Yesterday I wrote about my thoughts on how roleplaying games can encourage players to develop distinct character identity. Now I want to follow up by looking at a few case studies. I had originally said it would just be a few hours, but I'm bad at math.

Quick disclaimer: none of the games that I mention here are mine, so I'm not trying to claim credit for their achievements (though I did help a little on one of them). I'll break each game down into six parts; an overall strengths and weaknesses, then an individual write-up of each of the methods (flexibility, power, limitation, narrative connection, and development) that the games can use to build character identity.

If I link to some of these games, those links might be affiliate links that earn me a little cut of a purchase. I haven't been paid to promote any of these products.

1. Open Legend

Open Legend is a game that I playtested and contributed a very small bit to, but from the moment I discovered it I could see that it had some really strong ways to build character identity. The system was designed around a philosophy of saying yes to players' efforts to create characters and building toward allowing any narrative to unfold.

Flexibility

The strength of Open Legend is that it's a genre-less core ruleset, which means that it tries to predict what is needed for almost any game without going too into detail with any particular element. While it's always meant for high-octane (e.g. epic fantasy, superhero, space opera) games more-so than your traditional power level, it allows you to build pretty much any character concept with talents and attributes; attributes unlock a wide range of abilities that are then optimized with talents, which allows players to not worry about how to build characters and enables them to worry less about how to mechanically build and more about their narrative identity.

Power

Open Legend is a great example of how characters can feel powerful and balanced without having too much crunch. There is practically no resource tracking, which helps to further the design's focus on giving players a high degree of narrative agency.

If there's one flaw here, it's that a lot of what characters go into winds up being under-specialized and there is too great a potential for character overlap. Theoretically you could wind up with situations where the PCs are too powerful for the game, but Open Legend is flexible enough that it typically doesn't happen that way.

Limitation

Open Legend is strictly going for Hammer and Nail limitations. Barring the supernatural attributes, everyone is typically at least minimally competent in every field due to how the character attributes work, though there's a fairly heavy power curve (i.e. a very powerful character will be much more powerful than a low-power character).

Another element here is that in practice you can wind up with people running the game just pushing things to an extreme, but that's a problem for another day.

Narrative Connection

This is Open Legend's weakest point. Because it seeks to be genre-independent, it winds up with a problem ever connecting characters to their universe. There are fluffy bits for this (similar to what D&D has), but there's no mechanical representation of these things, and the system already has rules for many things so adding more can be problematic.

Development

Characters develop wonderfully throughout Open Legend because of its very simple point-buy mechanics smoothly extending the character creation process as characters grow more powerful. It doesn't necessarily link to any narrative in the game setting, but it does hit all the other points well, and players have incredible flexibility.

2. Degenesis

Degenesis (NSFW) is one of my favorite games because of its deep universe and its very tight mechanical implementation of that universe. For people who aren't familiar with it, I like to describe it as being mechanically similar to Shadowrun, if Shadowrun had self-restraint, and having a similar universe to pretty much nothing else.

Really, rather than describe it, I'm just going to link to the trailer. There's non-sexualized manbutt in the trailer (just a heads-up).

Degenesis trailer courtesy of SIXMOREVODKA

The thing that I love about this trailer is that while it shows Falberg, an actual character in the setting, the game is built around letting you literally be Falberg if that's your character concept.

Flexibility

Degenesis is, in my opinion, a great game at having very clear layers of characterization that work well.

At its core, it's got a point-buy system that has limits based on a character's backgrounds (though generally you're going to be able to increase anything you want to a point where you're at least marginally proficient), but it also has ranks in the various in-game factions that have their own requirements. Characters also get talents automatically based on their rank (for some ranks in some cults), and some that they can choose from.

This gives a lot of leeway while still being pretty generous with regards to allowing novel choices (albeit at a cost of career advancement).

Power

Degenesis is really designed for a low power level, but it still gives characters strong areas of competence. Likewise, most characters get one or two talents that make them uniquely powerful in a particular way, and talents are really strong in Degenesis. There are some areas that are under-serviced (no good healers, for instance), but your characters will stand out for what they are.

Limitation

Degenesis blends all three limitation methods together, though it has a positive approach to the spotlighting system. The game has thirty-six skills spread out over six attributes (of which characters only access 34, as there are two either-or pairs), but generally characters have a lot of leeway in how they solve problems, since some skills overlap but use different attributes, so there's some Hammer and Nails approach in everyday gameplay. A pool of resources called Ego is generously provided to the characters and gives immediate buffs that can be quite strong (up to 3 dice in a game where top-tier experts roll 12), and permits a character to push through any weaknesses. You also have some restrictions in the sense that there are abilities that characters are expected not to take, but these usually have an alternative (e.g. you can have low-tech or high-tech variants of the same skill).

I really like how Degenesis is set up because it blends these methods well enough that players generally don't feel left out in any way.

