How do you make your character?

So, I find that I am having a big problem.

Usually I have an overabundance of character concepts in my head. I keep them in a box and only open it wide enough to let one come out at a time so that the new one doesn't try to overwhelm the current one. This process has worked for me for a very long time.

When Gabe was eliminated, I went to the box, as per usual, only to find that when I opened the lid a crack nothing came out. So I opened the lid wider and wider only to find that the ideas were all swarming the bottom of the box. I've since pulled one of the concepts out and tried it on. After wearing it for a week or two the gentleman finally gave me his name, reckoned in my head, and gave me a vague enough idea of what he was about to make a character sheet. Now he refuses to tell me what he was doing between Reckoning and the present when he'll be coming to Regina. I'm frustrated.

How do you folks find your characters?

personally, i base the concept of a character/person/thing that i like. but nothing really comes alive until i write his story. that's where i get the personality, attitude and manurisms. i am guessing you have tried this already but thats what i do. to be honest though, the character isn't really a character until one or two games after.

Erm.

I look around for cool new mechanics I haven't tried yet, and a personality coalesces around them, like flesh around a skeleton?

I imagine I won't be terribly helpful to you, Alan.

I’m similar to Mark in that for me, mechanics often also play a role in my character building. I often start with what I want a character to be able to. Sometimes this is mechanics driven (“I want to be really good at mind-control”) and sometimes not (“I want a character who time travels in order to invent new tenses”). Once I have this kernel, I start asking questions about how and why the character does what he does and work those into explanations of his past.

I also try to make story and mechanic as symbiotic as possible. During character creation I do this often with flaws by going both directions. I will pick flaws whose mechanics I won’t find crippling and then come up with what I hope is interesting background reasons explaining it. On the flip side I will also come up with things about my character that are weakness he struggles with and then see if there are mechanics that go with it. Other elements of character creation kind of go the same way.

Location (both place and time) is also a huge part of how I find a character comes together for me. Rada being from the Deep South was very key to my envisioning of him. I had wanted him to be filled with hatred towards those who were intolerant of homosexuality and Alabama seemed a good place to create that in someone. From there I had a starting point to frame together his life. For Gapan, reckoning at Woodstock allowed be both to look backwards at how he got there and forwards at what would happen to him from there.

Finally my other big rule is the rule of 3. It takes 3 points to define a line, so I try to make sure I have 3 key defining moments in a characters background that make them what they are. Less than that and I usually don’t know who the character is (which admittedly isn’t always bad in some games) and more is usually unnecessary.

Sorry for being so long-winded. I hope it helped a little.

That's an interesting question that I've never really given a great deal of thought. I guess I'd have to say I come up with what a character acts like and what they're capable of, then I consider why. I ask myself such questions as If a character acts a certain way, what drove them to feel that was best? Admittedly, Dorian is something of an exception as I pretty much just slapped on a nametag at my first game and have been building a character around it since.

Thanks to those who have responded so far. It's interesting to see how different character creation can be.

For those interested, I think I found my problem. I think that Cole isn't the conviction I wanted him to be. Apparently between his reckoning and now he changed his views on God. I've had to let go of my predetermination of Conviction and hopefully soon he will tell me what happened to him and where he landed up. I wonder what other surprises he has in store for me...

Hopefully Cole will be ready to appear next weekend.

Often, it just comes from asking other people(STs or fellow players) "What do you need in the game?" I find it very satisfying to let other folks help determine my concept a little - it gets me hooked in, and I like the challenge. Such is part of the reason I tend to really like one-shots - it focuses my mind on the acting portion of LARP instead of the writing portion of it, and while I enjoy both I think I enjoy the acting portion a fair bit more now-a-days. My writing urges get satisfied by storytelling instead.

When that isn't an option, I often go for "What haven't I played recently? What would stretch me out of my usual character types? What would be a challenge?" This, as you might guess, is where Bal materialized from in part(the other part is taunting John with bringing in an Iredeemable Gluttony, and he encouraged me in it, so also sort of the first method, too).

