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You ever see Gorilla Grodd punch a guy? We are dealing with Space Apes.
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Mar 1, 2014 02:00
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It's probably worth mentioning that a single point of megadamage is, by rules as written, enough to vaporize a human being.
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Mar 1, 2014 02:30
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Rulebook Heavily posted:It's probably worth mentioning that a single point of megadamage is, by rules as written, enough to vaporize a human being. Exactly like a gorilla, then!
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Mar 1, 2014 02:49
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Rulebook Heavily posted:It's probably worth mentioning that a single point of megadamage is, by rules as written, enough to vaporize a human being.
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Mar 1, 2014 02:57
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 Roll 11d10 or Don't: Let's (Actually) Make Characters in Greg Stolze's Reign All right, so now that I've given everyone an overview of how the One-Roll Engine works and how random character generation in Reign works, let's actually roll ourselves up a character. Back when Reign was the new hotness, RPGnet user Mapache went and made an online version of the random character generators, starting with the one in the core rulebook, then adding others as they were released in supplements including a random Company generator...Companies are Reigns term for any sort of organization that players are in control of and/or opposed to, anything from a small-time thieves' guild to a sprawling empire. It's worth noting that Greg Stolze is entirely aware of the existence of the online generator and is completely okay with it being hosted for everyone to use.  Pictured: a really swell guy, also a wall. For now I'm going to stick with the basic character generator out of the corebook to start with. I'll take a look at some of the other generators later, all of which are tied to a different nation from Reign's default setting. Instead of how pointy your ears are or whether you have tusks or not, what matters most in the twin continents of Heluso and Milonda is your culture, where you come from. The core rulebook presents overviews of four of the setting's major societies, and several more have been outlined in the various supplements that Greg Stolze released. As I look at the other generators I'll also look in on the nations in question. Mapache's random generator allows users to set as many dice to whatever values they choose in advance, as well as the ability to pick which of the three random waste die event tables they want to use. For right now I'm going to go completely random...11d10 taken as they fall, with all three tables up for grabs (the online generator will randomly choose which table to draw each result from). Unfortunately unlike Orokos there's no provision to link to a specific roll for proof so you'll have to take my word on it as a fellow nerd. And the numbers are in. quote:1x2 Imprisoned: Maybe you were locked up for your political views. Maybe you were in a prison camp after your cowardly general surrendered. In any event, you were jailed somewhere crowded and unpleasant. Or maybe you were crammed in a madhouse, with or without good reason. And there we have it, our first randomly generated character! As you can see we've got a number of matched sets, the highest of which is the 3x7 Canny Sage, so clearly our character is pretty knowledgeable about something. The "Student of [WHATEVER]" skill is Reign's answer to knowledge skills, an undefined skill linked to Knowledge that the player chooses the focus of at the time they take it, and it can basically be about anything. In the case of the 3x7 set we have a full 5 points in a "Student of" skill of our choosing. Combined with the additional point into our Knowledge stat added to our default starting value of 2 and we'll be rolling 8d10 to know things about our area of study, which is pretty dang good in a system where 10d10 is the highest you can go. Many of the other skills are self-explanatory, things like Dodge and Ride and Parry don't really need a lot of explanation, but I want to take a moment to talk about the Fight skill since there's something we'll need to do with that in a moment. In Reign there are two main offensive combat skills, "Fight" and "Weapon: ____". A character with Fight knows how to fight, period. How to fight with swords, with axes, with clubs, with their own bare hands, with teacups, with chair legs, with someone else's leg...the Fight skill allows someone to use any relatively simple hand-to-hand weapon without penalty. Someone versed in the Fight skill is never really unarmed even if all they have at hand is a rock.  Like this only less dumb. The downsides to the Fight skill are these: any sort of weapon that's sufficiently exotic (like rope darts or fighting chains) can't be used with Fight, you can't use Fight for missile weapons like bows or thrown blades, and the big one is that there are no martial paths for the Fight skill, no special advanced techniques to learn. Really, when you stop and think about it being able to treat spears, axes, and swords interchangeably is kind of an advanced technique in and of itself, and there are general combat maneuvers and tactics that anyone can attempt regardless of their training, but if you're the sort of person who wants fancy, flashy techniques to call your own then you need the Weapon skill. The Weapon skill is the opposite of Fight, and in many respects is similar to Student of ___. You have to choose one specific area of expertise when you buy the Weapon skill, though you can buy multiple Weapon skills for multiple weapons. You don't have to narrowly specialize...you can buy Weapon: Bow and you'll be proficient with long- and shortbows as well as crossbows, and Weapon: Sword will allow you to use both Dindavaran short-blades and Western Marches greatswords with equal skill. You can even choose to specialize in Weapon: Unarmed, and the core rulebook presents several schools of unarmed martial arts for people who love to get their fantasy kung-fu on. The drawback to the weapon skill is, of course, that if you don't have access to a weapon you're proficient in then you're kind of hosed...someone who's trained for years to be a master of the sword won't be able to just pick up a spear and use it with equal skill. Thus Reign gives you the choice of making a character with superlative skill in a single field but who can be disarmed and rendered helpless, or a character who's generally proficient in the field of inflicting harm on other people regardless of circumstances but who won't ever know any of the advanced techniques that legendary warriors are renowned for. Of course you could always take both to make a character who has some advanced martial skills to draw upon but can always fall back on good-old-fashioned raw violence if necessary. In the case of our character here we have a whopping 6 points in the Fight skill...which is a problem because you can't have more than 5 points in a skill. Uh-oh, so now what? Is everything totally hosed and we have to start over? Nah. Remember last time when I told you that every die we roll on this is essentially worth 5 build points of stuff? So all we really need to do here is choose: 1). Take one of those points of Fight and move it to another skill, either one we have points in or one we don't. Or, what we can also choose to do is 2). "Buy back" the build point for that 6th point of Fight and spend it on raising one of our Fight dice to an Expert Die. It costs 1 build point to turn a regular die into an Expert Die. Technically we could buy that point back and turn any skill die into an ED, but I feel like it's more appropriate to put it back into Fight since that's what we rolled so high in. So I'm gonna go with the second option there. Instead of 6 points in Fight we get 5 points, and then the "6th" point will instead upgrade one of our regular dice to an Expert Die giving us a final total of 4+ED in Fight. So we have brains and brawn. One other thing to note is that our character has two advantages, noted in italics...we have 4 ranks of the Possession advantage which gives us a valuable belonging of some sort, perhaps an enchanted item or an extremely useful mundane one, and 1 rank in the Wealth advantage which gives us generic fat stacks of cash. Well, not quite so fat in our case. A brief interlude in which we discuss fantasy economics.  I was looking for something from The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck but I decided to go with this instead. Reign uses an abstract wealth system because tracking individual coins is frankly kind of boring (sorry old-school D&D players). The gist of it is: 1). If your Wealth score is higher than the value of a good and/or service then you can simply purchase it outright without your Wealth score changing. 2). If your Wealth score is lower than the value of a good and/or service then gently caress off sonny, come back when you've got some money. 3). If your Wealth score is equal to the value of a good and/or service then you can purchase it, but doing so will permanently reduce your Wealth score by 1. You can also use the Haggle skill to attempt to purchase something without reducing your Wealth, rolling against the merchant's own skill. If you get the higher set than congratulations, you get what you wanted and your Wealth remains untouched. If you fail then you don't and you can't even get it by reducing your Wealth as the merchant decides to teach you a lesson by being a petty jerk. Greg Stolze knows that gamers are conniving little shits and so he closes the loophole of infinite 10-foot poles with the goods and services chart which not only lists the Wealth cost of various individual items but also gives example costs for things purchased in bulk. The cost of a single sword might be Wealth 2 but that doesn't mean if you have a Wealth of 3 you can freely buy every sword in the world, large purchases like that have correspondingly higher Wealth costs. Finally, though I won't be discussing Companies for a while, Wealth and Treasure (the measure of a Company's overall funding and resources) have a conversion rate of 3-1 in both directions...a point of Treasure is worth 3 Wealth and vice-versa. So our character has a Wealth of 1, which means we never ever have to worry about basic food or lodging expenses but most anything else is outside of our financial grasp. Fortunately Greg Stolze isn't a huge dick, and so when you make a character in Reign every skill that you take comes with a set of "expected possessions," which are basically gear, equipment, and trinkets that you would expect someone with that sort of skill training to possess, so even a character who buys no Wealth whatsoever to start with isn't being sent out into the world naked. Not every skill gets something, but the basic advice given in the book is "talk it out, don't get hung up on basic things, but anything that qualifies as a capital-P Possession needs to be purchased as such." Our rank 4 Possession gives us such an item. How this works is we look on the table that lists goods and services, find something with a Wealth score up to 1 more than our rating in Possession (so up to 5 in our case) and bam, we own that thing. In theory you could buy a valuable treasure with your Possession and then immediately try to sell it off for Wealth once play starts but that would be stupid since you could just as easily put the points from Possession straight into Wealth at 1-1 during chargen...but I mean, you could if you wanted to. You can also use Possession to buy things like vehicles, weapons, houses, fancy personal belongings, etc. The tables don't list everything and discussing things with the GM is encouraged. Shut up about money and make a goddamn character already. All right, we've got our random results but now we have to make an actual character out of them. In most games with some sort of random lifepath system (like, say, Traveller) you have to take the results as you get them and that's the order events occur in. In Reign the game gives you the events and it's entirely up to you how you want to assemble them. They can go in any order and they're left broad and vague enough that you can put your own spin on them if you want. Looking at the results we rolled, right away I see we've got Foot Soldier and Squad Leader. Those seem to flow together nicely so I'll go ahead and start with that. Our character starts his backstory as a simple grunt fighting in the services of some kingdom or another and proves himself not just an able soldier but one worthy of command (up to a point). So he's a Sergeant, basically. He's tough, he's capable, he's learned the basics of tactics... Then he gets taken prisoner. We'll say that a battle went disastrously wrong...the enemy was far more numerous than reported or they had access to powerful magic that turned the tides of war in their favor, and our squad leader finds himself taken as a prisoner of war rather than simply executed on the spot. Why would the enemy do that? Good old-fashioned slave labor, of course! You can't have a sprawling, decadent empire without slaves to do all the heavy lifting.  