Character creation during play

[madelf]

I'm at it again, fishing for information.

I know I've heard reference to games where character creation takes place during play, but I can't think what they were. Maybe you folks can once again point me in the right direction?

I'm not looking for examples where everything is created as part of a group development like Universalis, but something more along the lines of coming up with a vague character outline at the start of the game and then deciding what the stats are & what skills the character has based on how things develop. (And I don't know if that made any sense or not)

General descriptions of what methods might be used for something like that would be good too.

Thanks.

[Ben Morgan]

IIRC, Hero Wars featured DIP as an option, I'm assuming HeroQuest still might.

[Trevis Martin]

Well there is the Pool.  In the strictest sense of the game.  You start out with 50 words and draw your traits from that.  Then you get 15 more words each session buying new traits when you have pool dice available for them

best,

Trevis

[Marhault]

The only one I know of is called Immortal.

I have only read the 1st edition, I don't know if any of this info holds true for the second.  Also, I haven't looked at the book in years, so I hope I don't butcher the games concepts too badly in my description.

PCs basically are immortal beings whose physical bodies are merely representations of their true selves, which are composed of various hues of light (I believe the games term was "Halo").  The strength of a particular hue in the character's Halo determines the effectiveness of the character in a certain area.  For example, a character with a lot of orange in his halo would be very strong (I think orange was strength).

The thing is, however, that the PCs had lost their memories (for a very backstory-heavy reason I can't even begin to remember accurately).  They start with little (if any) of their Halos defined at the beginning of the game.  Instead, they have a pool of free points (called Motes, I think) which they could channel into any color they wanted, whenever they wanted.  Once a Mote is channeled your score in the appropriate color went up by one.  

Your score in a color would be added to a d10 roll and compared to a difficulty number (called a Hostile, the game had lots of nifty terms) to determine success.  Tests could have separate Hostiles for each color that was relevant to the task, for example, if you were pushing a car off of your friend while working through an injury you might have to roll against a 7 strength Hostile (orange?) and a 4 resolve Hostile (purple?).  This makes the choice of spending those free Motes an important one.  I don't remember if you ever got more free Motes after your starting pool was used up.

[komradebob]

Calvin;

I recall a pulp game of some sort where players could use some sort of hero point to call for a training montage if they discovered they needed a skill that noone had taken during character creation. The gamemaster or players would then briefly describe some previously unrevealed instruction. I think they were required to engage in some sort of exposition as well. Does anyone know the game I'm thinking of? It was free for a while, but I believe it's being sold now as a download.

A house-rule my group tried for Vampire sort of did what you're talking about. The players created a vague, unfinished character and got the gamemaster's approval to start playing. They would have a pool of unspent dots written as a number by whatever category was appropriate. As play progressed and folks were able to get abetter handle on both their character and the gamemasters style, they placed their dots. Now, in all fairness, some negotiation was required for this to work ( which it didn't always ). The main issue was to have your initial dots spent by the first or second session, so they didn't get confused with xp purchases, and so the gm could get a handle on your character's skill level at different activities. Aside from minimaxing issues, the problem of " a dot is a dot" in character creation versus the "xps and freebie points are currency to buy dots at different rates" issue also cropped up.

I guess a related question might be, what would you consider to be enough info about a character for a player to start playing a game with it? With a point buy system, you might be able to cobble something together. I'm not so sure how you'd do it with a more random chargen system.

[tj333]

I think that in a game where the character is developed in play the players should not be influenced too strongly before play begins to develop his character in a certain fashion.

Going from the before mentioned Immortals game, motes were not spent before game with a different cost structure then in game.

Games like Vampire and Shadowrun do not make good DIP games since the system of one point = 1 skill level pre-game influences the players to have a fewer high level skills as this is more cost effective.

With Shadowrun using the BeCKs character creation rules you develop the character with karma as you would in play leading to rather different feels for the characters as the increasing costs for higher levels leads to  awider range of skills at lower levels. This is not DIP but I think an important step toward it.

