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Sometimes that means running straight at the enemy with a two-handed sword, other times it means teleporting to them with a nuclear-powered shotgun in hand. Building around a few personality traits like “loves sneak attacks and charms his way through conversations” or “always goes with the most aggressive combat option available and never tells a lie” and try to fit them into whatever game I’m playing.

I take the same characters with the same basic preferences and attitudes and run with them. What I’ve come to over the past few years has been a system of recycling a few characters over in different games in different genres. Pretty soon, I’ve had the game for over a week and have only managed to see the tutorial area. Or I end up chain-smoking characters, making one, playing around for an hour or so (which barely counts as playing at all when you’re talking about the Fallouts and Dragon Ages of the world), and wandering back to the “new game” screen to try out another one. As I’ve talked about before, I have a tendency to slip into an eternal planning mode - sketching out possible character builds, ideas, and dorky little stories - while never actually sitting down to play any of them out if I’m not careful. They’re my familiar crew, the usual suspects, and while I try and figure out who is going to be the first to explore the irradiated ruins of Boston in Fallout 4, I also have to wonder - am I the only one who does this?Ĭharacter creation is something I love in games, maybe a little too much. A small cast of characters I’ve remade again and again as everything from spacefaring psychic demigods, to mangy vampires skulking around the backstreets of L.A., to members of an up-and-coming band. I never walk into a character creation screen alone.Įvery time I start a new RPG where you have to brew up a character to spend the next 30-80 hours with, I bring a few familiar faces with me.
