Spoiled for Choice

I’ve come to strongly dislike the wealth of choices in contemporary character generation procedures.

I equate it with a trap, as the vaunted range of options gets relentlessly funnelled by the gears of rational optimization into one of a very limited number of viable molds (or “builds”).

It also encourages exercises in futurology and “level regression”, which we’ve all seen before: players coming up with optimized and 20th-level-regressed characters, the “predestined lot”, parcel to the entitled playstyle where success is a downright part of a campaign’s pitch – skilled players need not apply.

The worst offender of the whole "fetishized game balance" trend to me has got to be “point buy”, which I’ve had the opportunity to recently try out in the 5E campaign I played in which yielded some of the most positively soulless results I’ve ever seen in an RPG; Truly bland characters, given how little variation was possible between stat attribution, leading everyone to one of two build strategies: “strong suit & dump stat” or “all-rounder”. Neither option being the least bit enticing, as characters with no weak points and even those whose strong suits were utterly reined in (since the stat maximums were set at 16 and minimums at 8) made for a dreadfuly uninspiring chargen.

As I widen my readings along the blogosphere, I see chargen being treated as something from between a multiple-branching major concern to a necessary evil. Either letting optimizers have the cake or, at the opposite pole, getting the whole process over with quickly to enable new players to get most directly to grips with the game.

Even though I lean toward this latter camp, it’s not something that I see as being usually belaboured to any great degree so the plot seemed ripe for some heartbreaking whimsy. This is my stab at a  character generation module, made to interact with 5th Edition, but near enough to system-agnostic.

Paint it big.

As intended for a non-narrativistic gameplay experience, I believe character generation should aim to be several things: fast-paced, unpredictable, unbalanced and producer of diverse results. These four descriptors are weaved together on the basis of two root principles: the desire that no two characters should ever be exactly alike and the understanding that characters can die or retire.

Fast-Paced

In order to accommodate swift introduction of new players as well as accounting for the fact that older players may well be engaging in it more than once and also wishing to keep options open to allow a degree of agency – few but significant options and decision-points: not “3d6 in order”, but not too far from it, either.

Unpredictable (and Unbalanced)

Letting the dice fall where they may will provide for a wide spectrum of character capabilities – ideally “no two exactly alike” – but is a design aim that immediately takes the ethereally wispy snowflake that is game balance as an hostage. Other than putting into place a mitigation step that allows for additional feat purchases to weak-statted characters (increasing variety in the process), I conceded that the efforts aimed at the hair-graying utopia of game balance are much better spent in shutting up and leveraging what you got.

Wide Variance of Results

This is aimed at enabling a player to appreciate and value their own character. If getting any given set of stats and abilities has an implied cost of nothing but a short trip to the PHB (or character-building app of choice) then I guess it is expected that character death should be greeted with a jaded shrug of the shoulders.

“Bob died? Well shucks, here’s Dod, his replacement; Same stats, same class, same abilities, same level, let us get on with this”.

As the contemporary methods of character generation have become more and more calcified (always start at maximum hp, completely predictable levelling up gains, choice of feats, etc.), the burden of relative diversity for characters has been laid at the feet of the different classes and their special powers. Once you get tired of these, then it’s off to buy new ones from your usual resellers.

To conclude, I believe the game to be better served with greater reliance on the archetypal classes and the variance between the characters themselves being provided by chargen and the character’s own in-play growth –  thus fighting the age-old “all fighters are alike” problem.

And I'm sidestepping Backstory for now, I'll rail against that particular brand of bullshit on the next post.

The Grounding Principles of Worldbuilding

Me, apparently, getting quartered by the Four Horsemen of Distraction: Fancy, Whimsy, Obsession and Acedia.

What’s this bugger been up to, then? Well, frankly, fulfilling both the golden and silver lose-conditions for an RPG enthusiast: not running, not playing. On to the mitigating silver-lining, then: I’ve been reading, pondering and turning wheels, of course, buttering the very toast of the armchair go-getter!

As I start to gain momentum for some light lifting on the world building front I come to grips with a slew of questions.

I know what I’m striving for, a game-world that players will want to explore and me the GM will want to create and load down with intricacies and layers of symbolism.

How to get there and make it compelling, that is something else entirely.

A world that is faux-medieval in outlook but that has a bronze age beating heart, much like the original game itself. Magic that exists as a rare and unharnessed force, fragmented and decentralized shards of civilization, little to no supra-tribal cohesion, deities that are simultaneously present yet out of reach.

If my reading pile didn’t stand quite so tall, I might get something out of reading some Jack Vance or Robert E. Howard, both unknown authors to me and that probably carry the vibe that I’m after.

Thought of rereading Tolkien, but the first time around left a sour taste and one I don’t care to rekindle. Pondering upon it, many of the conceits he laid down are of use and interest to me: the different races as isolationist and carrying on with little interaction instead of the contemporarily standard cosmopolitanism that I find completely displaced, the depiction of foes as twisted tools of evil gods instead of misunderstood noble savages (that the publisher ensures – of course – that you'll get to play in a future supplement of the rules, as long as you front the cash).

I speak of “evil”, but rest assured: I enforce no notions of morality upon the players. Alignment has been thrown out the window; that splattering sound you heard when you began reading this post was it, hitting the pavement outside.

When I get to the grounding principles, I begin to appreciate the true measure of how we’re trapped in the box of our own preconceptions, our cultural and geographic world-view. I can call the north a hot land of deserts and the south a lurid polar landscape, it just won’t ring right with my fellow continental europeans, who have been nurtured with maps featuring their country of origin as the focal point and to whom the knee-jerk of “deserts north, snow south” would rub their fur right against the grain.

It’s not that I’m not after some degree of knee-jerk and out-and-out weirdness, it’s just that it all needs a proper contextualization of stable and predictable geographic elements so that it’ll hang together when put up on the wall for display.

Nonetheless, I don’t think using the real world as the stage solves all, if any, of my problems. You can argue that the physical geography will look right as peaches but then it is the civilizational deviance dictated by the existence of deities, demihumans and supernatural entities that’ll derail the entire affair right back into the muddy pit of disbelief.

But, going back to Tolkien, it behooves one to appreciate that, for all of his creative mythos building, he did not stray far from the contemporary european worldview: northerners are pale, southrons are swarthy. Cold is to the north, Familiar is to the west, Heat is to the south, Exoticism is to the east; It was very much a philologist’s dream, not a geographer’s one.

Could have been worse: G.R.R Martin simply grafted - root, trunk and leaf - both the geography and history of Europe wholesale into an ersatz-fantasy simulacrum. Anyone endowed with a knowledge of history ought to recognize Martin for the hack that he is.

In the end, I’m afraid I’m not here to trumpet a solution, but merely to appreciate the problem.

It is also apparent that any solution to be reached will have to forcibly consist in a pretty personal set of choices, one that I expect will be of little use to anyone else, for it is such a sensitive array of dials and knobs that the best one can hope for as an author is for someone to nibble bits off to go chew in their own private corners.