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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

komradebob wrote:
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.

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]

timfire wrote: 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]

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.

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.

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

Nathan P. wrote: You touched on this, but what about character stats being determined by in-game rolls?

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

madelf wrote:
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?

An alternative to creating the character "as needed" is to make the character creation the game mechanic. I've tried this in Past Life. I've bandied around a few other options for character creation during play, but this is the only one I've written and playtested.

-Mendel S.

http://home.comcast.net/~tckoppang/roleplaying/persona/index.html

A game called Persona. They call it Just In Time Roleplaying or some such. I found it here in the Resource Library under Free Rpgs.

Shadetree wrote: http://home.comcast.net/~tckoppang/roleplaying/persona/index.html

A game called Persona. They call it Just In Time Roleplaying or some such. I found it here in the Resource Library under Free Rpgs.

John Kirk posted a very funny discussion of exactly this sort of thing right here. The rest of the thread might be helpful as well.

Actually I like this quote from M.J. Young

There is a degree to which what we call character generation is not the creation of the character; it is the creation of the character sheet.