Character Creation - Templates and Classes

Templates and Classes

To speed up and ease the character creation process, many games use character templates of some sort: Sample characters representing genre-typical archetypes that are either completely ready-made or at least define the essential stats necessary for a character to be able to work in a given occupation or fill some dramatic role. For instance, a thief will probably know how to move quietly, pick locks, disarm traps, and climb walls. The use of character templates enables inexperienced players to easily create suitable characters as they won’t be overwhelmed with having to select skills and abilities, and it still speeds up character creation for even the most experienced players.

In some games, these templates are only an optional character creation aid that has no prescribed effect on the rest of the game: They can be flexibly modified according to the game’s character creation rules or can be ignored altogether. This is generally the case in games that try to give the player as much control over the character creation process as possible. (Examples are Shadowrun or GURPS.)

Other games use such a mechanism as a mandatory tool to provide direction and limitations to the character creation process as well as character development. This is the character class concept introduced by Dungeons & Dragons that is now used in all d20 System games and has been adopted by many others, such as Palladium Books’ Megaversal system.

With a character class, most skills and abilities are predetermined, or must be chosen from a comparably narrow subset of all available traits, leaving the player to select only a few extra skills. Some people find this too limiting, while others like the fact that each character necessarily has to be specialized to fill a specific role in the group of player characters. In a class-based system, a fighter is often not allowed any magical abilities, while mages are typically poor fighters. When players are not required do adhere to a specific template, on the other hand, their characters might turn out very similar even if they started from different templates — a fighter with good spell casting abilities is not much different from a spell caster with good fighting abilities. Thus, the freedom of a class-less system requires extra caution on the side of the players to create a diverse group of characters.

There are games that aim to get the best of both worlds by using some kind of hybrid. One approach is to let the templates (called careers in Classic Traveller as well as in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) still restrict the choices available for character creation or development, but apply them only for a limited timespan:

During character creation in Classic Traveller, each character pursues one of six possible careers (professions) that decides which tables can be used to roll on, thus giving direction to the otherwise largely random process. When the character is ready to be played, he has ended this career, so it doesn’t have a direct influence on character development during play.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a much more elaborate career system. Characters advance by entering a series of “Careers” that provide access to a set of new or improved skills, and bonuses to attributes (called “advances”). The menu of careers available to characters reflects the setting of the game world. Basic careers are those that might be filled by any individual with a modest amount of training or instruction. Advanced careers require greater preparation and training, and are often more appropriate for the lifestyle of an active adventurer. The career system gives both an idea of what a character might have been doing before embarking on a career as an adventurer (working as a baker, night watchman, rat catcher, or farmer), and how they changed and developed through their career (becoming a mercenary, explorer, ship’s captain, etc.).

As another approach, some games (such as Cyberpunk 2020) use a hybrid skill-class system, in which each of the primary roles (classes) in the game has one skill that is absolutely unique to it and defines that role, but apart from that, characters are created and advance using a skill point system rather than a class-and-level system.