Come on, what the gently caress is this thing even turning, seriously. P.S. don't Google image search "fantasy slavery" while you're at work. Being Imprisoned gives our captured soldier two skills...more Fight and Vigor. Vigor is a measure of how well you can overcome injury and illness. So it stands to reason that our guy (let's say he's a guy) has been through some poo poo by this point, but obviously he survives since this isn't Traveller and we still have more results to go through. And here's where things get interesting. While he's a prisoner, our soldier strikes up a friendship with another slave taken from a different land entirely. Things are a bit rough at first since neither of them speak the same tongue, but given time he overcomes this (Language 2). The two of them watch out for each other and wile away what idle hours they have trading stories of their respective homelands. Our soldier teaches the other prisoner how to defend himself and tells him tales of the battles he fought and led men into, and in return the man teaches our soldier many things...the fundamentals of the healing arts, a smattering of lore and legends from around the world, and he introduces him to the study of philosophy, the great scholarly pursuit of understanding the world and the self. Our soldier finds it tough to wrap his head around such things at first, but the intellectual exercise provides a welcome escape from the backbreaking labor and brawling over meager supplies, and he and his companion spend countless late-night hours engaged in philosophical debate...that's right, we are both a Canny Sage as well as a Student of Philosophy.  Well, two out of three ain't bad. Then one day, the opportunity they've been waiting for...a chance to escape! After many, many months of careful planning and dreadful secrecy, our warrior-philosopher puts his plans into motion, leading a slave uprising against their oppressors. Many slaves are killed, but many more manage to escape. He and his friend tearfully part ways here, wishing each other a safe return home, and then he slips onto a trading vessel in the dead of night to evade capture. The next day the ship has set sail but it isn't for home. When he's discovered as a stowaway the captain of the vessel orders him thrown overboard. After three of his best men are laid-out across the deck moaning and bleeding the captain concedes that maybe there's room on his crew after all. Our wandering adventurer (because let's face it, this is basically what he is by this point) learns the ropes of life aboard a ship and becomes an Able Seaman. His ferocious fighting skill combined with his tactical insight and commanding presence make him a natural fit for the position of Master-at-Arms and he quite handily helps repel several pirate attacks on his travels with the crew. Sadly the sailors show no real interest in philosophical debate. In fact, it's during these journeys that our intrepid adventurer winds up not only repelling a boarding action by pirates but leads the crew on a counterattack that results in them boarding the pirates' own vessel, a vessel laden with treasures plundered from some exotic land! Flush with wealth, the crew quickly sets sail for the nearest port to indulge in their newfound Windfall. Material wealth is of little interest to our character however, so he accepts a reduced share of the spoils in exchange for an unusual prize, a great ruby medallion that gleams with mystical light from within. The other sailors are too superstitious to want anything to do with it, but our character vaguely recalls something about a medallion like this in the legends his friend used to tell him and how it may hold the key to great knowledge...or great calamity. Well, either way. (In practice, we tell the GM we think it'd be cool if this possession was some sort of magical medallion, maybe containing the essence of some otherworldly spirit within it. We don't really know what we want it to do and the purchases table is fairly quiet on the relative worth of enchanted items, so the GM tells us that we can go ahead and take our medallion and he'll come up with something cool for us shortly.)  TELL ME YOUR SECRETS. And that's the point where our backstory ends and actual play (ostensibly) begins. Here's what our character looks like all put together: pre:Body 3 Fight 4+ED Vigor 3 Parry 2 Coordination 3 Climb 2 Dodge 1 Ride 1 Knowledge 3 Healing 2 Language (Native) 0+MD Language (Something else) 2 Lore 1 Student of Philosophy 5 Student of Sailing 2 Tactics 1 Command 3 Inspire 2 Sense 2 Charm 2 Advantage: Possession 4 (mystical ruby amulet) Advantage: Wealth 1 Possessions: Suitable melee weapon, dagger, a coil of rope, a decent saddle and a horse of no great worth, various healing supplies, a small collection of books and scrolls, a game with pieces and board of decent quality. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 11:44
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 Truth and Justice, PDQ super-heroes. If you want more info, you can see the Fatal And Friends entry here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601035&pagenumber=23#post426186395 I'm sticking like glue to the musical bird-lady, because it's easier than trying to come up with my own concept every time. Let's go step by step: Name It's super-heroes so lets alliterate. Paula Patterson. Background Lets see...Paula is an archeology student, early 20s with a particular interest in South American civilizations. Her life is pretty ordinary, until she took a fateful trip to Peru. Motivation As a hero, Paula's motivation is Helping The Underdog. She's got a soft spot for anyone being pushed around by anything the label "Big" can be applied to: Big Government, Big Business, Big Bastards, etc. Qualities Paula has 5 Qualities and one Weakness. We'll drop 2 Ranks into Expert [+4] Beautiful Voice, one into Good [+2] Basic Martial Arts Training, another into Good [+2] Archeologist and finally we'll have the final one apply to her costume, giving it Good [+2] Armored Wings. Her Weakness will be Poor [-2] Slender...she's just not big or heavily muscled. Origins Paula's powers come from the Feathered Amulet, an ancient artifact she discovered after getting lost in a ruined temple. When activated she's magically clothed in a winged and brightly feathered costume and granted amazing powers! Powers She's got 3 Power Ranks. One will go to Good [+2] Flight. Technically that gives her speeds of around 500 mph, but she flies more like a bird than a plane so we'll stick it with the Limitation: Max Speed 100 mph. Her two remaining Ranks will go to Expert [+4] Enchanting Song. This Power allows her to manipulate emotions, hypnotize those who hear her and lull people into a trance (a Failure Rank attack, although not a super-scale one). Hero Points She starts with 5 hero points and 10 MAX. Codename Songbird Uniform basically like those old-school Gatchaman uniforms, but covered in dozens of rainbow feathers and with an actual beak in place of a visor. Miscellany Songbird has a stunt called Shriek which does a black-canary style sonic attack, inflicting Damage Ranks. Probably building that up to become a Signature Stunt. character sheet: 
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Mar 1, 2014 13:18
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Kai Tave posted:
Now I feel guilty on lagging so much on the next F&F writeup, but it's the company rules and I keep thinking "Oh, hey, this isn't good enough to explain those" and eventually I may just wind up retyping the whole chapter if I'm not careful. Anyway, I vote one of the next characters should be a Equine unity sorceress just to show off Reign's extremely weird variant of muscle wizardry.
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Mar 1, 2014 18:58
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Ars Magica: Try try try to understand, I’m a magic man So, we are going to make a spell. We have a spell that lets us talk to plants, but we’re also an air mage. And an investigator. How about we develop a spell to talk to wind? Now, we talk to the GM, and the GM rules that wind is not very smart, and it only remembers things for around a day or so in most cases. A storm might remember everything within its lifetime, maybe, but they die out fast. So it’s not going to solve all mysteries forever. But it’ll be useful. So, now we go look up the guidelines for Intellego Auram.
Okay. So our spell’s base level is 15. We only have 30 spell levels left, and we can’t learn an Intellego Auram spell above level 29. (In practice, this means above level 25, as we will see.) At base level, a spell has Range: Personal, so it can only affect you directly. It has Duration: Momentary, so it ends immediately. It has Target: Individual, so it only hits one thing. Now, we definitely have to raise the Range. We’re not air and we can already talk to ourselves just fine. Malik needs to talk to the wind! Let’s look at ranges.
What, you ask, is a Magnitude? That’s how spells are measured. It is 5 levels unless the spell is beneath level 5, in which case it is a single level. So a base level 1 spell could have +1 Magnitude added and become level 2, but a base level 15 spell gets +1 Magnitude and becomes level 20. Now, we’re going to raise the range from Personal to Touch, so our spell is now level 20. We can touch the air we want to talk to fairly easily. Next, target. One thing to note - the size of your target does matter when determining what Target you need…except for Intellego magic, which cares only about number or area, rather than size.
Again, if we had to deal with size modifiers, we’d note that down in our spell and perhaps add extra magnitudes...but we don’t, because this is an Intellego spell! We’re good with the base Individual target. That means we just have to pick our duration.
We want to be able to ask questions, so Momentary won’t do. We decide to make it Duration: Concentration, adding one more Magnitude to our spell. It is now level 25. As a side note - Intellego also has the option of a special set of Targets - sensory targets, in which the magus affects their own senses. This is good for, say, being able to detect poison at a touch. But we don’t need those for this spell! In fact, all we need to do now is name the thing. It doesn’t have Year Duration or Boundary Target, and it’s under level 50, so it’s not a Ritual spell. It has no other Art requisites - it’s all Intellego Auram. We decide to name it Ask the Wind. With our last 5 spell levels, we pick up Hunt for the Wild Herb, since why not? pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 2 (15 XP) Spanish (Slang) 1 (5 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 3 (20*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 3 (30 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 1 (5 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 1 (5 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Intellego 9 (30*1.5 XP), Perdo 7 (30 XP), Auram 7 (34 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local) 14 years before chargen ends. Okay. At the end of chargen, Malik will be 34. Because he is a magus, for each of those 14 years, Malik receives 30 points. These points can be spent as XP for Arts and Abilities, or it can be spent as spell levels. We will spend our 420 points next time. Next time: Seriously, Malik, that’s a lot of XP.
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Mar 1, 2014 19:48
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Well, with Mors Rattus showing us some proper wizarding, I figure I ought to show you all some post-modern gutter magick (yes, with the k, only the second most pretentious way I've seen it spelled). That's right, it's time to create a character for: This is actually the cover from the French translation, but I like it a lot more than the English one. Unknown Armies is the system Greg Stolze designed before the One Roll Engine Kai Tave is showing off in his Reign character creation. Married to John Tynes' postmodern, humanocentric occult horror setting, it's one of my favorite RPGs of all time. Let's see how well we can translate "bird bard" into UA, shall we? Basic Overview UA uses a percentile-based stat and skill system, but it combines them differently than, say, ORE. Rather than adding a stat to a skill to determine the actual value you have to roll against, your skills are always rated somewhere lower than your stats; since stats typically range from 30 to 90, that means skill ratings are typically very low. The logic behind this is that, rather than giving you "white room" odds of using a skill and then levying a -20% penalty for the dark, -10% for the rain, -10% for unfamiliar locale and -25% for the psycho hopped up on demon-laced crystal meth chasing you with a chainsaw, UA just assumes that you'll be rolling skills when you're running through unfamiliar woods at night, during a raging thunderstorm, while being chased by a psycho hopped up on demon-laced crystal meth. When you get to roll in safer, saner conditions, you get a boost; you just have to roll under the stat that governs your skill to succeed (though if you roll under both stat and skill you succeed really well). Characters in UA are much less strongly defined by stats and skills than they are by their various psychological foibles, obsessions, and... let's charitably call them "quirks." UA characters aren't exactly healthy at the best of times, and the deeper into the occult underground, the worse it tends to get. We'll cover most of this when as we go through character creation, but I want to talk a little bit about madness meters here first. Every character has five madness meters: Violence (duh) the Unnatural (seeing weird magick poo poo that shouldn't exist), Helplessness (things that make you feel like you're not in control), Isolation (loneliness and disconnection from other people) and Self (guilt, self-loathing, and your sense of identity). Each meter tracks up to 10 hardened notches and five failed notches, which measure your reaction to trauma. Traumatic situations are assigned a level on one or more madness meters: being shot at is a rank-1 Violence check, for example, while being presented with conclusive proof that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5 is a rank-4 Unnatural check. If you have fewer hardened notches than the rank of the trauma, you have to roll your Mind stat. Succeed and you mark off a hardened notch--you've become just a little more inured to that particular category of gently caress-upedness. Blow the roll and you mark a failed notch, plus you wig out and either run the gently caress away, freeze up and go catatonic, or totally flip out and smash the poo poo out of whatever triggered the check. