Inquisitor Stats, a thing of much debate...

[Kasthan]

The 'kuffal' over Marco's two new characters got me thinking.

How do you come up with stats and what method do you justify them by? 

To this end I propose that each person places their own method and reasoning in this post, but there should be no statements disagreeing with one persons opinion (save that for another topic).

In addition, thoughts upon equipment and abilities can be included, this would possibly improve your post allowing other to further understand your approach.



Personally:
Background is every thing, I start of with a rough idea put some stats and abilities to it then expand upon this. e.g. If character X is a swordsman he might have feint and a high WS, so then I have to go into further detail about how he go to that level of professionalism etc.

I would appear to have most of my characters with lower stats than the rest of the conclave. This comes from the advice I revived from reading Kaled's posts (particularly the lengthy one on B&C). Due to this I use the guidance at the front of the rulebook, almost exclusively. I think that a standard human character that would be in an Inquisitor's entourage (e.g. not a space marine or some assassin) would struggle to get their WS or BS over 70 and and only one should reach over about 65, S and T are difficult to justify over 60 (unless bionics etc), an I of around 55-high 60s, and the other are v. character specific. This is from measures I recon the rule book states.

Maths and probability are used yet they play only a small role in stat selection for, personally, the GM should award bonuses and penalties where necessary.

Character design comes from the background and the model. I need to justify why and how the character does/has what they do. The process of constructing a model often causes me to think deeper into what they would carry and why this would be the case.

I select equipment on the actual model and during pre-construction (through character design).

Abilities come from the background and the design process listed above.



Just to remind you, please don't criticise others about their methods of design. This is topic hopefully will lead to more equal characters because we will "hopefully" understand other peoples approaches better.

[Ferran]

For me it's basically -

1) Think of a miniature (usually a product of imagination, constrained by artistic ability and available options).

2) Build/paint miniature.

3) At some point during stage 2 I'll start to think about background and profile.

During stage 1 and particularly during stage 2 I've usually made some sort of connection with the character and subconsciously or otherwise have started building the profile. At this point I'll open my rulebook and start to weigh up my vision with what is presented in the character section at the back of the book.

I've painted loads of 28mm guardsman/spase marines/aliens, generally the only consideration that I give them are aesthetics - don't tend to think of what they would be if they are real entities but when I do I'm happy to imagine the marines as gods of war, the mortal men as doomed cannon fodder and the aliens as evil/misguided threats. I don't consider game proficiency or anything like that, don't need to.

However when it comes to =][= I'm a bit more discerning. Despite that my characters aren't fully developed by any stretch of the imagination I am unwilling to think of them at either extreme of the spectrum. They aren't super heroes but at the ame time they're certainly not kill fodder either. The first lot I made were elite, hard-bitten survivors, not barely proficient basic military types with a 50/50 chance of doing the job that they're supposed to do. In this respect I'm definately more leaning towards the rulebook (back of) / =][= fluff side of character design - powerful, effective warrior/scholar archetypes.

Having said that though I do find myself leaning towards "weaker", less robust characters. I think it's mainly because as the collection grows, my connection with individual characters dilutes. I plan to trim the current crop back a little, but I want to finish my current miniature before I do this (the last few entries to my warseer blog didn't show much progress on the painting/modelling front - personally I'm not too fond of people updating blogs in this manner, ideally I'd like to see pretty pictures with most blog updates, and I'm trying to update my own blogs in this manner, so the updates are scheduled for the weekend and no earlier).

[Kaled]

My approach to creating a character varies, but normally boils down to concept first or model first.  Either I come up with an idea for a model I like and figure out who the character is afterwards (as with my Calculus-Logi and Ogryn); or I come up with a concept and then figure out how to represent him (as with my ship-board death cultist).  I don't normally consider the character's profile until the model is complete, however I normally find that as I'm building the model I start to work out some elements of their background and personality.

Equipment is normally the easy part of the profile to write - it almost all come straight from the model.  Stats are normally based on the front of the rulebook, but generally my characters are meant to be good at what they do otherwise they're unlikely to be employed in a warband.  Now that I have quite a few characters, I tend to think about how the new one's stats should compare to my existing ones - that way I can at least be reasonably sure that my characters are consistent among themselves, even if they're more or less powerful than other people's. I tend to use special abilities pretty sparingly with most characters having just a couple.

