ok, so you do it like his, invite the players over for char generation. Have them create characters and let them know that they should create characters they would want to play but dont get attached to them, then have them leave you the character sheets and when you get together to play you randomly assign the characters to the players. then play!

Or more twisted yet you constantly re-shuffle the sheets for the players so they never know who will play who ahead of time.

And the ultimate eveil, have one character who is amnesiac (whomped on the head, magic whatever) and you make and keep his character sheet and give him a blank sheet and let him figure out his skills and define his SA's in play. this one I did twice, its lots of fun!

just some evil thoughts.

Development of, and identifying with, a PC is the core of role-play. Plus, see how another player treats a PC whom you think of as yours can create hostility within a group.

Personally, a bad idea IMO.

Synecdoche.

While that's an important part of some people's roleplay, I disagree that it's necessarily the core. Personally, I'm quite happy playing extras and scenery at times.

Given that statement, I think TRoS would stand up to this character-shufling treatment pretty well. The SAs and stuff give you a lot of hooks to hang play on.

Darth Tang wrote: Development of, and identifying with, a PC is the core of role-play.

darth, with a name like that you should have noticed that I prefaced this whole post as mean and evil... why restate the obvious. Now note that I said the characters should know that the characters they are creating should not be ones they are attached to and the key fun factor is that the players will have fun adapting and creating a continuous atmosphere for each unique individual in the game. Think of it as a one shot fun break from the typical game.

It is evil though.. heheheheheheheh

Hi there,

In Legends of Alyria (review soon to be posted), which you can also read about in the Alyria forum, people often play characters made up by the other players.

It starts by the GM stating a place and a problem. "This little village over by the forest; it's being threatened by mutant wolves." Then the whole group makes up a ton of characters. Not numerically, just verbally, and by talking about how they're related or what issues they clash over. They draw a little map of how they're connected and everyone chimes in all over the place.

When things look nice and messy, then each player picks a character on the map. It might be one they made up, but most likely isn't (based on my experience of play). The GM of course ends up playing a whole lot of characters he didn't make up initially.

Only after all this discussion do people sit down and hack out numbers, which of course, can bring more surprises into play.

It works really, really well, and I've seen it work well for The Riddle of Steel with Jake da Man himself.

It's not exactly what you're suggesting, Ashren, but I thought I'd offer it as an example of functional play in which people didn't necessarily play the characters they made up themselves.

Best,
Ron

Ashren: If myself and friends had more spare time to play, it would be fun.

As is, we don't. It might have already be stated as an evil idea, but the idea is having 'evil/twisted' fun. Without time for experiments like this, I don't think it would be fun.

I also think that the TROS system makes PC's far more personal than in other systems. No knock to D&D, but I think this experiment would be better suited for use there.

Ron Edwards wrote: Hi there,

In Legends of Alyria (review soon to be posted), which you can also read about in the Alyria forum, people often play characters made up by the other players.

It starts by the GM stating a place and a problem. "This little village over by the forest; it's being threatened by mutant wolves." Then the whole group makes up a ton of characters. Not numerically, just verbally, and by talking about how they're related or what issues they clash over. They draw a little map of how they're connected and everyone chimes in all over the place.

When things look nice and messy, then each player picks a character on the map. It might be one they made up, but most likely isn't (based on my experience of play). The GM of course ends up playing a whole lot of characters he didn't make up initially.

Only after all this discussion do people sit down and hack out numbers, which of course, can bring more surprises into play.

It works really, really well, and I've seen it work well for The Riddle of Steel with Jake da Man himself.

It's not exactly what you're suggesting, Ashren, but I thought I'd offer it as an example of functional play in which people didn't necessarily play the characters they made up themselves.

Best,
Ron

I've been wondering about somthing similar with the initial problem in the area. Instead of the GM just saying what the problem is (mutant wolves) he says one, then perhaps each player adds one after that.

