Character creation (also character generation / character design) is the process of defining a game character or other character. Typically, a character's individual strengths and weaknesses are represented by a set of statistics. Games with a fictional setting may include traits such as race, class, or species. Games with a more contemporary or narrower setting may limit customization to physical and personality traits. This is usually used in role-playing games. Role-playing games Character creation is typically the first step taken by the players (as opposed to the gamemaster) in preparation for a game. The result of character creation is a direct characterization that is recorded on a character sheet. In its most comprehensive form, it includes not only a game-specific representation of the character's physical, mental, psychological, and social properties in terms of statistics but also often less formal descriptions of the character's physical appearance, personality, personal back-story ("background"), and possessions. Often during play, only a character's appearance is explicitly described, while other traits are characterized indirectly, with the exact statistics known to the character's player and the game master, but not necessarily to other players. Character advancement refers to the improvement of a character's statistics later in the game. The player will modify existing statistics and add new ones, usually by spending experience points or when gaining a new experience level. Character advancement typically uses similar rules as character creation. In order to avoid unrealistic sudden changes in character concept, changes during character advancement are often more limited than during initial character creation. For example, in many games attributes are harder (if not impossible) to change during character advancement. The term character development is, in some contexts, used interchangeably with character advancement (in a sense similar to professional development or Human Development), whereas elsewhere character development refers instead to the player's indirect characterization of the character through role-playing (in a sense similar to film developing). Making decisions A character's initial attribute scores are typically either generated randomly or determined by distributing character points, though some systems use a combination of both. Some game systems also allow attribute scores to be increased later in the game similarly to skills, usually via a predetermined system. Characters can also gain a number of skills. What types of skills the characters can learn and how easily they can be learned usually depends on if the character creation system is "class based" or "skill