try to prod them into having some damned dimension to what are otherwise just a series of powers that carries shit. Because if that's literally all my players want to do, then we can just fucking play munchkin and I can stop wasting my time writing campaigns.

Prak_Anima wrote:So, given that my players are increasingly making me feel like they don't give a shit about game worlds or fluff and just want to pound monsters and get loot, I'm stealing this to try to prod them into having some damned dimension to what are otherwise just a series of powers that carries shit. Because if that's literally all my players want to do, then we can just fucking play munchkin and I can stop wasting my time writing campaigns.

Chances are they won't stop. I've wanted to play in or run intrigue/mystery/drama filled games but my regular players just aren't attuned to playing those. Anytime I try and inject it into the game I'm often times met with blank stares or they sit around waiting for direction.

Prak_Anima wrote:So, given that my players are increasingly making me feel like they don't give a shit about game worlds or fluff and just want to pound monsters and get loot, I'm stealing this to try to prod them into having some damned dimension to what are otherwise just a series of powers that carries shit. Because if that's literally all my players want to do, then we can just fucking play munchkin and I can stop wasting my time writing campaigns.

Instead of trying to passive-aggressive them into SRS ROLEPLAYING, why don't you sit down and have a talk with them about what you want out of the game vs what they want out of the game?

Yeah, that's sort of the way things turned out. We'll talk at the session tomorrow.