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Get as many hardened notches as you can and you'll be A-OK psychologically, right? Well, no. Too many hardened notches and you become a sociopath. That's not good. On the other hand, too many failed notches and you develop some permanent mental trauma. Hope you've got a therapist on speed dial. Okay, so let's make some goddamn characters! Not so fast, sparky, we need to do a quick overview of some setting elements for this to all make sense. UA divides its campaigns into three scopes, which are pretty much precursors to the "tier" system newer World of Darkness games have employed. At the street level, you're probably mostly ignorant of the occult underground and almost certainly don't have any mojo of your own. You're probably drawn in by some external stimulus: sister brainwashed by weird cult, friend dead in inexplicable circumstances, or maybe just something you saw once that you've been obsessed with figuring out. At the global level, you're plugged into the occult underground and all its petty little wars over power and ideology. You've probably got magick of your own, and you're interacting more with the power players of the setting. Finally, at the cosmic level, you are the power players, and the stuff you do can literally change the universe. Without going into too much detail, magick in UA comes broadly in two forms: adepts and avatars. Adepts are obsessive crazy types who have built their entire worldview around some inherent paradox: by living that paradox, they gain magickal power over the universe. They're the closest things to "wizards" the game has. Avatars, meanwhile, are people who are tuned in to archetypes, powerful symbols of the collective unconscious like the Mother or the Warrior. By living their lives in accordance with the symbology of their archetype, they can manifest some of that archetype's power. For example, walking the path of the Merchant lets you deal in abstracts, buying souls and selling years of lifespan, while channeling the Pilgrim can let you cross a distance about the width of the continental U.S. in a day. Avatar powers are generally more subtle and specific than adept spells, but they have the advantage of not making you bugfuck crazy. So there's that. Cool. Ready to start? Yes. We're going to be creating a global-level character, an avatar of the Flying Woman archetype who is also the frontwoman of a hard rock band. The Flying Woman is an archetype of female independence, self-reliance, and defiance of societal mores. You can see echoes of her in stories of Morgan la Fey, Mulan, and Artemis, and in recent history it's believed that Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks both channelled this archetype, consciously or not. Indeed, the name "the Flying Woman" comes from a belief that Amelia Earhart may herself have ascended to become this archetype when she vanished over Howland Island. That's all I've got as far as concept right now--we'll hope that by filling more stuff out throughout the process that we get a clearer picture of who this woman is. I am going to tentatively name her Shirley, just to have something to call her for now.  Yeah, that'll do. Step 0: Trigger Event All UA player characters start with some experience with the weird or the supernatural. Something gave them a glimpse, however brief, of a world deeper and stranger than the one they knew. We call this the character's trigger incident, and it's the very first thing we're supposed to come up with. Ideally we'd do this step in a group, before we know anything else about our characters. Imagine a bunch of strangers waiting out a snowstorm in some quaint little country inn somewhere, drinking mulled wine to take the chill off. After a moment's lapse in conversation, the bartender asks you all "What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?"  Shirley was about 17, playing a gig with her skeevy high school band at this skeevy, mobbed-up roadhouse bar out on Route 86. It was the kind of place her parents would have killed her for going to--hell, she was a minor, she shouldn't have been allowed in, but Skylar had used his older brother's ID to get himself in and the bouncer didn't seem to give a gently caress about liquor laws, soooo.... Anyway, it was after their first set and she went backstage to try and find the bathroom, only she must have taken a wrong turn because when she opened what she thought was the bathroom door she saw this guy all beat to poo poo tied to one of those cheap, metal folding chairs, and the owner of the bar was pointing a pistol at the guy, asking him where the hand was. Luckily, neither of them saw her. So the guy in the chair just smiles and he starts singing this little ditty Shirley couldn't quite make out over the sound system pumping Tool at roughly jet-engine levels, and0 the guy with the gun looks totally freaked, but then he starts singing too, and they're doing harmonies, and then her hearing got all fuzzy for a second and suddenly the harmonies are switched, and now it's the guy in the chair who looks totally freaked out, and he stops singing, and a second later the guy with the gun stops singing too, and the guy in the chair says "you sonofabitch, give me back my face!" only now his voice is the guy with the gun's voice and that's when Shirley ran. The rest of the band claimed not to notice that the owner's voice was totally different when he paid them for the gig. Step 1: Obsessions So, let's begin. The very first thing we come up with for a UA character is their obsession. Like I said, UA characters aren't healthy at the best of times. A charater's obsession is what drives her into the occult underground, makes her start seeing weird correspondences and mystical significance where other people just see weird coincidences. If we were making an adept this would have to be tied to their magickal worldview, but avatars don't have to be that obsessed with their channels. In fact, it's entirely possible for avatars to be total hypocrites, just going through the motions to gain power even if they don't actually believe in what their archetype represents. For Shirley, though, I think we'll split the difference and pick an obsession that marries the two sides of the concept we've come up with. Her obsession is music, specifically how music can be an expression of freedom even among the most oppressed and downtrodden. Something about that sounds like it could be a good thesis paper, so I'm going to file away the idea that maybe Shirley's an academic in addition to a rocker, and that researching that paper is what brought her into contact with the occult underground and the idea of channelling the Flying Woman. Obsession doesn't have any mechanical impact just yet, but it will come into play later when we get to skills.Step 2: Passions Passions are the things that push your emotional buttons. Ever mentioned something you thought was innocuous in a conversation, but your friend totally flipped out over it? That's a passion. Real people are messy and complex and have a lot of triggers like that, but for our purposes we boil it down to three: fear, rage, and noble. One freaks you the gently caress out, one pisses you off, and one inspires you to be the best you can be. Once per session per passion, you can choose to either reroll an action related to your passion or flip-flop your result. Flip-flopping means you reverse the 10s and 1s place on your roll; a 71 becomes 17, 46 becomes 64, etc. When you pick your fear passion, you have to link it to one of the five madness meters. When your fear comes into play, you have to make an immediate stress test on that meter. Doesn't matter how tough or hardened you are, this one thing freaks you right the gently caress out. On the other hand, you can flip-flop or reroll any action to get the hell away. Shirley's fear passion is eye trauma: She saw Zombi 2 at a friend's Halloween party when she was a little girl and it traumatized her pretty bad. That's obviously linked to the violence meter, so no matter how much of a stone-cold killer Shirley might end up becoming, if she sees somebody's eye get hosed up, she's going to have to roll.The rage passion doesn't have a specific madness meter associated with it, but when you trigger it you can only use the flip-flop/reroll to lash out. Maybe you throw a punch or take a shot or just chew the rear end in a top hat out, but whatever it is it can't be any kind of careful or precise action. This is anger, pure and simple. Shirley's rage passion is punching down: It gets her really pissed off when people in positions of power or privilege use their position to poo poo on people underneath them. She's not much of a Daniel Tosh fan, in other words.Finally, the noble passion is the thing that brings out your best self, the thing that, when you channel it, makes you feel like a decent human being. You can use your noble flip-flop/reroll on any kind of immediate, selfless act related to your passion. Immediacy is the key: drafting a law proposal to guarantee every schoolchild a free hot lunch doesn't qualify, but driving like a maniac to get a hurt kid to the hospital does. For Shirley, I want something that ties back into her high concept, but I don't want her to become a one-note character. I decide to add a little shading here and say that her noble passion is performing: Despite all the occult weirdness she finds herself mired in, despite her obsession with finding the music of freedom and all the other poo poo going on in her life, Shirley's at her happiest when she's on stage in front of the crowd and everything but the music melts into the background.Step 3: Personality In most games, this would be the part where we're expected to write down a paragraph or two about your characters quirks, hopes, and fears. That's not what UA means when it says "personality." See, between obsession and passions, we've already got a pretty good idea of who Shirley is on the inside--"personality" is the face she presents to the world. We're advised to keep this very short and archetypal: maybe a role model like "Good Cop" or "Femme Fatale," maybe a Zodiac sign, maybe a pop-culture touchstone like "Joey from Friends" or "Neo from The Matrix." (Hey, the game came out in 2002.) You could also go for something like a tarot card or even, god help you, a D&D alignment. I like using vaguely occult-y cues for personality in UA, so Shirley's going to go zodiac. Her personality is pure Aries: She's couragous, powerful, and straightforward, but also incredibly egocentric. When she sees something she wants (or something she wants to fix), she goes right at it and usually gets her way, but for anybody around her, it's her way or the highway. That to me seems to fit with a woman who's both the frontwoman of a rock band and an avatar of the Flying Woman, and it creates plenty of opportunities to hook in drama.That's it for the first phase of character creation, and usually when I create a UA character, here is where I like to pause for a moment and flesh out a little more backstory. At this point I figure Shirley must have had at least one strong female role model in her formative years, but she's probably also seen her fair share of hardship. I'm initially thinking "mom," but that's kind of cliche, so instead I think I'll say she had an Aunt Amy whose place she'd run to when her parents were fighting. Aunt Amy teaches music at Juilliard and encouraged her to explore her passion, even when Shirley's parents thought hard rock wasn't an appropriate hobby for their little girl. Aunt Amy hoped Shirley might come to Juilliard, but her trigger event left her seriously curious, one might even say obsessed, with music's occult power. She ended up studying musicology at Columbia, performing with a succession of bands before starting her own, an all-female group called Elevation. At first her channelling of the Flying Woman was unconscious, born out of her defiance of her parents' disapproval for her music and her refusal to be bullied by the club managers and other bands she dealt with on a daily basis. Over time, though, her studies led her to the intersection of blues music and hoodoo, and to women like Hattie Burleson and Wynonie Harris who were early avatars of the Flying Woman. Now Shirley follows in their footsteps, drawing on the symbology of the liberated woman to bring her more and more in tune with the Flying Woman. Lately the songs she's been writing for Elevation have been incorporating a lot more delta rock and blues influences. Her latest, "Black Magic Pill," features lyrics heavy with the occult symbolism of the birth control pill as a signifier of the Flying Woman. The other members of the band, who aren't part of the occult scene (well, outside the bassist, Cassie, who went through a "Satanist" phase in high school to piss off her parents), aren't thrilled by the change and claim that it's costing them gigs, but so far Shirley's domineering personality has kept the new songs in rotation. Next time: We'll put some numbers down.
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Mar 1, 2014 20:08
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unseenlibrarian posted:Now I feel guilty on lagging so much on the next F&F writeup, but it's the company rules and I keep thinking "Oh, hey, this isn't good enough to explain those" and eventually I may just wind up retyping the whole chapter if I'm not careful. The great thing is that Reign actually has several schools of muscle wizardry. I'm actually planning on discussing how sorcery in Reign works in the process of making a magical character probably not next post but the one after. I hear that birdic bards are what all the hep cats are doing and doing that might also give me an opportunity to discuss one of the established setting's various nations along the way.
