[The Stray Path] Group involvment on character creation.

[Ville Takanen]

The Stray Path - Or Harhapolku as it was originally deciphered.

I have no idea, if this would belong here - or in the actual play forum, so let the gods of the Forge to decide.

It seems, that nowadays I allways make a new system for each of the games I host (or gm). During the last year the games have been set in modern occult/horror setting using system derived form some forgean and some scandinavian infuences. It all started from an idea on how to make character creation more group thing. Most usable base system at the time to use as a base system was Dogs in th Wineyard. With little tweaking of character stats, base mechanic was perfectly usable (I tought) for the experiment itself. The game evolveld to something more... scandinavian or immersive/drama oriented later on. But the phenomenoms I found seem to be repeatable on other gamegroups than the original, and on different systems too.

I'll assume, that you know how Dogs's basic system of escalation and stat usage works on conflict situations. So lets go on to the character creation and the whipslash system of character building.

At the beginning of character creation, each player (in any order, but preferrably from left to right) decides the basic "Cover" (See Sorcerer) of his or her character. The attribute is usable allways. Any sentence like "I'm a fireman" goes. I think fudge has attributes like these.

After the first attribute, players may name any number of attributes ("backgrounds"), like "I'm an ex-marine 2d6". Player may choose that his/her attribute is special or more powerfull than base attributes (and this should be done to all "extraordinary or special" attributes) and change it to Xd8 - if he/she takes an "edge" Xd4 given by other players to his/her character (veto, and players choose another one - if character becomes unplayable or the edge nullifies previous attribute of character.). All character attributes are usable only by the player.

So - base idea is to take (one Xd6) or (one xd8 and (one Xd4 or(Yd4 and Zd4)) where Y+Z=X on your atrribute naming turn.

In addition to Backgrounds and special backgorunds, supernatural backgrounds (Xd10) could be named. A separate aversion of control by dark nature of psyche was presented.

My hypothesis was that the character creation would become more social activity, and that players would like this gamelike nature of naming attributes, and that this methoid would lead to more vivid or colourfull and intresting characters. This far allmost all of my players have agreed afterwards - and even thos who disagree with the fun part, agree that the principle seems to work.

There is a wiki in finnish, with complete system (which does not anymore resemble much any of the original testing systems for the "whipslash" - Sorcerer/Dogs/Fudge) for those finnish speaking who might be intrested (pm, semi-public). The idea of this post was to share the "whipslash method" (the best characters were made under "make the edges as tough/harsh as you can" type of social contract), and hopefully have some international comments on the idea.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello! This is a fine modification of the systems you've mentioned, and I've seen it work very well, informally, in many groups for many games. But that is a general, vague comment.

I do think that you will get more benefit from posting in Playtesting. Rather than moving this thread there, you should start a new thread in that forum, describing in detail what happened in the game, who played, what they did, and all related matters. Then we can have a real foundation for discussing whether your specific application of group-character-creation achieves the goals you wanted for it.

Best, Ron