Character Designing

[JP Dogberry]

Yesterday, I rolled up a character for a Cyberpunk 2020 game. It took about an hour for me and one other player to do this.

I went home and spent three hours writing up details about this character. I ended up with 2325 words, all written in one go. I hadn't actually noticed I was writing that long.

My question, then, is how much time and effort do people put into designing characters? Do you just build stats, or do you write fully fleshed out histories and do those "100 question's you should answer" lists (Which I'm tempted do do to round out my character.)

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I simply build stats around an interesting concept. I give him a couple hooks. Then, I let the GM design some plot for my character. Not the plot of the whole campaign, but some plot. I EXPECT the GM to do that. THen i let the character develop as we play.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I played Gurps once in high school and we wrote a series of stories about what happend. When it was done I had about 40 pages of prose written about my character, and more background than I ever wanted....

[Spriggan]

EUOL use to write stories that were the backgroud of his characters, not sure how long they'd be but I remember they were around 20 or so pages sometimes.  For me it just depends on the GM, system and setting.  Sometimes I do sometimes I dont.  I rarely do though unless the GM is willing to use that info in the campaign somehow.   But sometimes I do it just for the heck of it.

[Entsuropi]

Currently i just build the character sheet, take some personality based merits / flaws (etc, stubborn, loyal to friends, gallic code of honour, etc). Then you end up with a character who is basically me, projected through the personality traits and lifestyle of the character.

For a internet game i sometimes write up a page or so of description, personality, speech habits, background.

[Onion of Death]

I can spend forever making characters. It took me at least two weeks worth of thinking up a character concept, and then an additional three hours or so of using a Character Creation Program to get my Shadowrun hitman done.

[Eagle Prince]

I think most of my character creation is spend thinking of a name I like.  Detailed background can be nice, but they can also be hard if you are playing in a new custom-made campaign world because you don't know very much about it.  I also tend to like rolling up a few random background elements and building off those.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

I think it depends on my mood, often creation is as fast as a flick of the wrist, or a skim of the points. Still I can spend hours on a character too.

[Prometheus]

I find that I make my best characters if I have some time *after* I make their base stats. Some of those still never really get fleshed out appropriately, but for me the statistics themselves give me avenues I use to explore their history & personality.

[Nicadymus]

Since I have been the GM for many of my groups campaigns as of late, I have not had much time to spend on PCs.  However I have spent a good deal of time creating NPCs.  Most of the time they consist of basic stats with small histories explaining their motivations.  However, for those long standing anti-heros (using this term because sometimes the group plays evil characters) I try to spend a good deal of time writing a back story to ensure that the character is properly motivated in the actions they undertake.  I have almost 50 pages on the main NPC for my current campaign (as an example).

[Spriggan]

Since I have been the GM for many of my groups campaigns as of late.

heh, you're never going to escape GM deuties Nicadymus.

[Nicadymus]

That may be... but at least I can use that as grounds to prove how evil I am...  ummmm... wait... that didn't come out right.  

[Spriggan]

Yes I remember seveal of those "adventures", trust me I belave you.

[PaperSword]

In D&D, 3rd edition , i tend to take an element of the game, lets say human fighter , and i take time thinking of exactly what i would like to play :-/. After a short time, a brief idea or shadow of a character comes to mind. I then, slowly, begin to fill in the character outline with detail. My end results are always rather in-depth. DMing is no fun in my opinion , i'm too good a player . (i was near literally forced into DMing for a group for the longest time . That allowed me to grow tired of it. )