Character questionnaires aren’t new tech by any means; even before they started to be ingrained into character creation and session zero procedures, lists of key questions have been used extensively in TTRPGs to give players a starting point from where they could figure out who they wanted their character to be outside of mechanical determinants. In recent years, though, the character questionnaire has developed into a procedure all its own, with some interesting tech for making the process more specific to both TTRPGs in general and the given TTRPG a questionnaire was packaged with. One character questionnaire I’ve used recently, the persona generation questionnaire from the DIE RPG, is both powerful enough and generalizable enough that I want to break down what it does in an attempt to make writing a character questionnaire for your own session zero easier.
Continue reading System Hack: Making a Useful Character Questionnaire