A player generated NPC/PC map is an interesting idea though. I presume the unused characters they just thought up still get used as NPC's in the area?

Noon wrote: A player generated NPC/PC map is an interesting idea though. I presume the unused characters they just thought up still get used as NPC's in the area?

Hi there,

I don't want to hijack the thread into scenario design, but people seem interested, so ...

In the Quick-Start Rules for Legends of Alyria (see Alyria forum for link, or bug Seth if you can't find it), the GM sets the "one problem" before everyone leaps in with characters to populate the place. I think this plays an important role in keeping people focused, rather than going into "plausibility" mode and making up irrelevant stableboys and that sort of thing (as opposed to relevant stableboys, which can of course be great heroes and so on).

Seth's method ("storymap") is actually a derived version of my "relationship map" method for scenario design presented in my supplement, The Sorcerer's Soul. The relationship map method is not well understood by folks without the supplement; suffice to say that it's more GM-heavy regarding the back-story but perhaps more open-ended and often longer-term than the storymap method (which is often resolved quickly), due to the Sorcerer rule called "the Kicker."

As for opening the process up even further, as suggested, yes, the group as a whole can start from scratch. "Where do ya wanna play?" Discuss. "What's going on here?" Discuss. "Who could be involved?" Discuss, make storymap. "Who does everyone wanna play?" Choosing, then character creation and lots of NPC creation (yes, the GM takes the "unclaimed" characters). This is, in a word, the principle that the game Universalis is built upon, because it provides a system for doing this that itself becomes, actually, the resolution system during play.

The game lineage here is direct: Alyria was directly influenced by on-line discussions of The Sorcerer's Soul, and Universalis was directly influenced by playing Alyria at conventions. So these three games/books offer a great spectrum to choose from when considering how to set up a TROS scenario - especially, since TROS provides such a range of player-character freedom and redefinition during play, the traditional "GM feeds players the scenario" isn't going to work well for it without major rules-drift.

Many people play Sorcerer and TROS with very strong doses of the derived scenario-design techniques in Universalis and Alyria.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: In the Quick-Start Rules for Legends of Alyria (see Alyria forum for link, or bug Seth if you can't find it)

As for opening the process up even further, as suggested, yes, the group as a whole can start from scratch. "Where do ya wanna play?" Discuss. "What's going on here?" Discuss. "Who could be involved?" Discuss, make storymap. "Who does everyone wanna play?" Choosing, then character creation and lots of NPC creation (yes, the GM takes the "unclaimed" characters).

Sneaky Git wrote:

Ron Edwards wrote: Hi there,

In Legends of Alyria (review soon to be posted), which you can also read about in the Alyria forum, people often play characters made up by the other players.

It starts by the GM stating a place and a problem. "This little village over by the forest; it's being threatened by mutant wolves." Then the whole group makes up a ton of characters. Not numerically, just verbally, and by talking about how they're related or what issues they clash over. They draw a little map of how they're connected and everyone chimes in all over the place.

When things look nice and messy, then each player picks a character on the map. It might be one they made up, but most likely isn't (based on my experience of play). The GM of course ends up playing a whole lot of characters he didn't make up initially.

Only after all this discussion do people sit down and hack out numbers, which of course, can bring more surprises into play.

It works really, really well, and I've seen it work well for The Riddle of Steel with Jake da Man himself.

It's not exactly what you're suggesting, Ashren, but I thought I'd offer it as an example of functional play in which people didn't necessarily play the characters they made up themselves.

Best,
Ron

Wow. That sounds cool. This Thursday (tomorrow) I'm starting a new campaign.. and I think I'm going to port that idea over. If anyone is interested, I'll drop a note to relay how it goes.

Chris

Do it. We're always keen to hear about TROS games and how they run.

The Actual Play forum might be the place to talk about it though.. not sure, there's a fine line there, in that Actual Play of TROS kind of belongs in both forums. Your call I guess.

Brian.