‘But, say, Apocalypse World? Very, very tightly focused. You get some outward choices when you create your character — your face and eyes and body — but I have found it’s a pretty hard game to proactively characterize in. I can go in wanting to play a charming Brainer but gosh that violation glove is gonna go to waste if I really am insisting on being a “good guy.”‘

I am now thinking of Monsoon, my poor Battlebabe, who tried to talk and bluff her way out of every problem, and always ended up with a pile of bodies and a heap of new debt to the Angel…

There’s also the “steal an archetype” method, which works very well for NPCs and for convention games, and can be the seed around which a real character accretes in games that favour “reactive” models. My friend Joe and I once decided we were going to play Tulio and Miguel from The Road to El Dorado in a D&D game that we were playing with a GM we didn’t know well. I played in a game of Atomic Robo a little while ago where my friend Thomas made a character who was basically Captain America with the numbers filed off, and he was hemming and hawing about it, until he just decided to go with it. In both cases, the experience of play, the internal preferences of the player. and the other voices at the table eventually molded those “stolen” characters into something more unique, but it meant that the players always knew the answer to “what would my character do in situation X?”