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Mar 1, 2014 20:21
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When we left off, we had established a basic persona for Shirley, a hard-rocking Flying Woman-channelling music scholar. We know she hates bullies and eye trauma, loves performing, and can be kind of an egomaniac, but she's obsessed with the idea of music as an expression of freedom and how that can be used via occult channels to actualize freedom. She's thinking songs that break bonds, that unite people and elevate them above their oppressors, 13-note acoustic scales penned in secret journals by Stravinsky and Dizzy Gillespie. Now we're going to start putting numbers to those traits. Step 4: Stats Unknown Armies characters have four stats: Body (physical toughness, strength, etc.), Speed (quickness, finesse, and agility), Mind (intellect, wits, and mental fortitude), and Soul (inspiration, connection to other people, and magick). Stats are rated on a percentile scale, with 30-70 being the "normal" range for most people. In addition to a number, each stat gets a descriptor, a short phrase that helps you picture the character. A Body of 30, for instance, might mean you're "flabby" or "a bundle of sticks in a suit." Descriptors don't have any mechanical impact, they just help visualize the character. Shirley is a global-level character, well-plugged into the occult underground. She has a whopping 240 points to divvy up between her stats. In other words, even if she splits her points dead-even, she's above average with a 60 in everything. That's boring, though, so we're not going to do that.First of all, Soul is the key stat for any and all use of magick, as well as creativity and expressive skills. Since Shirley is both an avatar and a musician, we want it high. I'm going to go ahead and give her a 90 Soul, with the descriptor magnetic. People just can't help but stop, look, and listen when Shirley's around--it makes her a mesmerizing performer, but also fuels her egotism, since she's used to people shutting up and agreeing with her. A Soul of 90 also means she's sensitive to psychic and occult phenomena, and that she gains almost as much information about the world from her intuitive senses as she does from the normal five. Shirley's also a grad student, so I figure we'll peg her Mind at 70--she's bright, certainly, but she's not a revolutionary, once-in-a-generation intellect. Mind 70 indicates someone who tests in the top 5% on intelligence tests. For a descriptor, I'm thinking intuitive. Guided by her sense of the larger occult world, Shirley often makes connections others fail to see, and her leaps of logic usually stick the landing. I figure all that studying and rocking out probably doesn't leave Shirley a ton of time to spend at the gym, so her Body can sit comfortably at 40. According to the book, that means she's "either generally puny or a lard-rear end, but not too bad." I imagine she eats a lot of fried foods and generally unhealthy poo poo between doing gigs and late-night cram sessions, so her descriptor will be chunky. Shirley never quite managed to ditch that "freshman 15." That leaves us 40 points for Speed, or "the low end of average." Shirley can usually avoid embarrassing her self in a game of darts and can drive stick in most conditions, but her on stage moves are more or less limited to "throw the horns and jump up and down in place." Since she's so attuned to the invisible world, I figure she's a little spacey--it's not so much that she lacks coordination as it is that she's too easily distracted. Step 4a: Hit Points Your hit points are equal to your Body. Easy peasy. Step 4b: Madness While we're assigning points to Mind, we also have the option to play around with madness meters a little. By default, PCs start out with clear madness meters, but we can add some notches if we want. For every failed notch we put on a madness meter, we can also put a hardened notch on the same or another meter. Since Shirley's been involved in the occult underground for a while, we're going to do exactly that. Normally, if we want more than three notches we have to consult our GM, but since I'm calling the shots here I'm just going to go until it feels right. Right off the bat I know I want to put a few hardened notches on Shirley's Unnatural track--she's been at this a while, she's seen some poo poo. I decide to take a failed notch on Helplessness (She was mugged once walking home from a gig--she didn't get hurt, and she only lost about 200 bucks, but the experience really shook her), Isolation (sometimes she gets really in the zone when she's researching or writing a song and goes for days without talking to anyone), and Unnatural (yeah, she's seen some poo poo, and as much as she tries to tough it out some of it gets to her) to mark off three hardened notches on the Unnatural track. I'll also mark off a failed Violence notch (have you seen the splinter-in-the-eye scene in Zombi 2?) to give her one hardened Isolation notch; she's getting more used to being alone, especially as she sinks deeper into the occult underground and leaves her friends behind. I think that's about right for Shirley--she hasn't gotten involved in any serious occult quarrels yet, so she hasn't seen much in the way of violence, and watching her sense of self erode will be more interesting in play than in backstory.So what does this tell us about Shirley? She's not too out of whack, but she does tend to get a little edgy around knives and the like. She follows some weird superstitions and listens intently when people talk about their weird experiences, but it's minor enough to qualify as "quirky" rather than "creepy." She tends to be meticulous and risk-averse, and she can be curt or standoffish with people at times. Sounds about right. Step 5: Skills Now that we've figured out stats, it's time to break those broad qualifiers down into specific skills. UA doesn't have a skill list; it's all freeform barring a few common skills that everybody gets. Skills don't even have to be "skills" per se: "Smokin' hot bod 45%" or "Do Two Things At Once 50%" are perfectly valid. Skills are governed by a particular stat, and no skill can be higher than the stat that governs it. Having a 15% or better in a skill means you automatically succeed at any minor task where time and risk aren't a factor, so keep that in mind. For each stat, we get one or more free skills that are common to basically everybody on the planet, plus a number of points equal to the stat value to spend on whatever skills we want. Finally, as a global-level character, we'll have 70 additional skill points to spend wherever we want.Step 5a: Body (40) All characters start with a skill rating of 15% in General Athletics and Struggle. We're encouraged to rename these to something fitting the character, so I'm going to change Struggle (the hand-to-hand fighting skill) to Self-Defense Course. Now we've got 40 more points to spend on Body skills: I'm thinking as a rock star/grad student some kind of physical endurance skill is going to be helpful: I decide to call it Study All Day, Rock All Night and put 20% into it. Since Elevation hasn't hit the big time yet, they probably have to be their own roadies, so even though she's not crazy strong, Shirley can Carry Heavy poo poo 15%. That leaves us 5 points which I think i'll put into beefing up Self-Defense Course to 20%. Step 5b: Speed (40) Just having a pulse gives us 15% in Dodge, Driving, and Initiative. At least in the western world where UA is assumed to be set, pretty much everybody can get the hell out of the way, drive a car, and try to get the jump on somebody. With 40 points to spend, I'm going to beef up Driving to 30% (Shirley drives the band's van most shows), and given Shirley's general lack of combat effectiveness, I'm going to give her 10% in Sneaking Around and 15% in Running the gently caress Away. Step 5c: Mind (70) Measurable brainwave activity gives us 15% in Notice, for spotting stuff happening around us. We also get 15% in General Education, but we can instead apply those 15% toward any college degree-based skill. That skill covers any general education as well. Since Shirley's a Musicologist, we'll spend 35 points on that skill for a total of 50%. We'll further give Shirley a 15% Hypnotherapy skill, since that seems like the kind of thing she might have delved into with the whole occult studies scene. Finally, we're going to give her a skill called Music of the Spheres at 20%. This is going to be her paradigm skill. Step 5d: Paradigm Skill As an option, you can pick one Mind skill as your Paradigm Skill: This is a skill that represents a fundamental part of your character's world view and provides some protection against a certain type of madness at the cost of making you more vulnerable to another. Mechanically, what this means is that, whenever Shirley fails a Helplessness check, she can roll again. If the second roll is less than Music of the Spheres, she doesn't gain a failed notch (but she also doesn't get a hardened notch like she would have if she'd passed normally). The downside is that she has a permanent failed Isolation notch--she's that much closer to going crazy from isolation. Shirley's paradigm skill is her Music of the Spheres, which reflects her belief that, despite all the seeming chaos and entropy of the world, underlying it all is a structure that can be expressed mathematically and, therefore, musically. With the proper understanding of this musical structure, the cosmos makes sense, and by harmonizing with it, one can work seemingly miraculous effects. Music of the Spheres protects against Helplessness, because every setback is just a new data point that brings you closer to understanding the music of the spheres. It's vulnerable to Isolation, though, because when you're all alone and cut off from the music, there's nothing for you to harmonize off of.Step 5e: Soul (90) The big enchilada. Shirley gets 15% in Charm and Lying just for existing. Given what we've seen of Shirley's personality, I think I'm going to change Charm to Overawe--Shirley dazzles people with how loving cool she is moreso than getting people to like her. Soul is also where her musical talent and her avatar skill live. We'll talk more about avatar skills later, but for now just know that it's a skill that governs how in tune Shirley is with the Flying Woman. We're going to go big on both of these, with 55% in Avatar: Flying Woman and 35% in Rock and Roll. Step 5f: Bonus Points With 70 bonus points to spend, I'm going to beef Shirley's Overawe up to 35%, her Rock and Roll to 50%, And Music of the Spheres to 30%. That leaves me with 25 points to spend, and I think they'll go into bumping Sneaking Around up to 35%. Step 5g: Obsession Skill Finally, we pick one skill that's most representative of Shirley's obsession to be her obsession skill. Whenever we roll that skill, we have the option of flip-flopping the result. Adepts have to make their Magick skill their obsession skill, but as an avatar Shirley's not so restricted. Looking over her skills, it seems obvious to me that her obsession skill is either Musicology, Rock and Roll, or Avatar: Flying Woman. We only get to pick one, though, and I think Musicology is the one. Whenever Shirley does anything related to researching or studying her musical theories, she can flip-flop the roll. For the math nerds out there, that effectively turns her 50% Musicology rating into a 74% in terms of probability.And that's it for character creation! Next time we'll talk about what kinds of magick Shirley can do, but for now let's recap her abilities: pre:Name: Shirley McCready
Obsession: Music, specifically how music can be an expression of freedom even among the most oppressed and downtrodden, and the mystical significance thereof
Passions:
Fear: Eye Trauma: Shirley saw Zombi 2 at a friend's Halloween party when she was a little girl and it traumatized her pretty bad.
Rage: Punching Down: It gets Shirley really pissed off when people in positions of power or privilege use their position to poo poo on people underneath them.
She's not much of a Daniel Tosh fan, in other words.
Noble: Performing: Despite all the occult weirdness she finds herself mired in, despite her obsession with finding the music of freedom and all the other poo poo
going on in her life, Shirley's at her happiest when she's on stage in front of the crowd and everything but the music melts into the background.
Personality: Aries: Shirley's couragous, powerful, and straightforward, but also incredibly egocentric. When she sees something she wants (or something she wants to fix),
she goes right at it and usually gets her way, but for anybody around her, it's her way or the highway.
Body: 40% (chunky)
Carry Heavy poo poo: 15%
General Athletics: 15%
Study All Day, Rock All Night: 20%
Self-Defense Course: 20%
Speed: 40% (spacey)
Dodge: 15%
Driving: 30%
Initiative: 15%
Running the gently caress Away: 15%
Sneaking Around: 35%
Mind: 70% (intuitive)
Hypnotherapy: 15%
Music of the Spheres: 30% (Helplessness/Isolation)
Musicology: 50%
Soul: 90% (magnetic)
Avatar: Flying Woman: 55%
Lying: 15%
Overawe: 35%
Rock and Roll: 50%
Madness
Violence
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Unnatural
Hardened: ■ ■ ■ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Helplessness
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Isolation
Hardened: ■ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ ■ □ □ □
Self
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: □ □ □ □ □
GimpInBlack fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 22:14
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That One Roll Engine character generation is really neat mechanically. I'm glad I read this thread just for that.
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Mar 2, 2014 01:59
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Alumnus Post posted:Please do! Glad you think what I've come up with is useful (and actually makes sense). The method is my own, although I obviously don't lay claim to inventing anything else about it. And when it's done, I'd love to see what you've made. Is it for a PnP RPG, or just because you need a I wrote up the method on my tumblr here. Now that I've got that out of the way, I can get down to serious bird bard business.
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Mar 2, 2014 07:07
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for whatever purpose? You could probably post the completed character over here.
