While riding the bus this morning and listening to my Creative Zen Vision M, jamming out to some sweet tunes by Manowar (seriously, if you haven’t heard their song Courage and you’re a fan of inspiring metal, check it out ASAP), I had a really simple yet excellent idea to try out next time a player brings forth a min-maxed Combat Zombie character into one of my games.

As a game master, I prefer that players enter my game with characters possessed of solid concepts and lots of good and chewy story fodder, like relationships, opinions, financial investments, and personal histories, to name just a few. Aspects like these give me a lot of juice to fuel my ideas, and the players only benefit from these considerations in the long run.

However, I don’t like saying no to a character just because it lacks these things. I like to think that just about any basic character sheet can potentially be turned into roleplaying gold, if only the right amounts of inspirational creative pressure are added to the right spots. I enjoy the gaming company of several individuals who often struggle with their character concepts when they surpass the base mechanical aspects, and sometimes I struggle as well with helping them grasp deeper ideas and attach them to that character sheet.