Tell me about your character.

No, really I want to know. This is my challenge to anyone who stumbles on this blog. The only rules are below, you can be as brief or as long as you want. The idea is to make a character without all the trappings of a system.

What I want to see- An original character, any genre…. even a mixed genre. That’s right just make something up that you would like to play in a RPG. You could even mash-up different sources for this.

What I don’t want to see-  stats, rankings, or numbers of any sort (excepting age perhaps although you could boil that down to young, old, and so on ).

 

So, tell me about Your  character. drop it in the comments section below, I can’t wait to see what you awesome folks come up with.

Saturday Character generation, round two.

Once again I had no players so yet again I ventured into character design.  This time I decided to make a character for Little Fears Nightmare Edition.  I only made one character because the section following was a spot of advice on how to a good player which got me to thinking about the past.  Also how to apply that to the now.

I am not one of those individuals who is good at meeting new people, I do it but it makes me intensely uncomfortable.  Well at least in the past it has, but the thing is I do it everyday at work.  So I realized with my years of Game Mastering it should compel me to do my part for the hobby and get out there and convert some people to the world of pen and paper Role-Playing Games.  Also because if I want to game and there are no experienced players willing to play, then I need to make some new players.

Little Fears character generation

Little fears is a game about childhood terrors with an age range of 6-12 years old.  Lets face it, playing a kid can be hard for us to do.  Most gamers are well beyond the twelve year old boundary, those that are about twelve and just starting out in this hobby are probably playing D&D.  That being said, by the end of the process I had a character I would feel comfortable playing.  The Character sheet is laid out in accord with the creation process and seeps flavor, it looks like one of those “hello my name is…” questionnaires that elementary school children fill out.  The back of the book gives a bunch of sheets for tracking all the narrative and mechanical bits for both characters and for G.M. use.

First thing you choose is your concept, and LFNE gives a list of examples that are so cool that I wanted to play them all.  They are all typical kid Archetypes and are well described.

The second thing you do is choose your age.  This as I mentioned earlier is a range from 6-12, and it determines the points you get to put in your “abilities” which are in this game your basic stats.  I liked this because your age simply and beautifully influences how skilled you are….but it also determines your belief in reverse.  Belief is your ability to have and use the magic of childhood.  In a nutshell, the older you are the more physically/mentally competent you are but the less belief you have.  The younger you are the more magic you have, but the less physically/mentally competent you are.

Character creation is a bit labor intensive but not because of calculations.  This is time well spent in building a character that has a solid foundation.  Players who are used to less detailed character creation will have a harder time with this.

The whole process went smoothly except for one small thing.  I had a problem coming up with two sub Qualities to match my main Quality.  The book gives great examples of these and if you choose something straight out of the book then this isn’t even an issue.  The main Quality was easy, like everything else it comes from your concept.  the sub Qualities are basically your skills and should reflect the main. (see how this flows?  concept leads to qualities, qualities lead to sub Qualities.  Cool eh?) but I had trouble inventing my own…the only reason this stands out is because everything else was so easy.  I eventually came up with them, but I think at this point a fellow player or G.M. with an outside opinion would have made this a non-issue.

In conclusion, I had a blast making a character by myself and I think making characters as a group would be as much fun as playing the game itself.

Character Generation

Last night was game night and I had no players as I had kind of suspected would happen.  I thought it was likely a couple of guys I know would be coming over, but they were a no show.

So as promised I made characters for two of the game systems I haven’t tried yet.  the revamped World of Darkness core book, and Savage Worlds Explorers Edition.  Next are my views on both systems Character Generation.

First up is World of Darkness, I suspected this would be an easy build as I am familiar with the the original rules and I knew they didn’t drastically change.  I decided to make a retired surgeon and launched into the build.  The points (dots) distribution is similar to the original rules and I moved easily through this.  Then I moved on to skills and here I hit a snag.  I had too many dots…yes thats right I had more dots then skills that made sense.  Mental skills weren’t too bad, I took a high medicine and some points in skills like science and academics.  Physical skills were a killer though nothing really made sense with  my concept and in the Social section there wasn’t a whole lot either…SO I made a concept change.  After looking at the options I decided to make him a young surgeon who worked at the local hospital during the day and did charity work a couple nights during the week at the local free clinic.  His hobbies include getting away from it all by camping.  It was pretty easy to generate a character, but I really think the dots to skills ratio was a bit off.  It may just have been my concept however, I would have to try a Police officer or something else to see.

Second was Savage Worlds.  This was ridiculously easy to do, in fact after I made the character I kept looking at the character sheet to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.  It had the perfect balance of choice and limits in all stages of design making the whole process fluid.  My only complaints are 1) I had to do a lot of page flipping (scrolling in my case since this was a PDF) back and forth and 2) the steps of character creation were out of order for easiest creation.  I will say that I am very excited to actually try this out in play…now if only I had some players who wanted to show up.

Next weekend I will have the same ultimatum as this one, 8:30 pm be here and game or I will make more characters or do something else game related.