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Eclipse Phase 2: Songbird   No, I don't know what the bird body's holding. It's a future tool. Now we're starting from a character concept: A bird bard. Several hypercorporations create uplifted animals, including neo-ravens, neo-crows, and neo-parrots. There's a whole civil rights can of worms going on with both uplifts and AGIs, because they are in most cases literally a product produced by a corporation. There are patents on their genetic structure, some of them have built-in deficiencies that need to be treated through regular courses of gene therapy, and some are literally conditioned to be unable to think ill of their corporation. There are multiple civil rights movements for both AGIs and uplifts, but in general those uplifts and AGIs focused on breaking free of their corporate masters (And, in extreme cases, humanity itself) are known as mercurials. We, however, will be creating a completely hypercorp uplift. She has been engineered to be the perfect pop star. Scanning through the books looking for companies associated with uplifts and media, I'll say she was created by Somatek, the company responsible for the first uplifts, and works for Experia, the largest media conglomerate. We can skip most of the lifepath system, although rolling or picking for life experiences may be handy. Instead, we can simply use the package system. We begin much like the lifepath system, determining our aptitudes. While we could take the Extrovert template again, Art skills, where we will find Singing, are covered by INTuition, not SAVvy. We take the Inquisitive template: "Your natural problem-solving and investigative bent means you often notice things others miss." This gives us: 20 COG, 10 COO, 20 INT, 10 REF, 20 SAV, 10 SOM, and 15 WIL. We tweak that, moving 10 points from COG to REF. We're quick, observant, and personable while being a bit dull, clumsy, and weak. It should be noted that our aptitudes are taken into account when determining the skill cap and how many points we can spend before the cost goes up. Any aptitude bonuses from our morph, however, can make our skills go over the cap. Next up is our native tongue. Hypercorp gerontocrats tend to be sticklers for the classics, and while Urdu-Shinto melodic rapcore disco and Farsi-Celtic electro love thrash are hip with the kids these days, our songbird will sing in French. Now, we get 10 Package Points with which to buy packages. Packages come in values of 1, 3, or 5 PP, each PP being equivalent to 100 Character Points. The only packages we really need are a Faction package and a Background package. However, most of them don't have essential skills like, say, being of any use in a fight. Our background is simple: We're an uplift. There are three uplift packages available: Escapee, Feral, and Standard Specimen. We choose Uplift: Standard Specimen at the 3 PP level, which gives: -+1 Moxie. -An Academics at 40, an appropriate movement skill (Flight, since we're a bird) at 50, Fray 20, an Interest at 20, Interfacing 30, Intimidation 30, Kinesics 35, a Networking at 40, and a Profession at 30. -Social Stigma (Uplift). -+Mercurial Cause, +Sapient Cause, +Uplift Rights, -Uplift Slavery. Now, for faction, that's fairly simple, too. Socialite at 3 PP bestows: -+50 f-rep. -An Art skill at 40, Deception 25, an Interest at 50, Intimidation 30, Kinesics 40, Networking: Media 40, Persuasion 30, and Protocol 40. -+Artistic Expression, +Fame, +Hypercapitalism, +Wealth, -Anarchism. So now we have some specializations to pick. Art is easy: Singing. Academics might get swapped for something more important later, but for now let's go with Sociology. Astrosociology is also a thing, but let's stay in this solar system for now. Two Interests... Let's take Uplift Rights at 20 and Music at 50. She's at least aware there's an issue, but her handlers have decided there are more important things to worry about. We get Networking: Media for free, and adding our other Networking to it would push us well over the cap, so we'll go with Hypercorps. And finally our Profession. Like the Academics, we may change this later, but let's take Viral Marketing, so she can handle her own hype machine in the absence of her staff. We get 75 Kinesics in total, which goes over the cap, so we'll only take 50 of that and note we have 25 points to spend elsewhere. Now we have 4 PP remaining to spend on focus and customization packages. While it's tempting to keep her skill set in line with what her hypercorp masters would want, we have to remember that by default, Eclipse Phase PCs are agents for Firewall, so she will have... other skills. Customization packages only come in 1 PP size, so we'll pick up Essential Skills: -Fray 30, Networking (Choose One) 30, Perception 40. That makes us much more likely to survive in a fight, and we go for Networking: Firewall, just so she'll know her way around. Bards were often employed as spies or assassins in medieval times, but she's already got quite a lot of the skills needed to be a spy, so we'll take the Assassin package for 3 PP. Death doesn't really have the impact it used to, what with uploading our brains to the cloud and having extra bodies on hand, but it can be handy to get someone out of the way for a bit. We get: -+50 Rep (Our Choice) -Blades 25, Fray 30, Infiltration 40, Kinetic Weapons 50, Language (Choose One) 40, Perception 20, Profession: Assassin 50, and Unarmed Combat 40. -+Personal Career, +Privacy, +Survival. We'll take English for the language, so she can have that French accent the electronic old men go nuts for. And we'll assign our new Rep score half-and-half between g-rep and i-rep, for some influence both with criminals and Firewall. Fray is already nudging the cap, so we'll switch that to Disguise, making tweets about seeing a pop star murdering someone much less likely, and also letting her do her own makeup before shows. We only bump Perception by 10, making our free point pool 35. We can use some of that free pool to specialize in some of our skills. We'll add a Knives specialization to her Blades skill, and a Hypercorp specialty to Protocol. That uses 10, and, after calculating skills over 60, we wind up with 5 free Character Points. Now we move on to morph and gear. Naturally, we sleeve in a neo-parrot. This is free with our background. We have 5000 credits to spend on gear, so we buy: -a wasp knife (250c, this is a knife with a pressurized canister in the handle, which can discharge air, drugs, or other nasty substances into the target), -a light pistol and 200 rounds of plain vanilla pointy metal ammo (350c), -smart vac clothing, (1000c, acts as light armor, a spacesuit, and stylish apparel), -a utilitool (250c), -and Scent Alteration, a minor biochemical tweak that lets our bird smell nice. Or at least different. 250 credits, it's probably an outpatient procedure. Which leaves us with 2,900 credits. Now, the last thing to do is pick our motivations. +Artistic Expression and +Fame will represent the values our corporate masters have instilled in us, and +Personal Career will both mesh with that and cover our being a badass knifebird. We are pretty much done, this character is viable and would be interesting to play. In fact, it's so interesting I want to actually flesh her out more. We only have 5 points, though, so let's grab some drawbacks. We already have social Stigma (Uplift), and we'll add the Stalker trait from Panopticon, giving us at least one turbonerd that wants to sniff our bird panties or something.  We add Data Footprint, also from Panopticon, which dirties up our online life, making it easier to track us that way. Basically we can't stop somewhere without leaving a comment on their facebook page. We add Planned Obsolescence from Sunward to our bird body, making it so we need to get periodic gene-therapy "upgrades" to avoid getting weak from neural degradation, joint pain, and other genetic defects.That gives us 30 points. We'll convert those into credits as necessary to buy us a second morph and its gear: a Kite synthmorph from Gatecrashing. This is a flying robot body made of smart materials, so it can change its wings to fly in different atmospheres/gravities or deploy an ion propulsion system to fly in vacuum. This costs us 5000 credits, or 5 CP. We upgrade its durability with Light Combat Armor for another 1000, and give it a Magnetic System for 250, letting it grip onto spaceship hulls and factory scaffolding and all that noise. We'll grab another wasp knife for 250, but it's just backup for our primary weapon: A Sniper Rifle. We add an imaging scope, a flash suppressor, and a silencer, bringing the cost of the weapon up to 6500 credits. We could have skipped the silencer and suppressor by making the rifle a railgun, but railguns don't have the great array of ammunition available that conventional firearms do. We get 100 Reactive Accushot rounds for 500 credits, which ignore range penalties and then explode when they hit. Now that's fine for just killing things, but we can get all kinds of wicked, because there are two types of ammo that are made to just dose people with chemicals, drugs, nanoswarms, or maybe just paint if we're feeling cheeky. We get a hundred Splash rounds and load them with liquid thermite, which will ignite when it receives an electrical charge. And we also buy 100 Zap rounds, which are technically nonlethal because they do half damage and deliver an electric shock to the target.   Cost for being able to set a dude on fire with two shots? 1100 credits. Now technically we either have to load our magazines in an appropriate sequence or change mags after every shot to do that little trick. There are smart magazines which can fire whatever rounds we have without needing to reload, but this has gotten complex enough already. The game setting discourages you from spending a lot of points on gear (Which includes bodies), but they give you so much to choose from.We've got 15 points and 400 credits left over. Let's dip back into traits for a bit, since we have nothing but negatives in that section. We've got lots of nice choices here for a sniper, but I have a plan, and in pursuit of said plan we shall pick up Ego Plasticity level 1 for 10 points, which makes her less likely to go horribly insane after copying her mind and re-integrating with it. There's not really much we can use that other 5 on, though, so we'll turn it into money so we have some petty cash. And so here we have the Songbird: Darling corporate lounge singer by day, robot-bodied sniper by night. And potentially by day as well. She can create a fork, a copy of her ego, sleeve it into the kite morph, and have her own self run cover or air support while she goes in with the flesh body. Or have the fork (Technically the mind we as the players are following) go off and have Firewall adventures while the pop star body maintains her cover. This is a character I would actually love to play. I picture her based on Mars, scouring the souks and slums for hypercorp black labs and TITAN artifact smugglers, flitting through the rarefied atmosphere of Olympus Mons boardrooms with a word and a song. Now, I want to do at least one more Eclipse Phase character. I'm starting to get burnt out on the character generation, but I want to show off at least one more aspect of the setting, so you guys pick: -a mad psychic, -an anything-goes genehacker, -or an ultra-conservative combat
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Mar 2, 2014 09:07
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Well apparently EN World's Morrus is making a pair of D&D clones called OLD and NEW. Kickstarting for them at least. There happens to be a link on the Kickstarter to a sample of the Character Creation, so I was thinking if that has enough rules why don't I try to build one.pre:THE PROCESS 1.Choose a race and record starting attributes and three racial skills. 2.Choose a series of backgrounds, noting age, attribute adjustments and new skills as you go. 3.Determine your final age category and select an age special ability. 4.Choose a trait. 5.Choose one free combat trick. 6.Calculate your derived stats. 7.Determine your contacts based on your backgrounds and your REP score. 8.Equip your character with weapons, armor, and equipment. 9.Play O.L.D. The Roleplaying Game. quote:Start by choosing a race and sex for your character. Your race will determine your starting attributes, which are the attributes of a small child of that race (human adult average is 4 in each attribute). Your gender does not affect your attributes or skills at all. Humans provide the simplest, most straightforward playing experience. I am going to go for Ogre which gets: pre:Ogres The mighty Ogres are large and tough, but slow witted. STR 5 AGI 2 END 5 INT 2 WILL 2 CHA 2 LUC 2 MAG 0 MELEE WEAPON, CARRYING, HARDY, INTIMIDATE Large size: DEFENSE -2, SOAK 5 At the moment I am thinking Hardy, Carrying and Intimidate. I might go back and switch one for Melee Weapon, depending on if I can manage a build focused on Unarmed Combat in the later steps. 2.Choose a series of backgrounds, noting age, attribute adjustments and new skills as you go. quote:A starting character takes one starter tradition and four subsequent traditions (or tradition advancements), making five in total. Those marked [starter] may only be taken as your first tradition. Careers which have a chance of an enforced follow-up tradition (like some of the criminal traditions and prison) do not enforce the follow-up tradition if the tradition is the final (5th) tradition. TRADITION CHECKLIST When taking a tradition, go through the following steps: 1.Check prerequisites. 2.Apply age adjustment. 3.Apply attribute adjustments. 4.Select one skill from the list of available skills provided. 