Barring all that - I look at the game, and just try and imagine what type of things I want to do in that game. What would I have fun doing there? I used to try and start characters from the concept and move forward into a final product, but all too often I had brilliant characters that just weren't all that fun to play. It is like everyone who made brooding loners back in the days of Vampire - yeah, the background might have been awesome, but people don't usually see your background - backgrounds are worthless except insofar as they inform play. If you asked a bystander to describe the character in terms of "What do they do?", they'd say "Stands in the corner and doesn't talk to anyone ever." Well, that sounds lame. So instead I try to think of what I want the answer to be to the question "What did you do this session?", and work backwards from there.

Well said.
One of the reasons I never wanted to LARP until recently was because I can think of a hundred better things to do with my life than stand around brooding in a corner...for "fun".
As to my character creation...can't really speak to LARP as Jill made my character and I just said "surprise me".
My TT characters though...it all boils down to what I wanna do with them.
For example, in Deadlands (the awesomest game ever), I wanted an ass-kicker. But not just a "slap-leather" shooter. I wanted a man on a mission. A paladin. I wanted to sit in the background and be a nice guy until evil appeared, then go to work with jaw-dropping violence. He also had to be well-travelled and knowledgeable in a great many things. And he had to look like Sam Elliot.
So I made an aging Lutheran Preacher with a blessed shot-gun, who travels the west searching for the undead and such. A man who doesn't just speak about evil, a man who confronts it with both-barrels. A 19th century Solomon Kane, or western Van Helsing.
Another guy in the group did the same thing, but from the other end of the spectrum. He played a Huckster who consorted with "demons" in order to achieve the same ends.
never actually got to *play* those guys, but the opportunity for violence and good role-playing was there. Just what I wanted.

The characters you mention sound oddly familiar, I wonder why. Anyways, I think Bal and Tim both said exactly what I was thinking in my post, expect they are far better with words than I am so there ya go. I hope it works out for ya bud. This is also a good thread for anyone new to the game or making a new character, there are some really good suggestions.

And on the OTHER side of the spectrum, may I introduce to you
Minmax the Unstoppable!
http://goblins.keenspot.com/d/20091207.html

Aw, man. My favourite Goblins comic ever was a Minmax one: http://goblins.keenspot.com/d/20060422.html

Not that I don't like the rest of it, but Minmax is awesome.

heheh
well, since we're talking about new char then
http://goblins.keenspot.com/d/20060506.html
In all seriousness though, usually my initial char development is much the same as Bal where I try to fill a gap and then go from there. Mostly TT characters though, I'm still a neophyte with larping in general. For any RP characters though, my ultimate motivation is to be able to go through a session with straight roleplay and no dice, R-P-S, or character sheet usage. Its rare when it happens, but when it does, its a damn fun experience too.

I find it fascinating how people can come up with concepts. I, for one, dislike one-shots and NPCing because I don't have a background or sufficient quality. I need to know where my character has been in order to know where they are going and how and why they react to things as they do -- without that information I am only reacting to stimuli instead of acting. Not only that, but I also need to know the comparative influence of events on the character's psychological development, e.g., was it more traumatizing when he killed his ex-wife's stripper girlfriend's dog or when he consigned his son's G.I. Joe's Barbie girlfriend to the depths of Hell for getting an STD. If I find those two events on a point-form background which someone else has given me I can spin it how I think it should be, but I'll constantly be wondering if I'm doing it "right" even if there really is no right way.

As for unnoticed backgrounds, it is the responsibility of the player to ensure that the character's background gets to see the light of day in how they react to events and what they choose to share with other characters. I think that there could be a great scene in one brooder going up to the next brooder and comparing... broodiness? ... broodst? ... broodage? ... well, their methods of brooding and reasons for doing such. :)

Another thing that works is discovering your character through play. Make what the group wants or needs, then play it and see what comes out.
Obviously this is opposite to how you like to roll...but sometimes you get awesome ideas about the character you wouldn't have otherwise come up with.

I typically start with one or two big personality traits that I think will differentiate the character from everybody else. Often, that trait is something that I want to play because it will be a challenge for me. Crazy. Evil. Whiny. Talkative. Deaf. Then I start to flesh it out, working usually from who I want them to be in the present to what must have happened to them in the past to make them that person. Often the present-character changes as I fill out their past (and yes, as I play them too - sometimes they just aren't who I think they are at first).