Narrative Connection

Degenesis' characters are built around cults; they gain benefits from hitting ranks by growing in certain ways and also have access to talents that link them to the world. Character creation is very strongly dependent on background, because archetypes, places of origin, and cults each have a say in a character's maximum skills and attributes at that stage.

Development

Characters move through ranks as they complete certain tasks in the game world (like making powerful allies) and allocate character advancement resources in certain ways. As they do so they gain direct bonuses in a sort of feedback loop. One interesting thing to point out here is that Degenesis has a "Backgrounds" mechanic that reflects the intangible benefits that a character has gained on account of their adventures, and these are awarded directly during play as a consequence of actions, which ties into character identity very well because these reflect what a character has pursued. Add in a traditional XP system with free-form point-by mechanics and you're well-set for characters to grow both along scripted paths and in novel manners.

3. Dungeons & Dragons

D&D is one of the oldest and most successful roleplaying games, but I'm going to focus on its fifth edition, which makes some novel changes and I think is probably the best at storytelling of all the different editions.

Flexibility

One of the places where D&D gets into issues with flexibility is that the majority of its character creation decisions are limited to choosing a class. Strictly speaking, there are lots of other options here; skill selections, attribute assignment, and spell selections for classes that get them are important, but in earlier editions of D&D there were also more prevalent feats. The fifth edition still contains feats, but they're side-lined; at first glance this looks like an absolute decrease in flexibility, but in practice many of the feats a character got were "mandatory" in the sense that you were only going to have a strong character if you choose one or two feats at each possible juncture, and D&D's balance mechanic doesn't smile on people making poor choices.

In fifth edition, these feat selections were done away with in favor of each class getting a couple paths to choose from (since expanded by supplemental material to 4-6 options per class) and many classes having additional selections for the

Power

The thing that D&D does particularly well is giving each player a particular set of powers by allowing them to choose a class that has a particular wheelhouse as their main focus. As a result, especially in fifth edition where many of the old false choices were removed, characters feel powerful.

It's worth noting that there are still limitations here; some classes have functions that are not necessarily intuitive. For instance, a lot of the martial combatants have specializations that aren't immediately obvious, and they step on each others' toes quite a bit. Although nominally designed around multiple "pillars", D&D is heavily oriented toward combat, and most characters wind up colliding with each other's personal role when fighting starts.

Limitation

In practice, D&D's main limitation method in fifth edition is a Hammer and Nails system, since almost every character can attempt any skill test and they simply are likely to fail most of them. There is a class that has access to a jack-of-all-trades ability specifically to counteract the likelihood of having nobody able to do a particular thing.

There is some Flaws and Restriction element present in the sense that it is possible for characters to be especially inept, but this is not usually the case and has been heavily reduced as the editions have gone on (e.g. spellcasters simply don't benefit as much from wearing armor, where they used to suffer major penalties for doing so).

Narrative Connection

My biggest gripe with D&D and character identity is that the classes don't necessarily intuitively match what a character is going to do based on their role in the universe. The paths that each character chooses are supposed to help with this somewhat, but many of the classes don't necessarily tie into what a player wants to do with their character. It is theoretically possible to do this most of the time, but requires a lot more familiarity with the system than can be reasonably expected of a novice player.

Even the presence of a backgrounds system and ideals/flaws that are supposed to be fluffy and encourage roleplaying doesn't necessarily help a whole lot with this, since the backgrounds themselves don't necessarily align perfectly with characters' stories.

The flip-side to this is that when a player enters with a vague concept, they are typically able to use a class to flesh it out further.

Development

D&D's character development is on-rails, which means that most of the time characters only grow in mechanically distinct ways when they reach decision points. While this is mechanically competent, it doesn't necessarily foster character identity, especially for some classes that have a much more difficult time having interesting abilities.

4. Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase is a d100-based transhuman sci-fi roleplaying game and it has a lot of features that make it really interesting for developing character identity both in what it does well and what it flopped on. I'm looking just at the first edition here, and I'll touch on how it developed as the product line got fleshed out, since there was definitely an improvement with things like Transhuman.

Flexibility

Eclipse Phase uses a point-buy character generation system that's tied to backgrounds and factions in the universe. The result of this is that there is a fair amount of flexibility possible. Later package-buy and life-path systems maintain a pool of points to spend at character creation to keep this flexibility while allowing players to have less of a load in terms of making sure that they hit the essentials.

You can play an octopus. You can play a bird. You can play a robot. You can play an alien squirrel. Any of these characters can be expert pilots, gunslingers, or hackers. There's multiple layers of complexity in terms of both physical form and the capacities of the individual character in terms of their learning and aptitude in various fields.

However, the one restriction here is that many of these more exotic options don't necessarily have full rules;Transhuman–a sort of advanced player's guide for Eclipse Phase–adds a few more rules for this, but still falls short of enabling a whole lot of diverse rules.

Were EP's core focus more narrative, this would work well, but since it's something of a crunchy spreadsheet it means that there's a lot of character options that do things that aren't represented by the mechanics as written and are difficult to integrate.