5.Note the special ability granted. pre:Starting Traditions Acolyte [starter] Farmhand [starter] Noble [starter] Page [starter] Primitive [starter] Slave [starter] Urchin [starter] Wizard's Apprentice [starter] Criminal Traditions Assassin Burglar Pirate Prison Thug Lore Traditions Alchemist Herbalist Loremaster Magical Traditions Cleric Diabolist Inquisitor Druid Mage Necromancer Military Traditions Archer Man-at-arms Squire Knight Watchman Musketeer Other Traditions Barbarian Berserker Beggar Gladiator Minstrel Ranger Sailor code:I end up picking Survival as my skill. I look over the options and have trouble finding one I really want, some sound interesting for our Ogre, but either have difficult requirements or don't really give me the stats I want, or the skills. It doesn't help that most that get STR, let alone STR and END, have the fewest amount of stat increases of all the traditions. Eventually I decide that our Ogre becomes a Man at Arms, this tradition has no prerequisites and increases both STR and END. code:Now I had been wanting to punch things, so I will be grabbing Unarmed Fighting for my skill, which not only gives me another dice to my Strength or Agility roll for unarmed combat but also gives me +1d6 to natural attack damage which is otherwise based off STR. As this character creation sample document does not include gear I will not be picking the starting item I get from that, nor will I be getting to the equip my character phase of character creation. I don't really plan to branch out with this Ogre, he is going to be all about punching things, so I am going to keep taking MAN-AT-ARMS for my next 3 traditions. Add 1, 4, and 4 years from my 1d6 rolls. We are now 26 I grab UNARMED FIGHTING 3 more times, each improving his punching damage. This also means STR, END and GC are increased 3 more times. Man at Arms is the same as above each time, except for the I: part, that has a new version each time you take it up to the 5th time. code:We are 26, for an Ogre 26 is an Adult. The only race that is Adult at 26 everything else is only Young, or younger, at that age. As an Adult we get to choose from two traits: code:5.Choose one free combat trick. These are normally purchased with xp, but we start with one free one. We have to make sure we meet any prerequisites for it of course. code:I don't see it on the numbered list but now we pick a Personal skill, it should be a hobby or something like that. It should be in the character's description, which I don't think I have seen yet, and it gets an additional rank for every 10 full years of age. I look at the examples and pick Carousing, being 26 that should give me Carousing x3. 4.Choose a trait This was listed as number 4 but Combat Tricks came up first in the pdf I have. So yeah. quote:Your trait is a dominant characteristic based on your attributes. If someone were to describe your character, this is the first word they'd use - “Alana? You mean that charming minstrel?” or “Boreque is quite the greedy nobleman”. Select a trait from the following list. Traits offer a 1d6 die bonus in the same way that skills do. You may only take one trait. As a defining characteristic, you should bring your trait into your roleplaying as often as possible. Every time you use your trait, you earn 1 XP. Some traits require a Stat to be at 6 or higher, others require a Stat to be at 2 or less. I look them over and eventually decide on Athletic, which requires 6+ in either STR or AGI, but since our STR is 10 that is plenty. We are fit and strong. 6.Calculate your derived stats. Attribute Dice Stats determine a number of things, but when you need to use a stat to roll something you use a number of dice based on your attribute, using this formula. code:Health is calculated by rolling our Endurance dice in d6s, with Endurance 10 we roll 6d6. If we roll less than 3 times our Endurance then we increase the total to 3 times our Endurance. I rolled a 22 which is less than 3 times our Endurance, so I raise my Health to 30. Speed add Agility + 1/2 Strength (round each up). That is how many squares I can move in one action, if I had the running skill it would increase my speed by 1 per rank. Agility 2 plus 1/2 of Strength 10 gives me Speed 7. Climb is my climb speed and is equal to half my regular speed rounded up, if I had the climbling skill it would increase by 1 per rank. Half of 7 gives me Climb 4. Jump are my basic (free) horizontal and vertical jump distances. Under normal circumstances I can just this many feet with no attribute check required. •Horizontal distance is equal to twice your AGILITY in feet. This gives me Horizontal Distance of 4 feet. •Vertical distance is equal to your STRENGTH in feet. This gives me Vertical Distance of 10 feet. •If you have jumping as a skill, add 2 per rank to the horizontal distance per rank, and 1 per rank to the vertical distance. If you have selected a skill which combines both climbing and running somehow (such as free-running), add 1 to both instead. •If you are size SMALL then reduce your horizontal jump by 4' (to a minimum of 5') and your vertical jump by 2' (to a minimum of 3'). Initiative This is recorded in the form of a die roll derived from the table above and based on your INT attribute. Tactics and reactions both increase the number of dice rolled. For example, if you had an INT of 7, you'd record 4d6. If you also had reactions you'd treat it as INT 8 and record 5d6. Well don't have either of those skills and an Int of 2 which gives me 2d6. Defense Is 10 + (Agility x3). It is also effected by Size (Large -2, Small +2) We are Large and have an Agility of 2. So we have Defense 14. Mental Defense Is 10 + (Willpower x3). Works just like Defense but vs mental checks. Will 2 so 16 Mental Defense. Carrying Capacity Is (Strength x20) +30 in pounds. That is a carrying increment, for every multiple or part thereof beyond that Agility is reduced by 1. The carrying skill increases this capacity by 20 per rank. Have Strength 10 and 1 rank of Carrying. So we have Carrying Capacity of 250 lbs. Magic Points Is equal to 10x Magic attribute plus any bonuses that traditions offer. We have a Magic of 0 and no traditions that add to this so 0. Natural Damage This is the damage we do with a punch, kick, claw, bite etc. It can be improved with skills (unarmed combat, er fighting as a skill adds 1d6 per rank). It is equal to 1d6 per 5 STR or part thereof. 10 Strength plus Unarmed Fighting x4 gives us 6d6 Natural Damage. To compare our values the average values for a non-adventuring human are: Health 15, Speed 6, Defense 22, Mental Defense 22, Carry 110, Damage 1d6. Ours are: Health 30, Speed 7, Defense 14, Mental Defense 16, Carry 250, Damage 6d6. 7.Determine your contacts based on your backgrounds and your REP score. You get 1 contact for each point of REP, we have 0 so yeah, and each should reflect where you got that point of REP. The contact should have a particular skill in which they are trained. For each contact you roll a Routine [10] CHA check. On a success it's a contact and on a failure it's a rival. 8.Equip your character with weapons, armor, and equipment. Now we roll our GC in d6s x20 based on our Gold Coins attribute, or 3 times our GC attribute, whichever is higher. Rolled a 10, which is less than 3 times our GC, so I bump it up to a 12. Then that gives us 240 gold coins. Then we add 10 x LUC to that total. This is 50, plus the 240 above, gives us a total of 290 gold coins. We would then look through the equipment chapter, but that was not included in the sample character creation pdf. Here we are: code:NEW races are Humans, Ogrons, Venetians, Borians, Androids, Spartans and Felans. NEW careers are: pre:Starting Careers Child Prodigy [starter] Genetic Experiment [starter] High School Jock [starter] Monastic Upbringing [starter] Navy Brat [starter] Street Kid [starter] Talent [starter] Teenage Hacker [starter] Traveller [starter] Wealthy Upbringing [starter] Academic Careers College [repeatable] Field Scientist Criminal Careers Burglar Cat Burglar Con Artist Gangster Prison [repeatable] Smuggler Street Thug General Careers Craftsman Drifter [repeatable] Gambler [repeatable] Musician Noble Media Star Psychic Socialite Superstar Athlete Investigative Careers Bounty Hunter Detective Navy Intelligence Officer Police Officer Psi-Cop Psi-Corps Military Careers Assassin Military Academy Infilitrator Scout Sniper Star Marines Cadet Star Marines Tour of Duty Vocational Careers Ambassador Bartender Counselor Doctor Miner Politician Priest Reporter Space Jockey Navy Careers Academy Teaching Navy Cadet Cruise Navy Command School Navy Tour Starbase Assignment Comms Officer Starship Counselor Engineer Pilot Medic Science Officer Security Officer Species Careers Spartan Battle School [starter] this actually has 3 levels so I guess it can be taken multiple times. Venetian Retreat Felan Scavenger [starter] Service Droid [starter]
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Mar 2, 2014 10:16
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Roll 11d10 or Don't: Let's (Actually) Make Characters in Greg Stolze's Reign Hey do you like characters I like characters let's make a character go go go go go quote:2x1 Lowly Beggar BAM! Holy poo poo, look at those results. Last time the generator gave us Conan the Philosopher, this time we seem to have gotten ourselves a literal murderhobo. We don't have the learned, intellectual leanings of the Canny Sage, but that Front Line Fighter result gives us our first taste of Martial Paths, and the Stolen Birthright random event also brings up something else that I haven't talked about yet, Passions. Let's get the boring stuff out of the way first. Okay, Passions aren't boring exactly but if you're like me you'll probably skip ahead to see how the Martial Path stuff works. It's cool, I'll wait.  Wrong kind of Passions, sorry. Passions are an optional rule for characters in Reign, you don't have to use them but you can if you want to bring the dread specter of storygaming into your ORE experience. Passions are pretty simple, really...you have a Duty, a Craving, and a Mission. A Craving is something you, well, crave. Fabulous wealth, fame, to see your enemies driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women, etc. A Mission is a quest or concrete goal you wish to achieve. If you happen to achieve it then congrats, you gain an XP and can choose a new Mission. A Duty is a somewhat nebulous set of principles or codes you live up to and abide by. You can buy off a Duty to get rid of it but it costs 10XP. You can never buy off your Craving. So what do they do? Whenever you act in accordance with/in the pursuit of a Passion you either add +1d to any applicable rolls or offset one point of penalties. This may sound like a pointless distinction but in Reign all penalties take the form of subtracting dice from your pool and Expert and Master Dice always get subtracted first. Being able to eliminate penalties as opposed to simply adding more dice can be very, very useful. If more than one Passion applies, you get more than one bonus all the way up to +3d. But, here's the catch, if you go against your Passions then it's a -1d penalty for each one. You can wind up in situations where your Passions are at cross-purposes...your Craving is to bed the handsome prince but your Duty is to the Queen and you know that she's arranged a valuable political marriage for her son. This is both expected and encouraged, and in cases like this the bonus and penalty simply cancel each other out and you act as normal. All right, now get to the good stuff. I've got killing hands, here. Okay, now let's talk the advanced art of murdering dudes. Martial Paths (and Esoteric Disciplines for non-combat skills) all work the same way. Each one is a series of five bonuses and techniques (a rare few have only three) attached to a specific skill that you purchase in sequence. If you're at all familiar with how the Storyteller system has handled things like vampiric disciplines then you know how this goes. Each rank of a martial path costs a number of build points at character creation equal to its level...so rank 1 costs 1 point, rank 2 costs 2 points, etc. So to buy all 5 ranks of a single path or discipline costs you 15 total build points. Reign generally has at least one Martial Path for every major common fantasy weapon out there...axes, spears, swords, bows, daggers, punching people...though some have had more Paths created for them than others, but it's not an overwhelming amount (swords get, I think, three). Most skills have one or two Esoteric Disciplines attached to them. Fortunately they all tend to be flavorful, distinct, and quite useful though some live up to the "esoteric" part more than others. In our particular case we've been granted 2 levels in one Martial Path and 1 level in a second. Also thanks to our rolls we have two distinct Weapon skills, a single level of Dagger from our Cutpurse roll and 3 levels in a Weapon skill of our choice from Front Line Fighter. In addition there are two other potential Martial Paths we could take, one in Dodge or one in Parry. The reason the One-Roll Engine is called that is because, in large part, when you mix it up with some burly motherfuckers you don't roll initiative, then roll to-hit, then roll damage, etc. You roll once and everything springs off of that roll...how fast you acted, how hard you hit, etc. This makes combat lightning quick, but it also makes combat kind of dangerous because if you and someone else exchange blows and they happen to hit faster than you what happens is that they will knock a die out of your set. And if that reduced your set to only a single die then your action is lost. So simply standing there trading blows with someone is a bit of a risky proposition, as if they manage to strike quicker than you do you'll wind up taking an axe to the face and losing your turn in the process (of course you can try to do this to other people yourself...if you're confident that you're fast enough). So a good defense can be important...but if you only get one roll in this One-Roll Engine then how can you do both? Multiple actions.  Shown: the proper emergency procedures for handling multiple actions in roleplaying games. Wait wait wait, come back. It's not that bad, I promise. Here's how multiple actions work in Reign: 1). Decide what two things you want to do simultaneously, like "Attack" and "Parry." 