I can certainly try to help. I’ve run Dread more than a few times and here’s an example of one of the more popular characters for my “Beneath a Broken Wing” scenario:
You are a blue collar worker for a manufacturing company. What is your job?
What type of movies do you enjoy?
Where do you eat every Saturday night?
Why is your Saturday dinner date not your significant other?
This is an expensive flight. How did you afford it?
Why is the company paying for your hotel, but nothing else?
20 years ago you woke up with no memory. Where did you wake up?
How did you try pick up the pieces of your life?
Why are you traveling to Japan?
What do you really hope to find there?
What is your name?
I won’t just leave it there, though. Let me give you the rundown of some of the reasons I came up with some of these questions.
The first question (“You are a blue collar worker for a manufacturing company. What is your job?”) defines the character quite specifically, but leaves enough room to allow the player to specialize. It’s up to me how that applies in-game. The game for which this is designed has no need for many of the specialized answers to that question; When he’s stranded on an island, does it matter that he was an expert at mechanical calibration? What it gives me is an insight into that characters aptitude for one thing or another. A blue-collar worker who’s an expert at calibration expert is going to understand something about material fabrication, leverage, safety, first aid. I can use this to have them face something that is either right up their alley or something they really can’t do. When it comes to dicelessness, that’s all I have.
“What type of movies do you enjoy?” is another fun question, especially in the context of being stranded on an island. The inspiration for that was “What type of video game do you play every Saturday?” I liked that question because it caused the gamer character to fall prey to video game-inspired hubris; he believed that everything he was doing to stop the terrorists was working, and he thought it was working because he was used to it working in the games he played. Well, it worked for the common sense actions, so it gave the character confidence, thus it had a profound benefit for the player and character. It worked when he felt he had to pistol-whip a civilian for information. However, video games don’t always teach you proper military strategy and tactics—and they certainly don’t teach you how to dodge bullets—so he eventually got captured and tortured.
The next two questions are linked, and they help to determine a little more of the character’s day-to-day life. They can even be completely historical, in that it’s something that the character doesn’t do anymore. In this scenario, though, this helped me understand his personality because I knew where he liked to eat and who his non-romantic friends were. It helps me understand what the character would rather be doing.
I give the character a little leeway with the next two questions, because they’re relatively mundane. A blue-collar guy doesn’t just decide, on a whim, to fly to Japan. He could be flying there for an interview, on a business trip, or he could be having a total mental breakdown and decided to just cash out his whole life savings and disappear. This is where I start to really figure out what the player and character would do under mundane-yet-extreme circumstances. In Dread, I need to know that because after a few minutes into the game circumstances are going to be decidedly abnormal.
This is the end of page 1, by the way. A series of relatively simple questions that can be answered with as much detail as the player wants. I know the player’s and character’s perception and boundaries of normal, and can begin customizing a few of the more fluid aspects of the game to suit them in either a good or a bad way.
Let’s continue…
“20 years ago you woke up with no memory. Where did you wake up?” is on the top of page 2. This is not by accident. The first page is rather mundane, actually, covering the topics of job and money. Then it hits them completely out of the blue (if they’re following the rules and starting at the beginning of the questionnaire)—they are playing a horror game. There is an undercurrent of “wrong” about things. However, notice how I do not ask the player for details on what happened that caused his amnesia. He can speculate, of course…
“How did you try pick up the pieces of your life?” directly follows, but notice that the word
try is there. They might not have been successful. If they are getting into the spirit of the game, the page 2 top question has put the player in a suitably fatalistic mood, and the answer will reflect that. If they write that their character completely succeeded in putting their life back together, that’s a very nice shatter point for later in the game, when they either be shown how wrong they were, or that they were right, but it’s all going to be taken away from them again.
The last three questions are actually identical amongst all characters for this scenario.
1. It ties them together (“Why are you traveling to Japan?”). In the scenario for which I wrote this, they are all on a plane to Japan, which crashes. They all have a reason to be on the plane, albeit a soon-to-be irrelevant one. This solves the problem of “why would we all be together?” All games have their own ways of answering this question, and this is my way of doing it in Dread.
It also gives me the ability to set the stage for the adventure. I put them all on the plane, and I crash the plane. I put them on an island. I need a reason for them to stick together, and that’s why I have the follow-up question.
2. It provides potential conflicts and collaborations with the other characters (“What do you really hope to find there?”). For example, a man seeking a strong, supportive companion might find that in another character, either romantically or otherwise. There might be a go-it-alone character who was traveling to just start a new life and wants nothing to do with anyone, while someone else could be that supportive, leave-no-man-behind character. This question lets me pair those characters as allies and adversaries.
It also might let me give them the promise of getting their heart’s desire, and at some horrible cost. They might find that their heart’s desire is to merely survive, and they might find that their darker side will sacrifice one of the party. They might learn they possess a strength that pulls everyone together. Of course, they might decide that the cultists aren’t so crazy after all, and they can have everything they want if they just drink the Kool-Aid…
3. It gives them identity (“What is your name?”). This can be as easy as giving them a name that matches them most comfortably. However, it can allow them to be a minority, a prejudiced class, or it can define their gender, and that’s in the simplest of cases.
While it can be considered stereotyping in day-to-day life, a name is very important in a role playing game. Some of my players have clearly explained why they are named something, for example:
“Neha Smith. Neha is a female Indian name, even though my character is caucasian. Neha never really liked the extremely common feeling of her last name.”
Naturally, this gave me some more to play with when the bad things started to happen.
I hope this helps.
Though of course, "Alien" is always more preferable than "Aliens" in this system, it's still good times and I am glad it worked well!