Character Sheets: From Dusk til Dawn

I have gotten so good at spinning up detailed character sheets in like 4 minutes. Our games have to stay so flexible, I never know when the story is going to abandon a PC, or some minor character is going to be promoted in importance. Any time a player is assigned to a character from the movie who isn't in the very first scene, there's the danger that the story will have already taken a turn away from that character by the time we get to them.

Now, I always like to take some time getting the main characters from the movie correct, as it makes a big difference to our verisimilitude to the movie. But when people are jumping into minor characters, or people we never saw on screen, I gotta be able to whip those up real quick, because I'm not walking into a session with 95 finished character sheets, one for every person they might meet. And it's a process of just throwing skills and attributes that feel right to my mental picture of the character. It shouldn't be hard, but I feel like too many prospective GM's psych themselves out of that part of the process.

From Dusk Till Dawn was specifically set up to play with that mechanic. We had nearly a hundred named PC's sitting on a giant hand-drawn map. Players had the choice of anyone alive to jump into. I had a little rubric (which sadly I think I've lost), which translated names into one of several templates and subtracted or added points (plus I would spend a minute peppering some additional skills in there to make it feel more varied). The result is that we can play quickly with a field of countless playable characters, all of which I can print out in three minutes, and of which will feel varied and specific.

The point I'm sort of rambling towards is that character sheets are a gift. The story emerges and flows from them, but really, all you need to do is throw some ideas on a page, and the players will find their own mental picture of this character based on what you've given them. It's one of my favorite aspects of storytelling in this genre which almost has no analogue in any other type of storytelling. It's fully cooperative between the player and the GM. Now a lot of campaigns have players design their own character sheets, and that's fun in it's own way. But it certainly wouldn't work for our game, and I worry it creates a bit too much attachment to the character. Makes it less fun for bad things to happen to the players, which for me is essential to the way I tell these stories.

Anyway, I've rambled on too long. Enjoy the character sheets for Dusk til Dawn!