I missed my regular daily post last night because I had this idea floating around in my head and I wasn't ready to bring it to fruition, but I think I've figured out what I want to say.

Roleplaying is a somewhat complex combination of elements; it combines narrative storytelling, gameplay, and worldbuilding in one package, and there are ways that this can go very smoothly or hit bumps in the road based on how you choose to execute your design.

One of my favorite games, which I was a very small bit player in the creation of, is Open Legend. The reason for this is really simple.

Whenever I play Open Legend, I feel like I've made a character that feels really vivid and has a particular role in the universe that I decided. Whenever I run Open Legend for other people, I see them push the limits and boundaries of what I'd normally see in characters. I see some of this in Hammercalled, the game I've been working on for a while now, but Hammercalled is aimed at lower power levels and thus takes away some of the agency that Open Legend permits.

I think that there are really just a handful of things that go into creating good character identity in roleplaying, and I'll get to some case-studies of this in Part 2, coming later today.

1. Flexibility

To let a player develop character identity, they need to have the flexibility to do what they want with the character. This means that the system has to be capable of letting the player make choices that lead to whatever they want to do.

It's worth noting that you don't need to be absolutely flexible. As a designer I tend to have a personal affinity for taking a hands-off approach to this; Hammercalled just lets you say "I am good at this!" and be good at it, which is something that you see in more structured equivalents like point-buy systems, but having a sufficient variety or sufficiently high quality of more set in stone options is a good alternative.

2. Power

This is a bit of a contentious statement, but I'm going to say it and stick by it: characters need to be powerful to develop an identity.

Again, a caveat. You can have very low-power games that have very well-established character identity, but this is because power is relative. If you're playing a stone-punk game and your sorcerer's special power is that they can shoot a firebolt that can kill a small bird or annoy an ogre, that's still a power nobody else has and it makes the character distinctive.

Likewise, the power to be interesting isn't necessarily the power to effect meaningful change, but rather any measure of power which is enough to distinguish the character from a baseline.

3. Limitation

The counterpart to power, characters just feel more vibrant when they're limited in some way.

This doesn't necessarily have to involve debilitating flaws, though it can. Having a character who's just flat-out inept at something can be interesting, but it can be a major problem and forcing it on players as part of a mechanical design is of dubious value.

Hammer and Nails (Or Extreme Optimization)

However, to go back to power, you can impose a virtual limitation by simply making it more valuable for a character to do something in the way that they are best at; Open Legend, for instance, gives characters access to a staggering array of powers, but they will typically be distinctly better at using one or two of them; using anything else will be sub-optimal in general situations, though they can always fall back to a less than ideal solution to a problem if they can't solve it with their usual means.

I consider this the "hammer-and-nails" approach, based on the old saying that when you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail. This lets players have almost absolute power in one area, a fair amount of power in others, and still spread out the fun.

This tends to be my preferred approach, because no matter what nobody has to feel like their character sucks (though it works better when you have a holistic approach to design; each character's specialty falls outside an area that everyone else is going to participate in). It does fall apart if done poorly, and combat in particular tends to be an issue because many systems focus on it to an extreme.

Spotlighting

Another alternative is to implement some form of spotlight mechanic, either in a narrative or mechanical sense.

I've seen a lot of games over the years that explicitly tell GMs that they should switch focus characters for scenes/sessions and pursue their stories over everything else. I've got mixed thoughts on this, and they basically amount to this:

In good hands, this works.

If you don't have a very competent storyteller or if you have implementation issues, you basically wind up with a game that players may as well only show up to every fourth session of.

There are mechanical solutions to this that work well, and these predominantly focus on resource limitations. Waystation Deimos, our recently released smaller-scale game, is basically built on this, and the idea is that characters have a limited pool of Stress that they eventually will burn through as they fail or have complications from their actions.

The problem with these mechanical solutions is that they rely on making characters suck every once in a while. While this works well for some settings and narrative conceits, it's not something that works well in higher-octane games.

Flaws and Restrictions

Another possible way to keep characters limited is to just give them some mechanical flaw or narrative prohibition on certain types of behavior.

One of the best ways I've ever seen this done is in a game called Degenesis, where one faction is supposedly pacifistic (they're not, but they like to be seen as such), so the main branch of their members is forbidden from using any lethal weapons. It's entirely in narrative and characters who break the rule face in-universe, rather than mechanical penalties, but it's also something that depends entirely upon the GM. Given the dark post-apocalyptic nature of the game's universe, many players get away with not doing this and it works fine.

However, a lot of the time this is problematic because it works by limiting the flow of the story. Penalties on untrained skills, for instance, mean that you can have some solutions that just won't be available except if a player has chosen to go that route. This isn't a deal-breaker, and it can be a good way to help ground a setting in realism, but it also can be a big problem if it's too heavy-handed in implementation.

It also leads to some characters accidentally sucking if the designer or player overlooks something important. The first edition of Eclipse Phase is the king of this in my opinion; not only will a novice spend more points on shiny toys during character creation (limiting their permanent growth potential due to how the system is designed), but they also are likely to forget some really commonly used skills.

This was later remedied with a life-path and package-based character creation system, but it was still possible to get through character creation with important skills missing (a half-dozen skills govern movement, perception, basic social skills, and dodging, so just because the system tries to make sure you get a few doesn't mean you'll get them all).

4. Narrative Connection

This is simply a measure of how well a character fits into the narrative that goes on in the story.

It's possible to do this pretty much any way you want to do it, but it has to be consciously done. A lot of games have characters who feel like a spreadsheet, and the more weight of mechanics a player has to bear without them being clearly tied to a narrative payoff the more likely it is that they will not see the connections that are drawing their characters into the game world.

One of my favorite games for this is Symbaroum, precisely because it manages to draw on a relatively small number of input variables and characters are largely defined through talents and fluffy definitions, many of which are tied directly into the universe.

Because of how broad this is, I'll talk about it a lot more in the individual case studies that I post later.

5. Development

Characters who have a chance to grow and develop always have a more distinct identity.

This is something that can happen in a strictly narrative sense, but providing mechanical goals to go through is an important element that you're going to want to include if the design of your game is mechanically complex to begin with. If you're burdening your players with a lot of rules, which means that you expect them to buy in, you should include development that means something.

Development not only reflects change but also an increased potential. Characters that become more specialized down the road tend to do better at forming a strong identity. This has an added benefit, from a design perspective, of permitting novices to further build on their character, either delving more thoroughly into the world of the setting or increasing the power level of their character so that they can better compete with players who have more experience with the system and can do so at the beginning of a game.