For some RPG players, the concept of building a character seems like an unecessary chore. Sometimes I agree, and I happily admit to a healthy appreciation of pre-generated characters. Because pregenerated characters are possible, some people might wonder why they would ever bother building a character. Here are 5 good reasons.
It takes longer to learn a character if you didn't build it yourself. Suppose you're at a convention, and you go to a game, and the games master hands you a fifth-level character. You look it over, and it seems straightforward. You can handle this. Then you flip it over and find the back of the sheet is filled with skills, talents, spells you've never heard of, languages, features, and traits. That's a lot of data to process!
When you build a character, you usually start at level 1, so there's less initial data. More importantly, that data only exists on the sheet because you put it there. You've read about why and how to get those abilities and properties. As you level up gradually through play, you add new elements, bit by bit. You pick up new abilities, examine them, learn about them, and eventually feel comfortable with your character. You know which numbers to add, what spells you have, what abilities you possess.
A character without context is meaningless, so you end up referring to game mechanics when making character choices. During character creation, you absorb parts of the rules not only about your character, but about how the game works generally. You learn the game rules while building your character.
Even when you're building somewhat blindly, you're usually inspired to ask questions about the choices you're being offered. Through the process of making what seem like arbitrary decisions, you discover how your choices will influence your game play. You might learn about subsystems within the game specific to your character, you might learn how investigation works, or combat, or stealth.
Whether you absorb rules or just understand the game world better, or you just get a sense for how the game works, you're learning the context in which your character exists.
Getting rewarded always feels good, obviously. Better stats, higher dice rolls, more frequent victories, level-ups, and score boosts are always appreciated. That's why they exist in games. But I think it feels even better when you've built the character receiving the reward.
It's subtle, but when you know the sacrifices you made (why one score isn't as high as another, for example), then getting rewarded, and probably getting to balance those scores, feels meaningful. It's not just abstract number optimization. It's about what you or your character had to sacrifice.
Why wasn't my charisma as high as my dexterity at the start of the game, and why has it increased now? Why wasn't my ranged weapon skill as good as my social skills at first, but now it's improving?
There's depth to earning rewards in roleplaying games.
These aren't pure game abstractions. They're supposed to say something about your character. That character sheet is the character's life. Building it from the ground up makes rewards meaningful. You can approximate this with pre-generated characters, but I don't think it feels quite as significant.
If you don't build your own character, you might not play what you actually want to play. This is true even when the pregenerated character feels "fine."
I've built characters specifically for people, considering their interests and what they seem to enjoy in real life and fiction. I've handed them these characters, and they've had fun. Months later though, they build their own characters, and it's completely different from what I would have expected.
When I give people characters because they don't want to learn the build process yet, don't have time, or are late additions to the game, it works fine. It's acceptable, even appreciated. But I suspect that deep down, there's a missed opportunity. What would they have come up with own? What do they actually want to play?
In fact, oftentimes people don't even know what they want to play. But when faced with a rulebook full of choices and asked "Which one speaks to you right now?" sometimes you get surprising results. Obviously, sometimes it's predictable. The computer programmer plays the programmer archetype. No surprise there. But sometimes it's completely unexpected, something out of character for the player that surprises everyone, including themselves. You never know what you'll discover, and sometimes you land on something unexpectedly fun that no pregenerated character could have satisfied.
Building a character involves creativity, though I don't want to overemphasize this point. It can start sounding mystical, like it's a magical process where you form an important bond and express your innermost self through your build. It can be that for people who want it to be, but it doesn't have to be.
I've been building characters since grade school lunch hours, creating characters for early D&D editions that I never actually played. For me, it's not a ritual or deeply personal creative process. It's just something I do, and it's something I've been doing for a long time. I do a good amount of solo RPG play, and building a character is similar to that, for me. I work through this particular game loop (the character build) before moving to the other loop (playing the narrative part of the game.)
Sometimes I build characters I never intend to run because it's fun to create them. It's a creative exercise, not necessarily a personal one. For some people, it is deeply personal, like they're building an alternative identity within a character. Either way, it's a special process, and fun.
Whether it's emotional, mental, or something in between, character building is a fairly unique aspect of gaming. It almost feels like accounting. You have to build the scaffolding you need to interact with the rest of the game. Not everyone realizes the character build process has the potential to be as creative and fun as the rest of the game.
My 5 great reasons aside, character building isn't for everyone all the time. Some people don't see the value, don't want to spend time on it, or have more important things to do. Luckily, there's usually somebody close at hand who's happy to provide a pregenerated character when needed.
But some people don't realize the potential of character building. Everyone should probably try it once or twice. I wouldn't insist on it, and I'm happy to play with people regardless of whether they participate in every aspect of the game. You don't need to build a character to truly play a tabletop RPG. But there's potential there. For someone new to RPGs, it can be a valuable experience.
If anyone has remote interest in the process, it's worth trying. You can build characters at work during lunch breaks, or while sitting around the house with no-one else to play with. It's a legitimate way to play a game that's fun, imaginative, engaging, and remarkably comfortable.