Comment on “Making the Character”

"There is no sadder evidence of the utter failure of D&D as a game than the fetishism of character making over character running."

Amen!

The people I know in this hobby all seem to treat character creation as an exercise in creative writing. the games that they typically play explicitly mandate or strongly encourage that, but those players do so even if not required or prompted. to them it's just part of playing an RPG.

I think this fetishism played a large role both in the degradation of the centrality of the rules, and the decline of campaign play.

When Bob makes a character with a cool backstory and a cool personality -- when he is encouraged to take character creation itself as a creative endeavor -- Bob is going to want to suck all the juice out of that character ... play him for a while ... but he is not going to want to see him change or be seriously threatened, because then Bob is at risk of no longer getting to play the cool guy he spent so much time inventing.

So, Bob will advocate for rules to be downplayed in favor of "rule of cool," because then he can keep putting his descriptive brain to work. Using it persuade the DM he should be able to do such and such "because it fits in with all this other stuff about my character!" In this scenario, overloading character creation with meaning has created inappropriate attachment.

Alternatively, Bob might instead advocate for trying lots of new systems, or making new characters after every adventure, so that he gets to come up with cooler and cooler guys... In this scenario, overloading character creation with meaning (or depth, in games with large amounts of "character building") has made it just as enjoyable as the actual gameplay itself.

Neither is healthy for longterm play.