Using Personality Traits

timm meyers · 01-13-2024, 12:16 AM

I think as "gamers" we all tend to get caught into the tactical relevance of any rules. i.e. "does this help me or hinder me in winning contests/encounters/combat"

Personality traits are options for "Roleplaying". They are there to help define and remind a player of "who" their PC is. Yes there is a small % with obvious combat input or situational advantages/disadvantages but other than "Appearance" they have zero Physical manifestations.

My original thought experiment was for those players who enjoyed fleshing out or creating more colorful characters the traits suggested on p.14 are a great aid. These then become a guideline for the PC. Anyone who assigns an "average" value (7 on the 2-12 scale) to a personality trait is saying in effect that this trait is the same as generly everyone else = no need to list such normalcy. The traits listed are going to be the pronounced, more visible, aspects of their PC personality. That means these meaningful traits are going to be more extreme to either end of the spectrum (2-6 or 8-12).

Playing a character with chosen traits and values is more about the gamer putting guard rails up for themselves to help keep their use of a PC authentic. So beyond just a value metric to remind me what level of "Braggart" my character is I thought why not have some guidelines of how to test against them. Thus, the original succeed/miss by increments of 2 left the results minor to major, player controlled to GM controlled etc. All more of a prompt to story action than combat results. The second aspect of trying to codify the possible results of a personality is helping the player and GM give a small level of input to the game from our inanimate PC creation. In essence a low low low level of AI or sim.

So far, my takeaway from these great posts is most of our PC's are normal well-adjusted personalities and the need for personality guidelines are minimal. This kinda makes me chuckle at the possibility that we could all be quirky unbalanced personalities that have gravitated to RPG so we can try experiencing an alter ego who is more normal. I mean why play as the Anger-11, Humble-4 Wizard when I already do that every day in real life?
(well not the wizard part....)

01-13-2024, 12:16 AM	#10
timm meyers Join Date: May 2020	Re: Using Personality Traits I think as "gamers" we all tend to get caught into the tactical relevance of any rules. i.e. "does this help me or hinder me in winning contests/encounters/combat" Personality traits are options for "Roleplaying". They are there to help define and remind a player of "who" their PC is. Yes there is a small % with obvious combat input or situational advantages/disadvantages but other than "Appearance" they have zero Physical manifestations. My original thought experiment was for those players who enjoyed fleshing out or creating more colorful characters the traits suggested on p.14 are a great aid. These then become a guideline for the PC. Anyone who assigns an "average" value (7 on the 2-12 scale) to a personality trait is saying in effect that this trait is the same as generly everyone else = no need to list such normalcy. The traits listed are going to be the pronounced, more visible, aspects of their PC personality. That means these meaningful traits are going to be more extreme to either end of the spectrum (2-6 or 8-12). Playing a character with chosen traits and values is more about the gamer putting guard rails up for themselves to help keep their use of a PC authentic. So beyond just a value metric to remind me what level of "Braggart" my character is I thought why not have some guidelines of how to test against them. Thus, the original succeed/miss by increments of 2 left the results minor to major, player controlled to GM controlled etc. All more of a prompt to story action than combat results. The second aspect of trying to codify the possible results of a personality is helping the player and GM give a small level of input to the game from our inanimate PC creation. In essence a low low low level of AI or sim. So far, my takeaway from these great posts is most of our PC's are normal well-adjusted personalities and the need for personality guidelines are minimal. This kinda makes me chuckle at the possibility that we could all be quirky unbalanced personalities that have gravitated to RPG so we can try experiencing an alter ego who is more normal. I mean why play as the Anger-11, Humble-4 Wizard when I already do that every day in real life? (well not the wizard part....)