Character creation

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RPG Blog Carnival: Life and Death in RPGs… – Pt. 1 – Life

March 4, 2011 in blogs, Gaming, PCs, Resources by Fitz | 16 comments

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival topic is Life and Death in RPGs (see here for the kickoff article) and shockingly enough in the insanity of my last few weeks, I have some ideas to share…

Let’s start with Life, and then we’ll work on Death in the next post.

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For me, “life” in RPGs is more than deciding who lives and dies in a combat or trying to keep my PCs alive. It’s the roleplaying side of the house that keeps me interested and excited. So I try to define more than what a character can do and delve into why they can do it, when they learned it, and how they learned it or use it.

In the original Moebius Adventures system, we broke character creation into two large chunks – Childhood and Professions. Childhood covered everything up to age 12 or 14. And a character’s childhood might be very different than their choices of Profession. Look at a character like Conan. He was a normal child until he watched his family and village get slaughtered and was then taken as a slave. You think that might have shaped his attitudes, knowledge, and skills a bit?

So I propose that when folks are creating characters that they think about it in those two major buckets. What did the character learn as a child that has stuck with them into adulthood? And what choices might they have made as far as their professions go (or what choices were made for them)? Obviously not all skills you learn as a kid are useful. But many we continue to develop throughout our entire lives.

You could even go so far as to build in a tree of known associates. Who did your character grow up with? Have they kept in contact with any of those folks? Or did they part ways? Was it an amicable departure or one with enmity? Is it someone you might encounter during a game? What happens if a childhood enemy faces you as an adult? How is that different from a random monster encountered in an adventure?

Perhaps your character did or didn’t have a great family life growing up and they simply wanted to get out and explore the world or get away from what they knew before… What events shaped the decisions to learn particular skills? Did your parents teach you to forage and hunt or were you orphaned early on and forced to scrounge for food, learning what you could to stay alive? Did you gain any scars from early practice of weapons skills? Did you witness the death of a family member that you still seek revenge for years later (think Inigo Montoya)?

Not only do you end up with a basic history of your character to go with the skills they have, but you end up with contacts you can leverage in-game and that your GM can use to help tie things together and make them easier to relate to for your character. It works to the benefit of both the player and the GM to develop more backstory to better inform future events.

Yes, I know that D&D only gives you a few skill points here and there. Other games have the same issue. But slot a third or even a half of those skills towards defining your knowledge from childhood and you’ll end up with a better idea of where your character came from.

Next time we’ll talk about Death in a variety of ways. Stay tuned for part 2!

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Additions to WR&M for Immortals’ Wake

November 17, 2010 in Books, Immortals' Wake, Rules, WR&M by Fitz | 1 comment

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at extending the already cool system for Warrior, Rogue, and Mage for my new project. I’m trying to incorporate a few of the concepts we developed for Moebius Adventures as well as some new skills and talents.

For example, at character creation time in the base W,R,&M book, you get 3 skills and a talent. I’d like to tweak that slightly so that players pick skills based on different broad age groupings. So if I’m playing a young character, I should pick 2 skills with an eye towards childhood and 1 with an eye towards adulthood. Or if I’m playing an older character, perhaps only direct 1 skill to childhood and the other 2 to maturity.

I’m not quite sure yet how that will play out. I suspect that most players with such a small set of skills would focus on the usable skills for the character as opposed to how their childhood went. Perhaps this will be an optional rule players can use to help them define the life of their characters up to the present. I definitely don’t want it to get in the way of what players want – just to propose it as an option.

Beyond that, some of the new skills I’m considering adding include:

  • Animals (Mage): The ability to train and control animals. This would mostly be for domesticated animals, but could be expanded to wild animals as well.
  • Art (Mage): The ability to create a visual, auditory, or other sensory work to evoke an emotion in an audience.
  • Food (Mage): The ability to cook, prepare, and preserve food for consumption or storage.
  • Games (Rogue): The ability to play various games and apply strategy.
  • Performance (Rogue): The ability to perform (via acting, dance, or some other skill) in front of a crowd.
  • Wilderness (Warrior): The ability to hunt, track, trap, and live off the land in the wilderness to survive.

In addition, there are thirteen different wizardry skills ranging from Alchemy to the Supernatural, each with a particular spell book and magical philosophy. The first book will only cover a couple of these more closely tied to the sea – Supernatural Magic (similar to Voodoo) and Divine Magic (prayers to deities or forces of nature to help with a particular aim). I figure sailors (in fiction at least) have always been a superstitious lot and can use all the help they can get when rough seas come around.