[MarcoSkoll]

I have three ways of creating a character.

The main one is to come up with a concept, then develop it up in into a full character, assigning equipment, stats and abilities as I go. Usually, appearance will sort of deal with creating itself as I go, but if not, I head to a folder on my computer that I keep all kinds of different art in.
The model is put together at the end of this to whatever specifications I've come up with - I sculpt my models as a result, because I don't want to stifle my character creativity by limiting myself to "what parts are available".

One that's been more common lately is looking through other people's art (or, in rare cases, my own) until I find an idea or some combination of ideas that I can envision the basics of a character for. At this point, I can deal with making the profile and model in whatever order appeals.

And then there's the rare case where I suddenly end up creating a model to vague specifications with little idea of what I'm going to do with it. If I can't then really develop up a character that quite works for the model, they have to become NPCs.

~~~~~

As such, my stats are usually justified by the background I've written, rather than by the model - because the model is usually made to fit the background.

When I'm working from a partially/completely preset appearance, such as when I base my model off a piece of art, then I've not got as much freedom on stats, and the background therefore has to be written to take those fixed elements into account (although, I wouldn't have picked the particular artwork if I wasn't happy with the things it "forced" me into). But in the end, it all comes back to the background.

EDIT: Ugh, better read the question next time.

[Lazarus Caladine]

Being an entirely inept sculptor, my characters are exclusively model-driven. Normally I find it's a case of looking in my bitz box or on eBay, thinking which parts would look cool together, and applying glue.
Mostly I use the rulebook archetype stats and alter them slightly to what feels 'right'. However, any particularly shiny equipment or special talents someone has is always explained in their background (I must apologise for lack of any model pics or fluff, my computer monitor is currently being repaired and I'm doing this on my phone).
Personally, I believe that anything reasonably justified in a character's background is fair enough, like a savant with sg 95 but has a high ws because of a family tradition in learning the use of a sword. I do not accept or advocate the use of statements like 'Jim the guardsman found a graviton gun in a ditch one day on patrol on planet grimdark', except in very particular circumstances.

[Inquisitor Cade]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think we may have missed the point of the thread. The question wasn't 'how do you create characters' but 'how do you assign them stats.'

So once you have a concept or a model, how do you decide what they are good at and how good they are at it and so on, and then how do you justify them.

As for me, I'm much the same as Kasthan, background and frount of the LRB, though I am a bit more liberal than him in handing out stats. Ws OR Bs 70 is fairly attainable in my veiw, for a charcter that specialises, and S/T in the 60 is normal rather than in the 70's.

Like him I will justify high stats with a clause in the background, and if moderate stats aren't obvious (eg. Bs 60 for a character without formal weapons training) then I would make sure their skill in that area was evident or explained in the background too.

Kaled has said that a stat should be indicative of the skill and shouldn't need representation in the background, e.g. I see he has a remarkably fast mind as his I is 75. While I agree in theory, I like justifications as otherwise a difference in oppinion about what Ws represents a competant swordsman could lead to messed up games.

[RobSkib]

I have written character sheets for well over a hundred models now, and if there's one thing I've gathered is that different people play differently in different circles, which is pretty much fine until those two circles overlap and you have to have a mutually agreeable middle ground (which is why the Spring Conclave is throwing up a lot of guff about stats).

Some people have differing ideas about what stats entail, and I'd say that for an Inquisitorial warband, I'd say that 70s are a pretty 'attainable' with a small amount of background. However, once your collection begins to expand (or explode, in my case), you naturally start to ease off the stats on your characters, simply because the 'high spectrum' doesn't have enough numbers for all your characters to have different stats!

I am a firm believer that the model should dictate the character sheet - reams of background, drawings and stories might be a nice touch, but IMO should not come before the physical construction of the 54mm counterpart. If a woman is S 75 - I want to be able to see that she is a slab of muscle and sinew and couldn't cross her legs if her life depended on it. Tried and tested, I've found this literal 'eyeballing' of stats on a model tend to work the best, and it also has the minimum amount of drafts. Without the model, you can argue and debate the minutae of stats going up and down, but when the model arrives you might suddenly decides he looks uber-cool with twin pistols rather than that superduper daemon sword and massive WS you had planned, so what do? Change hundreds of pages of history and stats?