Dreams, Hopes & Aspirations

Last week saw the start of my new roleplaying group. As part of our first session, I wanted to insure that the players could invest themselves not just in the game but the characters they were using. I'm handling character creation a bit differently from most established roleplaying systems and I plan on detailing how I did that in a future post.

For now, I want to talk about PC investment via goal creation. After the statistical part of character creation was completed, I asked each player to come up with 2 features for their character - a desire/dream and a "secret".

The desire/dream was to be something that their character wanted. Be it a life-long aspiration to do something, go somewhere or be someone, I wanted the players to think about what their characters saw as long-term goals and hopefully something we could work towards as part of this campaign.

The "secret" was to be something that the character would not initially reveal to anyone without an established level of trust. This could be something that the player character did not want to reveal for fear of moral bias or judgement. It could also be something that was kept secret for any reason that the player wanted to create. I put no structure or design upon this, as I wanted the players to think of it as wholly their own creation.

I gave the players the option of sharing their desires/dreams with the remainder of the group. The secrets I asked them to only be shared with me. I do plan on using both of these character features extensively in our campaign.

I'll be sure to share the progress of how these two character features were encompassed in our games in future updates.