Talent-wise, I’ve only really come up with one so far:

  • Healing: The ability to heal oneself or others using Mana.

I’ve thought about a few other possible talents that may come out of the old Random Fates list from the Moebius Adventures books, but haven’t defined them so far. These would be relatively minor talents such as the ability to see ghosts, knowing what direction they are pointing in regardless of position, and so on.

The existing skill lists in the base W,R,&M book are perfectly open-ended, so I don’t want to add too much clutter to it. My goal is to define these additional options for the rules and focus on the world of Immortals’ Wake. Each subsequent book will further define additional magic and talents as well as flesh out additional areas.

What do you think?

(By the way, if you’re looking for more details about WR&M – check out the website here at Stargazer Games.)

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Playtest Update, Food for Thought, and a Story

October 29, 2009 in Design, Events, Playtesting by Fitz | 3 comments

Hi all…

So Tuesday night, through the Colorado Springs RPG Meetup group and the nice folks at Gamer’s Haven, I ran a sample adventure as a playtest opportunity. We had 6 folks, plus myself, so we had a great turnout this time and an amazing amount of input.

  • RPG DiceShannon was nice enough to arrange everything on the CSprings Meetup board and book a table at Gamer’s Haven. She played the thief Kress.
  • Johnny played the fighter Hans, battle axe in hand.
  • JP played Father Goul, the priest of the group.
  • Frank played the guard Rod.
  • Nathan played the huntswoman Andra.
  • And Arpie played the huntsman Andrax. (I’d run out of characters, so we improvised.)

It was a great mix of players, some of whom have game design experience, which led to some very interesting conversations about game mechanics and impressions of the system based on the quick start summary of the rules and the character sheets.

Among the food for thought provided was:

  • The d12 mechanic for characteristic and skill resolution didn’t work well. After a 45 minute discussion of bell curve distributions for die rolls, we ended up with using 2d6 for the rest of the night. A 2 or 3 was a critical success and an 11 or 12 was a critical failure. The goal was to roll as low as possible under a target characteristic score (either the characteristic we’re “checking” or the highest characteristic for the skill).
  • The “feet per action” mechanic didn’t really work when we moved it to a hex map. We changed it to “hexes” per action, where a hex was 5 feet across. I believe some of this was due to a misunderstanding about how possible actions worked in combat, but we just went with it.
  • It came up that it would be nice if characters who were cooperating on a task requiring a skill (such as Tracking) gained a bonus for working together. Since party collaboration is a great goal in gaming, we decided that if cooperation was declared, each character would roll their skill separately and gain a +1 on the attempt. And all characters cooperating would then gain the best roll for that action.
  • The other main thing that came up was that 16 characteristics seems like far too many and the Random characteristics (Beauty, Wealth, Family, and Luck) should roll into other characteristics (like Beauty could be considered part of Charisma) or become separate entities (like Luck could simply be a pool of points a player could buy with XP or at character creation).

I think all of this is great. I really appreciate having the input of other folks. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been wearing blinders when dealing with some of the “system” aspects, so it’s nice to see things with fresh eyes.

The whole process has kick-started some serious noodling over the rules and how I could simplify the mechanics to keep things fast, easy, and open so players can focus on roleplaying and creativity. We’ll see where it leads me.

Man on FireI owe a big thank you to Shannon and everyone who showed up, as well as Gamer’s Haven for providing us a table on a Tuesday night!

Before I sign off however, I have to relate a story from the end of the session that will stick with me for a while.

The group had attacked the brigand stronghold and dispatched the four useless guards patrolling within the partially ruined/rebuilt walls. Among the buildings are the ruins of a crumbled tower with an open doorway and stairs descending into the ground…

Hans, axe in hand, bravely headed down the stairs into the darkness. Near the bottom he heard the movement and growling of something large. He smelled it too – the musky scent of an animal den was unmistakable. But he couldn’t see in the dark, so he climbed back up, grabbed a torch, and headed down again…

Meanwhile, Andrax had come up with the idea of dousing one or more of the straw-filled mattresses in the guard’s bunk house, tossing it to the bottom of the tower stairs, and letting it smoke out anybody who might be down there. So, oil-soaked mattress in hand, he went down the stairs…

During this time, Hans had been attacked by the far-too-large wolf and was fleeing back up the stairs, axe and torch in his hands. Running up, he stumbles into Andrax with the oil-soaked mattress, setting it and them on fire, with both of them falling back down the stairs to the bottom. The wolf took a number of steps backwards and had a WTF moment. :)

It was a classic “you got your chocolate in my peanut butter” moment as the torch met the mattress… :)

–Fitz

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