A Pause before Character Creation

We’ve done a lot of work so far. We’ve looked at what kind of game we want to play. We’ve looked at games in that genre that work and make the levelling up system fun, and we’ve modelled a way we’re going to keep track of everything.

Before we get to the fun part, character creation, let’s review our guiding principles.

1. I want this to be fun and easy, something I can track easily in a paper planner.
2. I want something flexible, that I can change if and when I need to along the way without feeling like I’ve lost a lot of progress.
3. I want something that focuses on the everyday, something that will help me be more present in the day to day of my life, and will help me romanticise it.

I know the kind of game I’m playing, a vaguely fantasy RPG that focuses on building up skills in my preferred play style.

And we have our basic mechanics:

1. My character will have multiple jobs that will level up over time, based on how much work I put into that job. Each job will represent something I want to focus on or improve in.
2. To keep it simple, I'm going to focus on no more than 3 to 5 jobs at once.
3. At any time, I can change my focus and swap one job out for another. If I swap out a job, I do not lose the gained xp/levels in that job.
4. XP is gained through doing tasks that support one of the jobs I have chosen.

Now that we have an idea of how this system works, we can start creating our character.

That’s a lot, and it’s taken effort to get here. Good job.

Why Create a Character?

Some creators who gamify say ‘I’m just playing myself’, and that’s fine. If it works for them, great. I think creating a character would work better for me.

One of my guiding principles here is romanticising my daily life. Romanticising means treating something as if it’s better than it really is, and, in this context, I mean it in an aspirational kind of way. I want my life to be better, so I pretend it already is better. I’m playing a version of myself who already has it put together.

Remember, gamifying is about telling yourself a story that is going to motivate you to move ahead. Numbers on the page aren’t going to motivate you if you don’t buy into the story you are trying to tell.

Every RPG has a character screen, with details of the character, stats, equipment, skills, you name it, it’s all there. And the amount of customisation you can have in game is crazy. There’s a reason a lot of endgame in FFXIV is getting the pretty armour for your glamour plates. That is, make your armour look like something cool, but you get the status benefits of good armour.

Creating a character is also a reflective process, that will let you look back and see your progress as you go through the year. You aren’t going to update your character profile everyday, only every month or so. This is to help you see your life as it stands and what you want to change.

As with any game, the amount of effort you put into character creation is up to you. If you want to play the default character, go ahead, but I think taking a bit of time here is going to help you get the most out of this process.

Now, we don’t have a ton of sliders we can move to get our chin just right, but we can something else.

If you haven’t already, it’s time to get some pen and paper. Next time, we're going to start putting everything and journal.

A quick update on the 31 in January challenge, it should be pretty clear that I've fallen off that wagon and posting everyday is not working for me. That's fine, it happens. I've learned a lot. While I can write everyday, I might not be able to post everyday.

Instead, I'm going to post Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I already have the next couple of entries for Gamification created and queued, so that should go off without a hitch.