I’m using TiddlyWiki, whereas the others are using MindMan Personal. Both methods use freeware and take up little memory.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/

It has GM eyes only part on each page. The players can each have a page for their characters, there’s an NPC tracker, and an adventure log.

The only drawback: if you have the free access, then your page is visible to the public. If you pay a fee, then your page is private.

I have 3 or 4 players that I think would make use of it, and another who might use his laptop to review things during the game — kind of like if the players’ characters were keeping a journal. We used to have one player who kept infamous notes — good info, but also lots of snide or humorous observations of his comrades.

@BryanB – Family and close NPCs are useful in just about every system. Asking about upbringing and siblings is a good way to gather some good NPCs who can motivate the PCs later.

The watching the interaction between players is a great idea to get background on them and such. Very cool.

I like players to answer questions about their PC’s family. I like to know what a PC fears the most or what their goals and ambitions might be. I think it is fun to ask about a PC’s mentors or other people that had an impact on the PC when he was “growing up.” This can be a positive or negative impact on that PC’s development.

In our current series, we have Isao Shin and his uncle Massaki who tried to guide him about the Force, while both of them were on the run from Sith assassins during the purge. We have Doumar Creef who was haunted by the loss of his parents during the bombings of Taris. His uncle had been a mentor figure with both positive and negative results. And Jaris Nakor was a Corellian noble with Force Sensitivity whose biological father was a Jedi Master prior to the Jedi Civil War, a fact that Jaris was not aware of at the start of play.

During a series…

I like it when PC banter adds depth to the PCs. In my current series we have learned that Jaris Nakor blames the rifles for being “bent” when failing to hit the target. It couldn’t be him right? We also have Doumar Creef that tends to claim the use of “suppressing fire” when his shots are going off target.

Doumar also has the tendency to find cover first and shoot later, a sound tactic to be sure but it has become a character trademark. This has led to fun exchanges like when Doumar tried to roll a dining table as moving cover, but fumbled it badly and had the table roll away from him. Jaris yelled over to Doumar, “Do you need Katrina (younger sister of Jaris) to come move that table for you?”

So depth before play and during play are great things.

http://www.geocities.com/_suhuy_/amber_stories.html

Alis’s stories under “strength” are mine.

Something I’ve thought about doing for my new campaign is setting up a campaign Wiki where I can put background information on place the players go, the plot lines, etc. Then also have a page for each character where they or I can put notes in about their background. We usually have 2-3 laptops around during a session so it could be useful.

Have you, Scott, or anyone else ever tried such a thing, or know someone who has? The closest I ever came was having a Geocities page (telling you how long ago this campaign was) for Alis my Amber character with her stories posted.

That scrying mirror sounds great– a way to consistently work good questions into the game.

Here are some I have used in the past with success.

Shadowrun — A list of questions taken from the rule book and some of my own made up ones. I give the option of filling it out or not to the players, but they always fill it out as I bribe them with extra build points for answering most of the questions. Great way to make some runs personal for the players. Love all the hooks it can give.

D&D — My last campaign of three years (just started a new one) I had them just give me a three sentence background. Let them write whatever they wanted. I didn’t expect the campaign to be much more than a few sessions at the time. Nothing offered for doing so, but they all did.

D&D — Again, my last campaign; I let the players get their hands on a scrying mirror that could be used once a day. A player could ask it a question, the mirror would mist up and then show a scene of some sort that would answer the question in an often ambiguous way, but usually enough info was gotten that they players had actionable intelligence about something. The hook was that after their question was answered the mirror would ask the character a question (I kept a list of questions I wanted to ask about each character to fill in their backgrounds). If they didn’t answer or answered with a lie (they could be evasive just as the mirror was) the mirror would break resulting in a nasty curse. They never broke the mirror, used it often and it gave me a way of helping them when they got stuck on something and let me and the players flesh out their characters quite a bit. I even got some NPCs out of it and plenty of adventure hooks that were on a personal level for the PCs.

Aside from those, I’ve used with good success the idea from the article of having NPCs converse with the PCs to learn their motivations for actions or inactions.

Oh, and one more, though I had this from the player’s side. It was an Amber play by email game. During the attribute auction the GM required a short story that would explain the reason the attribute was better. For my character I had a childhood bullying story (strength) and a mountain climb on a dare from her outdoors mentor (endurance). By the time the campaign began I had a firm grasp of who the character was.

-Zig

And thanks for the checklist of “ways to get players to define their character”. With some players, the GM needs to find a way to coax the character out of the player.

For a different take on questions, hop on over to the Cannon Puncture 70 podcast, where they expand on the idea of questions shaping the world. They brought up a few games I haven’t had a chance to play– like Dread, which has only questions and answers as the character sheet.