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Creation-ism
Jun. 18th, 2011 09:48 amI love roleplaying, and I love RPG's. I have since I was about 13 years old, and the Ocean County Library's Young Adult Advisory Board coaxed me into my first tabletop gaming session (Marvel Superheroes, which remains a favorite to this day). I like one-shot games and campaigns, tabletop and live action; I'll try (and enjoy) just about anything.
There's just one thing I hate and dread, though. Character creation.
I honestly don't think of myself as a very creative person, and I think that's part of the problem. I'm not good at coming up with ideas. Give me a framework and I can happily play around inside it indefinitely, but ask me to just make something up, especially out of the blue with no basic structure to build around or guidelines as to what I might want, and I am utterly, miserably, hopelessly lost. I rack my brain for anything vaguely resembling a functional concept, fail, flail around despairingly, threaten to drop out of the game, beg my husband to make up something for me, and generally stress myself into a sulking ball of nightmares and frustration.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I also apparently have a superpower of my own. Namely, that the most absurd crap I can come up with somehow seems to catch on with other people, and refuses to go away. Invariably, at some point during the process of making up a character and a history, I will throw my arms up into the air in frustration and, fed up with the lack of ideas from myself or guidance from the outside, will just make up the most ridiculous, obnoxious, absurd concept possible. Usually, this is meant either to demonstrate to the GM that they need to give me a little more guidance to keep me from haring off into ludicrosity, or to prove that there are no good concepts available, only idiotic ones, within the space I have to work with.
And without exception, no matter how much I insist I was joking, everyone latches onto this idea, and it sticks around. In spite of me. And becomes what I wind up having to build my character around.
Which is why my last handful of characters have involved post-apocalyptic cannibal Mormon gangs, a single mother paladin of the god of Death and her dead lizard baby.... and now the FaginBot 5000 and his gang of space orphan hoodlums. (I picture him looking a bit like a cross between Bender, HedonismBot, and the Robot Devil.)
If only I could find a way to use my powers for good.....
There's just one thing I hate and dread, though. Character creation.
I honestly don't think of myself as a very creative person, and I think that's part of the problem. I'm not good at coming up with ideas. Give me a framework and I can happily play around inside it indefinitely, but ask me to just make something up, especially out of the blue with no basic structure to build around or guidelines as to what I might want, and I am utterly, miserably, hopelessly lost. I rack my brain for anything vaguely resembling a functional concept, fail, flail around despairingly, threaten to drop out of the game, beg my husband to make up something for me, and generally stress myself into a sulking ball of nightmares and frustration.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), I also apparently have a superpower of my own. Namely, that the most absurd crap I can come up with somehow seems to catch on with other people, and refuses to go away. Invariably, at some point during the process of making up a character and a history, I will throw my arms up into the air in frustration and, fed up with the lack of ideas from myself or guidance from the outside, will just make up the most ridiculous, obnoxious, absurd concept possible. Usually, this is meant either to demonstrate to the GM that they need to give me a little more guidance to keep me from haring off into ludicrosity, or to prove that there are no good concepts available, only idiotic ones, within the space I have to work with.
And without exception, no matter how much I insist I was joking, everyone latches onto this idea, and it sticks around. In spite of me. And becomes what I wind up having to build my character around.
Which is why my last handful of characters have involved post-apocalyptic cannibal Mormon gangs, a single mother paladin of the god of Death and her dead lizard baby.... and now the FaginBot 5000 and his gang of space orphan hoodlums. (I picture him looking a bit like a cross between Bender, HedonismBot, and the Robot Devil.)
If only I could find a way to use my powers for good.....