Dungeons and Dragons allows you to develop you character during play as he grows in a measured way at set level but even with multi-classing you are heavily locked into your starting choices.

A game I am working on that facilitates development in play starts the player with number of character points to create the character pre-game;  but you only need to spend 70 of the 120 character points pre-game. When the player chooses to spend his remaining character points he may do so at the same costs as in character creation.
This allows the player to develop the outline of his character then add to it during play or jump off in a new direction.

A more extreme version of my method is to start each character with just the minimum values on his character sheet then filling in anything on the character sheet when and as they want to in game.
Though  this will lead to the early developing character having a lot of spotlight time and latter developing character being left out almost entirely until the point where they make their character nearly perfect for a later portion of the gamewith their amassed character points  and, hopefully , take over the spotlight until things go to even playing field outside of that situation. What keeps me from using this method is worries about how well it would work in actual game play and the thought that everyone would develope their character at the start anyways.

[madelf]

I guess a related question might be, what would you consider to be enough info about a character for a player to start playing a game with it? With a point buy system, you might be able to cobble something together. I'm not so sure how you'd do it with a more random chargen system.

How much info is enough would depend I think on how smoothly the system worked for character development during play. I've got this vague idea, that play should be able to start with little more than a short description of the character. In a passing similarity to The Pool, this description would influence the actual stats.

I'm also thinking that some level of randomness might be in order. I want to avoid the min/max effect of a player just being able to buy whatever skill they need at a moment's notice. Perhaps a player must justify why their character might have a particular skill (this would encourage development of backstory, which I like) before they can try for that skill. Maybe a skill is gained simply by attempt and the degree of success (or failure) determines how good the character is at that skill. If it's a skill that ties into the initial description, or earlier established backstory, there is a bonus for gaining that skill.

Of course then there's the issue of a skill that the player really wanted the character to have getting botched in the roll, so I'd have to address that.

I'm not sure. It's kind of vague right now.

Thanks for the input, everyone.
Every little bit helps.
:)

[timfire]

Heh... Technically, DnD and all level-based systems work this way, if you consider long-term play. But that's probably not what you were looking for.

[edit] Hmmm, maybe I should have read the entire thread before posting. Some else already mentioned this. [/edit]

[madelf]

Heh... Technically, DnD and all level-based systems work this way, if you consider long-term play. But that's probably not what you were looking for.

[edit] Hmmm, maybe I should have read the entire thread before posting. Some else already mentioned this. [/edit]

Yeah...
That's not what I'm looking for at all.

D&D style levels (I really hate levels, btw), or even point-based character advancement isn't what I'm talking about. Those are advancement, or on-going development of the character during play. I want initial character creation/development during play.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to have the players sit down with the game book and a blank sheet of paper (or nearly blank) and start playing, not creating characters.

[Nathan P.]

You touched on this, but what about character stats being determined by in-game rolls? As in, you start with your characters name on a sheet of paper. You start playing. At some point, you want to climb a cliff. There's some base chance of success at everything - say you succeed. You gain the trait "Can Climb Cliffs", or something, which helps you if you try to climb a cliff again. If you fail, or botch, or whatever, you gain "Sucks at Climbing Cliffs".

Maybe combine with some kind of point system so you can add things during play that make sense to the character, but may not come up in play. F'rex, after a couple sessions I have a lot of traits involving climbing and swimming and stuff like that, and I figure my character is an outdoorsy type, so I give him " Good Camper" even though the characters have been staying in inns the whole time.

Also, I think it would be cool if other players/the GM could spend points or some such to add stuff to other peoples characters. Like "oh, how cool would it be if Swordman Bob has a secret past as a Pirate! I'm tossing in some coins to give him "Used to be a pirate". That may be just me, though.

[komradebob]

Nathan P.

