When Making a Character Becomes More Fun than Playing a Character

    So I pulled out an old copy of Neverwinter Nights 1 (don't ask me why).  Being based on Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 it has quite the robust character creation system.  Since you need to make a character to play the game, there were a lot of decisions to make.  The game has 11 base classes: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Wizard - and then it has 12 prestiege classes (which you cannot start as, but can unlock with base classes, skills/feats, and/or races): Arcane Archer, Blackguard, Champion of Torm, Dwarven Defender, Harper Scout, Pale Master, Purple Dragon Knight, Red Dragon Disciple, Shadowdancer, Shifter, Weapon Master.
    Playing one pure class has always been kind of boring to me, I really like the versatility you get from multi-classing.  But it's very tricky to make a good multi-class character, some classes mix well and others just make a useless hodgepodge.  So you need to plan your multi-class character carefully, weighing the advantages and requirements of each class you want to mix.  Plus, there's the question of what level to take each class at, the order you create them also matters.  I played with a few ideas in my head, and decided I wanted to try a Sorcerer, Paladin, Red Dragon Disciple (you can only mix up to 3 classes in NWN).  All three classes use Charisma.  Wearing heavy armor as a Paladin made spellcasting pretty hard (you had a % chance for each spell to be wasted), so I decided the Sorc part would be the least developed, I'd only use it to unlock Red Dragon Disciple and to cast some buffing spells (resist elements and such) before a fight (when I could take off my armor real quick) and that would last through a fight (or even several hours).  My plan was to max out Red Dragon Disciple for some nice attribute buffs, then go mostly Paladin for the Charisma bonus to my saving throws and straight fighting ability.  I took the feats for: blind-fighting, weapon focus (longsword), improved critical (longsword), and the increased reflex saving throws.  I could focus my attributes on just Charisma and Strength, and I only had Discipline and Lore for my skills (I think I threw a few points in Persuade).  Mostly I was a slightly-fancy sword-and-board melee fighter.
    One of the NWN campaigns let me start at 15th level, so I had a chance to make this character at a decently high level and see how the idea worked out.  In all, it wasn't too bad.  But playing the character was an interesting contrast to making the character.

    Making the character, I had literally dozens of decisions, all of which formed a complex inter-dependent web I had to understand and navigate to create the concept I wanted in an efficient and effective way.

    Playing the character, I clicked on the enemy and watched the auto-attack swing my sword.
   
    A friend once commented that "making a character was more fun than playing a character," at the time I totally agreed but could not say why exactly.  But after that night of making and playing my NWN character, I saw it.  While I was making a character I had a ton of important and meaningful choices to make.  But while playing the character, I had almost no choices.  Rolling a die is not a choice.  Which monster to hit is a small choice, but "I keep hitting the monster" is not a choice.

    I posted my thoughts before about defining Interactive Narrative as a story that the reader can influence.  A role-playing game is really just an Interactive Mechanical Narrative - it's still a story the reader influences, but in the case of an RPG the reader influences the story though the rules, the mechanics, of the game.  So when your character creation section takes up 100 pages, and your combat section takes up 20 pages, and everything else takes up 5 pages - well, then you can pretty much directly map out how many interesting and meaningful choices you have to make.  And thus, making the character becomes more interesting than playing the character.  In a more "old school" game the entire rulebook was 20 pages, and half that was spells, but the rest was evently divided.  So that should make playing the character more interesting, right?  Yes, and it does.  But, there's a caveat there: with fewer mechanics to provide meaningful choices, the burden is even greater on the GM to provide those meaningful choices in the game itself - which some GMs are better at than others.  A more mechanically-detailed system at least has some built-in interest, and possibly some more guidance for structuring the game itself.  Narrative games, like Fate, are a case where the mechanics are mostly for making story decisions, and only a small part for character creation, thus ideally putting the mechanical weight on the story to get the best of both worlds (of course, every game is a matter of taste, so while I stand by this as a general idea - of course each player will have their own values).

    This is one of those game designer challenges.  Just saying that "having 100 pages of character creation and 20 pages of everything else is bad," is not entierly accurate.  But it does bring something more clearly to mind- how are the mechanics weighed; outside of play (in character creation like late D&D/Pathfinder), in play via the character's actions (like early D&D) or in play via narrative control (like Fate)?  That is a tricky balance, and one I'm going to be looking more closely at from here on out.


Update: Re-reading this after I finished it made me want to throw one more random note in here.  I think the term I want to use defining RPGs is "Mechanical/ Negotation Interactive Narrative."  Yes, it's a mouthful.  It's not a wasted mouthful though, I think it actualy hits two important concepts right on the head.  Like a "choose your own adventure" book an RPG is Interactive Narrative.  But, a CYOA-styled book has the choices hard-coded, baked-into the narrative/ plot itself.  With an RPG the choices come from two places: the mechanics and the "negotiation" or interaction between the player and GM, or in-between the players in a collaberative narrative system (can't think of a good example off the top of my head).  Granted, that's something blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever played an RPG, but I like to have proper terms for things.  Just a quick side note, since I may end up using the term down the road.