2). Look at both dice pools for those two actions and choose the lower of the pair. 3). Take a -1d penalty to that pool and roll it. 4). Look for sets. Unlike a regular single action what you want is two sets this time, one for each action. If you roll two sets then you assign one to one action and the second to the other. If you roll only one set then you choose which action it goes towards and the other automatically fails. If you roll no sets then sucks to be you. For example, our character up there (who we've yet to fully assemble, I'll get to that in a moment) has a Fight pool of 5 and a Parry pool of 6. If I want to both attack with Fight and defend with Parry in the same turn I look for which pool is lower...that would be the 5...then knock a die off of that which reduces it to 4, and then I roll and hope to get two different sets on 4 whole dice. That's not super likely...the odds of rolling a single set on 4d10 are about 50%, rolling two different sets is probably not gonna happen that often. So a character with high offensive skills but low defensive skills is kind of stuck hoping that he can reliably bum-rush his opponents in order to foul their attacks with his own...if he ever rolls low or slow then he's gonna take it on the chin. Of course there's armor which can help mitigate incoming hurt, but it's still risky to simply wade through someone else's blows, and there are optional rules that can make getting whacked hurt even if your armor absorbed most of it. Someone who wants to dedicate themselves to being a slayer of men, then, will probably want to have both an offensive skill and a defensive skill within close proximity of each other. It's not a hard-and-fast system mastery rule, and there are Martial Path techniques that can and do assist with this sort of thing. Speaking of which, let's actually put this guy together. Putting it all together, round two. Actually we made a guy last time, let's make a lady this time. We'll call her Jenevieve. The first thing I'm looking at here is that Stolen Birthright. Goddamn, is there any better way to start out a backstory than that? I like the idea of a deposed noble...our gal is a bona-fide Princess. Or she was until her scheming uncle swiped the throne from her. Boo! That motherfucker is going to pay. Just as soon as we figure out how. Cast out and penniless, our Princess-in-exile is forced to beg on the streets to survive. It's a hardscrabble existence but it hones her wits and sharpens her reflexes, and through drive and determination she quickly graduates from begging to thieving, learning how to move without being seen, how to travel across the rooftops and hidden alleyways...and how to handle a knife. Then the day comes when she sets her sights on a tempting prize, a masterfully crafted sword in the possession of a mercenary captain. It doesn't go quite as well as she might have hoped. He catches her in the act and a chase scene ensues all across the city, leaving a trail of overturned fruit carts and shattered pottery in its wake. Cornered at last, she whirls around ready to sell her life dearly...and to her great surprise, the captain offers her a job instead. Anyone with as much fire as she has, he figures, has the makings of a great warrior. He lets her keep the sword. And it turns out he's right. With a desire for bloody vengeance driving her, she takes to the blade like a fish to water. A deadly fish that runs people through with a sword. Some sort of sword-fish, perhaps. Between what she learned on the streets and what he teaches her she becomes a whirling terror on the battlefield, almost impossible to hit and lethal when confronted. All the while though she strives to uphold her family's traditions, knowing that one day soon she'll pay her dear old uncle a visit to properly thank him for all he's done for her. Bells and whistles. Okay, so let's finally pick some Martial Paths. First things first, we have two really good combat scores going for us. Our Coordination is a whopping 4, just one shy of the maximum, and we have a Weapon: Any (I'm going to go with Swords here) of 2+ED and a Dodge of 5. That is really pretty good in both cases. So I'm gonna look at Swords and Dodge for my two Martial Paths. For the 2 ranks, I turn to the sword path listed in the core rulebook, the Path of the Razor Heart. All of these Paths (and Disciplines) have flavor that ties them to the default setting but they can easily be refluffed as desired, there's nothing that forces you to abide by the setting details if you don't want, and even if you do the assumption is that techniques like this inevitably disseminate across the world anyway so if you want to use a Dindavaran school of sword-fighting you don't have to be Dindavaran to do so. The first two ranks of Razor Heart get us the following: quote:Pure Commencement (1 point): You can draw a sword and attack in the same round That's right, it's just like one of your animes. Razor Heart is all about quick-draw attacks that hit extra hard when they land. The next level up from this will let us automatically drop someone to the ground and disrupt all their sets instead of just one if we strike them in the torso, the one after that lets us make multiple sword attacks that all land at the speed of the fastest set and can't be disrupted by someone else's attacks, and the final technique in the path lets us do our best Raiden impersonation and literally chop dudes in half and send limbs flying with a single stroke.  Craving: Eat spines Then let's use our remaining single technique to pick up a Dodge ability from the School of the Insouciant Monkey. quote:Monkey Dodge (1 point): You do not take a penalty for adding a Dodge to any action. Bam, how 'bout that? Remember that multiple action penalty I talked about earlier? Gone. We still have to use the lower pool of course, and remember that Single Intent can't be used with multiple actions, but regular sword attacks sure can. Further levels will raise the base difficulty to hit us, let us automatically counterpunch someone whose attack we evade, grant us the equivalent of always-on armor, and allow us to apply Dodge sets against attacks even if those attacks are faster than our own. Finishing touches. And now we put the whole thing together. Our rank 4 Possession is going to be a bitchin' sword...nothing magical but masterfully crafted from the finest steel, which does actually have an effect on it. We have the same Wealth 1 as the last character so at least we aren't totally penniless. So here's what Princess-in-exile Jeneveive the Swift Death looks like: pre:Body 3 Fight 2 Parry 3 Run 3 Coordination 4 Climb 2 Dodge 5 Stealth 3 Weapon: Dagger 1 Weapon: Sword 2+ED Knowledge 2 Language (Native) 0+MD Command 2 Sense 3 Sight 1 Charm 2 Plead 2 Advantage: Possession 4 (master-crafted sword) Advantage: Wealth 1 Pure Commencement Single Intent Monkey Dodge Duty: Sustain Your Family's Traditions Possessions: A comfortable pair of shoes, dagger, a coil of rope, a black cloak with a hood and scarf Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Mar 2, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 11:31
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Speaking of Reign I had clicked on the Character Generator, and got a rather interesting set of results.quote:2x1 Lowly Beggar That looks like a rather adventurous life. Putting it all together Let's call him Ash. I also got the Stolen Birthright result, but I think I will combine it with Adept, or perhaps have it as a followup. Ash's family was a powerful sorcerer family, they had used their magics to rise up in the ranks of nobility and were now pretty powerful. By all rights Ash should have been the heir of the family, and in time the lord of his family. But his younger brother had set up a scheme to dishonor him, to make him look like a failure and unfit for his rightful place. Ash was shamed and driven from his family. He had lost everything and was forced to beg. While begging he did whatever he could to try and make enough money to feed himself. He began to start shining shoes of those who passed by, or if the shoes were beginning to fall apart he would help fix them. One day a passing cobbler took him in, gave him a meal and a bath and began to test him. The cobbler found that Ash seemed to have an instinct for cobbling. Soon Ash became the cobbler's assistant. Not long after people began to come to the cobbler's shop specifically for Ash's work. It did not take long for word to reach the King. Ash was summoned before the King, his handiwork was tested, and he was proclaimed the King's personal cobbler. From that day on he made the most beautiful, most comfortable and most durable shoes in the entire kingdom, almost exclusively for the King. However his skills were not actually exclusively for the King, a few members of the King's court, and of course the King's family, were allowed to sample his wares. And this is how Ash met the Princess. The King's daughter was beautiful, and so too was Ash. She was charmed by his beauty, and his skill with his hands. They had become lovers. Yet she was promised to another. A powerful noble was pledged to marry the Princess. And when he discovered Ash's indiscretions he was quite livid. Ash had to make a choice. Rune like a coward, or die on the noble's blade. He ran. Leaving the Princess, and all his worldly possessions, behind. He escaped the King's castle, taking a horse from the stables, and ran, or rather rode, away. It seems that cobbling wasn't his only gift, for when he rode that horse he pulled speed from it that even its own stable master would not have expected. He got away, though that noble will forever hunt him down, and found the ride rather exhilarating. Settling down far enough away to hopefully avoid anyone who knew him. Ash took up racing horses, he just couldn't give up the thrill of the race. And like with cobbling he proved quite exceptional. None could really compare with his skill. Still he was a good natured man, and it didn't hurt that he was good looking to boot, and so he got along with the other racers. While he raced and stayed with the other racers he found that they all took turns cooking. He had not exactly had a lot of experience cooking. He had had people to do that for him before he lost his place in his family, and when he was working for the King, the cobbler's wife cooked when he worked for the cobbler, and he had nothing to cook when he was a beggar. Still he watched the others, and put his hand to the task. And once again he flourished. He seemed to have a natural knack for cooking, practically every task he put his mind to seemed to come naturally to him. Soon he became better known for his cooking than for his actual racing. His fame is already starting to build again, hopefully that noble doesn't find out where he is as a result. pre:Body 2 Run 2 Charm 2 Lie 1 Plead 2 Command 2 Coordination 3 Dodge 2 Expert Cobbler 4+Master Ride 3+Expert Stealth 1 Knowledge 3 Counterspell 2 Language (Native) 0+Master Lore 1 Sorcery 1+Expert Sense 3 Expert Cooking 5 Eerie 4 Sight 1 Advantage: Beauty 1 Advantage: Spells 3 Advantage: Spells OR Counterspell 2 Duty: Sustain Your Family's Traditions Problem: Enemy
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Mar 2, 2014 12:26
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Awesome. Hold that thought about picking spells, because in my next update I plan to go into detail on how sorcery works. Also just as a point of interest, you know how I said earlier that each random die is basically worth 5 build points of stuff? There's one single exception to that in all of Reign...His Majesty's Personal Cobbler gives you 4 dice plus a Master Die, which costs 11 build points total. But as Stolze himself puts it in the book, come on, it's cobbling.
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Mar 2, 2014 13:15
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I'm about to start using Reign's company rules in my 4e game, and I like them a lot. This character generation is kinda making me want to just play Reign straight-up instead.
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Mar 2, 2014 14:16
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I'll be honest, I'm a little surprised that Reign doesn't seem to get any love over in The Game Room. I'd have figured that Greg Stolze + nontraditional fantasy + decent mechanics + actual good random character generation + domain management rules would be like tradgoon catnip.
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Mar 2, 2014 14:18
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The ORE has a bit of a probability problem at high ranks.
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Mar 2, 2014 15:09
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What is it in particular you're referring to?
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Mar 2, 2014 15:30
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Kai Tave posted:What is it in particular you're referring to? At low levels you barely succeed at anything, while at high levels you can't really fail. There is a sweet spot between...I'd say 5 and 7 dice? Where things are mostly pretty okay.
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Mar 2, 2014 16:44
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On the one hand that's accurate...the probability chart in the Reign corebook illustrates that there's a sudden and swift rise in the odds of achieving a set at the lower end which quickly hits a point of diminishing returns at the high end, at which time the odds of you achieving some sort of set are exceptionally likely. A dicepool of 4d gives you 50% odds of rolling a set, and it jumps to around a 70% chance or so at 5d, then further increases get smaller per added die as it rises. On the other hand, that probability chart doesn't weigh in on the likely widths or heights of said sets, which are important factors to consider. Having high odds of rolling any given set doesn't help when that set doesn't give you the numbers you needed to beat the difficulty or race ahead of someone else although I'm sure the odds of those also rise along with increases in your dice pools. I do agree that low dice pools can be a frustrating thing to deal with at times, and the random generator's main drawback in my opinion is that it can spread your results fairly thin across the board. This chart on 1d4chan goes into greater depth than the one in the corebook does, showing the probability breakdowns not only for achieving a set on any given pool of dice but the odds of achieving sets by width, while this page provides an exhaustive examination of the mathematics of the ORE that I could not even hope to meaningfully weigh in on.
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Mar 2, 2014 17:07
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Kai Tave posted:I'll be honest, I'm a little surprised that Reign doesn't seem to get any love over in The Game Room. I'd have figured that Greg Stolze + nontraditional fantasy + decent mechanics + actual good random character generation + domain management rules would be like tradgoon catnip. I don't know how well the ORE mechanics would handle PBP either, due to the "declare->roll->determine order" factor.