Also, I think it would be cool if other players/the GM could spend points or some such to add stuff to other peoples characters. Like "oh, how cool would it be if Swordman Bob has a secret past as a Pirate! I'm tossing in some coins to give him "Used to be a pirate". That may be just me, though.

That reminds me of a short lived Vampire game I was running. I had a couple of players that were a bit shy about taking screentime for their characters, but who were very good at making suggestions for character and setting development. It worked out pretty well, but there wasn't any formalized method for it.

It could work out really well in team style environment. It could also work well as a mechanical description of situations where characters of vastly different power levels/competency are working together. Some examples that I can think of:
Doc Savage and Crew ( is there anything Doc can't do?)
Indiana Jones ( all of his pals can do one or two things, but Indy can do all sorts of stuff).
Batman (Much like IJ above, but consider Robin, The Gordons, and Alfred).

I imagine it would work best in an environment where OOC conversation (hints,etc) was encouraged.

It might also be interesting if players create very sketchy characters initially, but have a common resource pool to draw from to fill ouy those characters. Sort of a reverse Universalis. Instead of each player havng a resource pool, the group has a common one to draw from, so using those resources becomes a source of interaction. It might be workable for player group vs. gm gamism, or sim:genre emulation ( I choose not to touch this idea in regards to any form of narrativism.).

[jerry]

This isn't character creation so much as honing a character's skills, but in Men & Supermen characters have "discretionary knowledge points" that they can use at any time to gain or increase a skill; the default reason being that this is a skill they've always known, but this is the first time it came up as a need.

Jerry

[timfire]

You touched on this, but what about character stats being determined by in-game rolls?

This is sorta the way Zak Arntson's Metal Opera works. The PC's stats all start at zero. Whenever someone rolls a 6 (on a d6), the stat goes up by one. If they roll a 1, it goes down by one. The end-game, though, is tied to the PC's reaching a certain number in all their stats.

This actually makes me think a little. A question you have to decide is how long this game is meant to last. I would think that a mechanic where characters are developed during play would better serve a short game.  I would think that the in-game development would create a sorta arch. Like tj33 said, I assume the PC's would develop alot at first, and then not so much later.

You also have to ask yourself what the purpose of such a mechanic would be, and how it would factor into the larger game. I would think that such a mechanic would focus the player's attention on the character's 'development'/'realization'. I would think that such a mechanic would neccessarily be major part of play. (As it appears to be in that Immortal game.) Couple this with the above point, and you should see why I think this would better serve a short game.

But for me, this is still hypothetical. It would be interesting to hear from someone who has played this way for a significant amount of time.

[M. J. Young]

Multiverser's "On the Fly" character creation system (which we promote through our support but did not have when the rules went to print) works something like this. The assumption is that the character is more richly detailed than we can put on paper, but we'll take five minutes to get his strongest points recorded. Thereafter there is an inherent assumption that he has other abilities that just aren't as significant, which can be added to the sheet by agreement when they are needed. You're building around a core character which was established at the start. (Of course, in this case it helps that you're building around yourself, a known entity, and so have a point of reference.)

The mention of the Indiana Jones character gave me a thought in this regard. What if the character "development" method was all second person? That is, what if any player's character could at any time say to any other character, "It's a good thing we brought you with us, since you have X abilities which you learned because of Y," and that made it true, as long as "Y" didn't directly contradict known facts about the character? I remember the old Traveler Jack-of-All-Trades skill was said to assume that the character had done this before (or at least seen it done once) because of a broad experiential background. This would be codifying that to some degree, such that the experiences are created on the fly, giving rise to the needed abilities as they arise in play.

Just a thought.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

I know I've heard reference to games where character creation takes place during play, but I can't think what they were. Maybe you folks can once again point me in the right direction?

I think you may have heard a couple of buzzwords associated with an observed phenomenon rather than a conscious design decision in an existing game.  Back in the r.g.f.a days it was identified that some players heavily favour Design At Start methods of character creation, and some favour Design In Play, in which the character is only very loosely outlined at start of play.