Power

EP gives players the ability to layer attributes, skills, gear, and special qualities to come up with a variety of different competencies, and does this quite well. One of the very interesting things about it is that there are a lot of places where different characters are barred from certain things, but this is rarely a hard restriction on pursuing those pathways to success; ordinary people don't have robotic armor plating, for example, but you can still get enhanced armor in other ways.

Limitation

EP is a mixture of Hammer and Nails and Spotlighting when it comes to limitation, at least in theory. The exotic and powerful character options allow players to go fairly in-depth with their chosen fields, and it's generally possible to rely on a "muse" (personal AI) or other automated system to accomplish other goals, though a strictly rules-as-written interpretation can feel like there are more restrictions on what non-proficient characters can do, especially if taking a strict interpretation of just the core rulebook.

With that said, there is a section of the community that believes strongly in the heightened power of generalist builds that rely on specifically choosing character options that permit versatility and on the fly adaptation, including the game's spotlighting mechanic, Moxie, which can be optimized for in character creation.

Narrative Connection

This is both a strong point of EP and a weakness. By the time the full product line is considered, there are a lot of really cool character options. However, systems like the reputation network mechanic feel underdeveloped (not the least of which because they all function identically) and unless Transhuman is factored in there are a lot of exotic options that feel very much like playing a regular run-of-the-mill character (even then, some exotic concepts either break loose of the ruleset or don't have any distinction).

Development

Despite having a very competent point-buy mechanic, developing characters falls apart in Eclipse Phase due to implementation. The advancement mechanic is incredibly slow and lacks some of the deeper interactions with game systems that character creation has, which means that characters tend to remain static throughout all but the most lengthy and complex campaigns.

5. Warhammer d100 Systems

I'm taking the liberty of combining Warhammer Fantasy and the 40k RPGs like Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Only War because they're all relatively similar, though there are some major differences in execution between them.

The really important thing here is that their characters function in a very similar fashion (at least on a big picture sense), and it's an interesting approach.

The way the Warhammer d100 systems work is simple: each character can buy a number of advances, and their background makes some advances available easily. In some versions characters are more or less restricted in how many advances they can take outside of their main focus, but the really strong stuff is almost always specifically available to one profession or career tree.

Flexibility

The novelty of this system is that in some of its mode modern implementations it feels like a perfect fusion between a class-based system like D&D and an entirely free-form point-buy system like Eclipse Phase. This generally means that a character can do whatever they want, especially in some of the later variants like Only War and the second edition of Dark Heresy, and the design is built to be flexible enough that the designer didn't have to preconceive the directions that players would want to take their characters.

Power

The Warhammer universes are about struggle and a cosmic scale, and the games actually do a good job of giving characters a lot of agency. Locking characters into a career path allows some really powerful things to be kept to just one or two characters in a party, and it's a great example of how a low-power game (see Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy) can still let players feel very strong.

One way that the Warhammer d100 games do this really well is by giving a lot of named talents that have very particular roles, and including magic/psyker systems that are very restrictive with regards to who can enter them.

Limitation

Sacrifice is a major theme of the Warhammer universes, and that is carried through in the design. It's practically impossible to play a character who does everything well. Depending on the variant, the Warhammer d100 systems either locked certain options to certain character selections or made them exorbitantly expensive for outsiders, which effectively served to keep anyone from stealing the show from everyone else, though I'd classify it thoroughly in either the Hammer and Nails or Flaws and Restrictions school depending on which particular version you're looking at.

With that said, there are some balance issues. Just ask the Space Marine librarian who flies with his mind and is practically invisible while being the main damage-dealer in the party. This is a consequence of the majority of the games' character features often trending toward combat, where it's hard to make sure that everyone gets a fair shake.

Narrative Connection

Hands-down, the Warhammer universes are some of the deepest and darkest in gaming, and the characters tend to really fit in because they are created and develop along career paths that are drawn straight from the universe.

With that said, the execution of this definitely works better in some of the games than others, and even with some character paths versus others. The Scum in our Dark Heresy games always felt out of place, where the Psykers in any variant felt like perfect icons of the extremes of the setting.

Development

I don't think there's been any other game I've played that handles character development as deeply as the Warhammer roleplaying games do; the career paths are fantastic at providing opportunities and giving direction, though they were toned down a little in favor of a more free-form approach to development in later versions.

One interesting thing that the Warhammer games do is that they often encourage players to spend a certain amount on advances before they unlock their next round of goodies; Dark Heresy stands out the most for this in my memory (which is why the link above goes to first edition Dark Heresy), and there were real decisions to make that encouraged players to be really careful with how they planned.

Even within a single character class, it was possible to be really broad or really specialized, and that was incredible.

Wrapping Up

A roleplaying game that doesn't let players have a character that develops a distinct identity usually fails to encourage deep roleplaying and instead is judged by the merit of its mechanics alone to the detriment of the players' experience.

Developing strong character identity can be seen by making clear options that are meaningful, and providing a way for those options to be carried forward as the storyline unfolds.