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Mar 2, 2014 17:43
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 I've spent two days making pregens for 13th Age, so what's one more? Plus I hit this concept the other day and really want to stat it up. 13th Age is a D&D-ish game made by Rob Hisenoo (lead designer of 4th edition D&D, and a writer on Feng Shui) and Jonathan Tweet (lead designer for 3rd edition D&D, as well as working on Over The Edge and Ars Magica). As a result, 13th Age is a combination of the best parts of 3.X and 4e, with some storygame stuff thrown in for good measure. Character creation follows the D&D flow for the most part, but has a few important changes. First off, I pick my race. The normal D&D spread is available: human, dwarf, elf (dark/high/wood), gnome, half-elf, halfling, and half-orc. In addition, there are four "optional" races that will seem familiar to D&D veterans: I'm going to pick Tiefling, which gets me the following racial ability: quote:Curse of Chaos Next I choose my class. Again, we pretty much get the normal D&D spread here. Barbarian, bard, cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, and wizard. This tiefling's going to be a bard. Each class starts with a few talents, features, and other such abilities. Bards get the following class features: Bardic Songs: Songs are spell-like abilities that you can sustain over a few rounds for ongoing effects. When the song ends, there's a "final verse" effect that's a little different from the ongoing effect. Battle Cries: These are "flexible" melee attacks that buff my allies. A "flexible" attack is a special ability that is triggered by rolling a certain value on my attack roll; like a natural 16+, an even miss, or any hit. Flexible attacks are actually chosen after you roll, so you don't have to declare it then hope you roll the right value. Battle cries only affect allies, not myself. Spells: Spells. In 13th Age, you prepare spells, but some spells are "at-will" and aren't lost when cast, and some are only usable once per day but may "recharge" on a die roll after being used. Spells in 13th Age can also be prepared at higher levels than their base for better effect, so your spells scale with your character. For example, prepping "Magic Missile", a 1st level spell, at 5th level will increase the damage it does. A first level bard starts with two battle cries and two first level spells/songs. I also get to pick three class talents, which are my main class features. My picks for talents are: quote:Spellsinger: I can pick an extra bardic song or bard spell. Now I can pick two battle cries. I'll take: quote:Pull It Together!: Twice per battle, if I roll a natural 11+ on my basic melee attack, one of my allies can heal using a recovery. I also get three songs and/or spells. quote:Battle Chant is an at-will spell that attacks an opponent at range for 1d4+Cha thunder damage, and can trigger my battle cries like a basic melee attack. Bards also get a basic melee attack and basic ranged attack. A bard's basic melee can be based off Str or Dex plus level, so I'l have it key off Dex. Also, my basic melee does my level damage on a miss. Damage will depend on my weapons, of course, so I'll take a longsword (d8) and a crossbow (d6). It's worth pointing out here that weapon dice for the non-pure-caster classes scale with level, which means that my basic melee attacks do (level)d8+Dex damage and my ranged attack does (level)d6+Dex damage. Step 3 is to generate my stats. Stats are the Big Six, and can either be rolled or assigned through point-buy. As an added bonus, the book gives me 24 legal stat arrays if I don't feel like delving into the point-buy math. I'll grab a pretty balanced array and put the numbers where I want. Each stat also has a modifier that I don't think I need to explain. quote:STR: 12 (+1) quote:STR: 12 (+1) Now it's time to figure out my combat stats: my base hit points, AC, Physical Defense, Mental Defense, initiative, and recoveries. Base hp is a value that depends on my class (in this case, 7) plus my Con mod, times three. My Con mod is only zero, so I have (0+7)*3 = 21 hit points. I'm AC depends on my armor, of course. Bards are best with light armor, so I'll take studded leather armor to get the best benefit. My AC with leather armor is 12 + level + the middle modifier of my Con, Dex, or Wis. The mods are +0/+1/+2, so I have to use the +1 for an AC of 14. Physical Defense (PD) is like Fortitude in D&D, and is calculated the same way. For bards, it's 10 plus level plus the middle of Str, Con, or Dex, which means my PD is 12. Mental Defense (MD) is my "Will save", and is 11 + level + the middle of my mental stats for a MD of 13. Recoveries are basically healing surges, and everyone starts with 8 (except fighters, who get 9). Unlike 4e, the amount of hp I get back when I spend a recovery is rolled. A bard gets (level)d8+Con hit points back per recovery, so my recovery value at level 1 is 1d8. Which is low, but thanks to Battle Chant I don't have to worry about being in melee too much. I also get one feat at first level. Feats work a little differently in 13th Age than in D&D; instead of being a list of general stuff everyone can pick from, feats are mostly tied to specific abilities and make those abilities for effective. So I could take a feat on Move It! to improve the healing it gives, or on Battle Skald to allow my battle cries to target me one battle per day. I'll take the feat for Battle Chant to increase the damage dice to d6s. Now it's time for the storygame-y parts. I have to pick my One Unique Thing, Backgrounds, and Icon Relationships. Every character in 13th Age has One Unique Thing that sets them apart from the rest of the world. It can be anything I want, as long as a) it doesn't have a mechanical benefit, and b) the GM is okay with it. My One Unique Thing will be "A rip in space/time opened before me, and before it was closed I heard the most amazing music, and a strage lute-like instrument infused with thunder and lightning fell out." I think you can all see where I'm going with this. I'm basically the world's first headbanger and am spreading the gospel of heavy metal. That's also why I picked studded leather armor. Backgrounds are like a combination of skills and aspects. They work like skills, rated from +1 to +5, but are player-defined and should be set up to talk more about what my character's about. So if I was a thief, instead of taking "Climb +3" and "Pick Locks +2", I can take something like "Accomplished Second-Story Man +5". I could then use that skill in any situation where being an accomplished second-story man would be useful; climbing walls, picking locks, moving silently, even knowing where to find a good fence. Everyone starts with 8 background points, and backgrounds cap at +5. Thanks to my Mythkenner ability, I get two bonus points for backgrounds related to mythology, and those backgrounds can go up to +6. I'll take "Power Balladeer of Inspiring Legends +6", "Apprentice chef +2", and "Friendly +2". This character was just a normal likable guy who was working in a bakery or inn before the whole thing with the rift happened. Finally, I define my Icon Relationships. There are 13 Icons in the game, and they're basically the main power movers and shakers in the setting. They're not named, but are know by their titles: The Emperor, The Elf Queen, The High Druid, The Prince of Shadows, and so on. I get three relationship points to start, and I use those to buy a connection to various Icons. These connections can be positive, conflicted, or negative. I get one free point with either the Priestess (basically the pope of all the world's non-evil gods) or the Great Gold Wyrm (a gold dragon who guards the entrance to the Abyss to keep the demons in). I'll buy two Positive points with the Priestess since I'm sort of starting a new belief system based around being as awesome as you can; the Priestess is all about spiritual growth. I'll also buy one Conflicted point with the Archmage, since I was at ground zero at a significant magical event; he's probably keeping an eye on me. Lastly, I'll buy one negative point with the Diabolist because she doesn't like the idea of demon-like people going around and being nice and heroic. I should note that, at level 1, I'm probably not known by the Icons themselves. It's more that their organizations and subordinates know about me. As the game progresses, of course, that can change. The way relationships work is that at the start of every session I roll a number of d6s equal to the relationship with an icon. If any 6s come up, then that relationship should come into play in a positive way. If any 5s come up, then that relationship will cause a complication of some sort. For gear, I start with my weapons, armor, and 25 gold pieces. Lastly, we just name this guy and we're done! Here's his final sheet. quote:Dio; 1st level tiefling bard e: Goddammit why am I so bad at this today? Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Mar 2, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 20:21
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Okay, guys, you really need to learn how to use linebreaks when using the pre tag.
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Mar 2, 2014 20:22
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Mors Rattus posted:Okay, guys, you really need to learn how to use linebreaks when using the pre tag. Sorry! I fixed it, though. 
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Mar 2, 2014 20:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:Sorry! I fixed it, though. Yeah, but you also broke a few other things. Evil Mastermind posted:I've spent two days making quotegens for 13th Age, so what's one more? Plus I hit this concept the other day and really want to stat it up.
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Mar 2, 2014 20:39
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We're technically done creating Shirley as a character, but as a global-level power player in the occult underground, she's got access to a fair bit more mojo than just what's written on her sheet. In this final UA post (unless you guys want to see another character, like maybe an adept), we'll talk a little bit about that mojo. But first, a refresher on Shirley's stats: pre:Name: Shirley McCready
Obsession: Music, specifically how music can be an expression of freedom even among the most oppressed and downtrodden, and the mystical significance thereof
Passions:
Fear: Eye Trauma: Shirley saw Zombi 2 at a friend's Halloween party when she was a little girl and it traumatized her pretty bad.
Rage: Punching Down: It gets Shirley really pissed off when people in positions of power or privilege use their position to poo poo on people underneath them.
She's not much of a Daniel Tosh fan, in other words.
Noble: Performing: Despite all the occult weirdness she finds herself mired in, despite her obsession with finding the music of freedom and all the other poo poo
going on in her life, Shirley's at her happiest when she's on stage in front of the crowd and everything but the music melts into the background.
Personality: Aries: Shirley's couragous, powerful, and straightforward, but also incredibly egocentric. When she sees something she wants (or something she wants to fix),
she goes right at it and usually gets her way, but for anybody around her, it's her way or the highway.
Body: 40% (chunky)
Carry Heavy poo poo: 15%
General Athletics: 15%
Study All Day, Rock All Night: 20%
Self-Defense Course: 20%
Speed: 40% (spacey)
Dodge: 15%
Driving: 30%
Initiative: 15%
Running the gently caress Away: 15%
Sneaking Around: 35%
Mind: 70% (intuitive)
Hypnotherapy: 15%
Music of the Spheres: 30% (Helplessness/Isolation)
Musicology: 50%
Soul: 90% (magnetic)
Avatar: Flying Woman: 55%
Lying: 15%
Overawe: 35%
Rock and Roll: 50%
Madness
Violence
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Unnatural
Hardened: ■ ■ ■ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Helplessness
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ □ □ □ □
Isolation
Hardened: ■ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: ■ ■ □ □ □
Self
Hardened: □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □
Failed: □ □ □ □ □
Adept magick: Shirley's not an adept, so she can't use any adept magic. The way her obsession is set up, she could potentially develop an adept school of her own, something to do with musical magic that creates effects based on freedom and liberation, but she's not there yet. It's possible to be both an adept and an avatar, but it's difficult and tends to make you even crazier than just being an adept. Still, there's enough synergy between "music as vessel of freedom" and the Flying Woman's archetype that it could happen with the right trigger event. Avatar channels: Being an avatar means you have a Soul-based skill called Avatar: [Archetype Name]. Depending on your rating in that skill, you have access to anywhere from one to four avatar channels, which are the mystical boons you get for living your life according to the symbology of your archetype. Shirley isn't an extraordinarily advanced avatar of the Flying Woman, but her skill is enough that she has the first two channels:
As Shirley progresses along the path of the Flying Woman, she'll be able to roll her Avatar skill to bypass anything intended to restrict or restrain her and even flip-flop any roll she makes as long as the result is under her Avatar skill. In order to reach those lofty heights, though, she'll have to take care not to violate the Flying Woman's taboos. Taboos are behaviors inimical to the archetype, things like backing down from a fight for the Warrior or being indecisive for the Judge. Each time an avatar violates a taboo, she loses between one and three points of her Avatar skill. The Flying Woman's taboos include checking your own behavior for fear of what other people might think, submitting to threats or coercion, and asking someone else to do something she's capable of doing herself. None of those are doing Shirley many favors in the "winning friends" category. Ritual Magick: Ritual magick is the leftover remnants of modern and premodern schools of magickal thinking. Most of it's a hot steaming pile of bullshit, but just like a broken clock is right twice a day, every once in a while one of the old masters got lucky and hit on something that worked. Ritual magick is divided into three levels: minor, significant, and major. Only minor rituals can be used by anybody; the more powerful ones require charges, and adepts are generally the only ones with ready access to charges. To use a minor ritual, you roll under your Soul - 30%. With Shirley's Soul of 90 that still gives her a respectable shot at casting one, so we'll say she's probably accumulated a few. There's no real system for saying how many a global-level character should know, but I'm thinking three or so isn't unreasonable. Shirley's all about freedom and breaking bonds, so I'm going to say she knows the following rituals:
There are a couple of other types of rituals, including proxy rituals which allow you to designate another person as your mystical "double" in order to spoof magical attacks against yourself. That seems like the kind of thing Shirley would find repellent, so we'll say that while she knows such things exist, she doesn't know how the ritual works and would never cast it herself. Tilts are a much more freeform and minor form of magick, in which you assemble some symbolically-significant objects and come up with a little ritual that can put a minor blessing or curse on somebody. It's pretty much magick 101, so naturally Shirley's familiar with it and probably uses it frequently. Artifacts: Artifacts are, as you might guess, objects with magical power. They're seldom what you'd expect, and I'll let the short story Roll Your Bones explain it better than I could: Roll Your Bones posted:One of his operatives had spread the rumor that Abel's emerald ring was the Ring of Solomon, giving him dominion over the Spirits of the Air, who would devour the liver and kidneys of anyone who dared to attack him. This was, of course, utter bullshit. The ring was just a ring.  Anyway, artifacts aren't terribly common, but as a global-level character, it seems reasonable that Shirley might have one. Maybe she's got an old eight-track tape that never runs down, and as long as it's "playing" it makes people lose their fear of rejection. They'll flirt with that hottie at the bar they're sure is out of their league, demand that raise they were scared to ask their boss for, whatever. Mechanically, it postpones the need to make Self or Helplessness stress checks until you're not listening to the tape any more, but then everything catches up to you all in one big whammy. So that's about the size and shape of the mojo Shirley can bring to bear. My question for the thread is: are you guys tired of Unknown Aries, or should I maybe work up a really nasty piece of work to contrast Shirley, maybe an adept since we haven't seen much of their magick yet?
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Mar 2, 2014 20:46
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W.T. Fits posted:Yeah, but you also broke a few other things. ...I had wondered about that.
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Mar 2, 2014 20:46
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I wanted to contribute to this thread, but unfortunately I can't seem to find the information I'm looking for. Then it occurred to me that maybe someone in this thread would have that information. Back in the day (yo), there was a book that allowed you to systemlessly generate characters for roleplaying games. I think it might have been a series, actually, with one for fantasy, one for sci-fi, and so on. I mainly remember it for (a) having some really strange things that could happen to your character; (b) having an unusual alignment system, with several 'good', 'neutral', and 'evil' options; and (c) having had its table of 'derangements' censored (with a label stuck over it with revised entries) because, uh, certain entries on the original table were not politically correct. Can anyone identify this product? If so, I'll do my best to track it down and make something with it.
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Mar 2, 2014 20:52
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FredMSloniker posted:I wanted to contribute to this thread, but unfortunately I can't seem to find the information I'm looking for. Then it occurred to me that maybe someone in this thread would have that information. The alignment thing and the censored derangements sounds a lot like Palladium to me (as I recall, they drew their list of "derangements" from an old edition of the DSM, the result being that you could get hit on the head so hard it would turn you gay, among other things). I don't know anything about a systemless tool like that, though. How far "back in the day" are we talking?
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Mar 2, 2014 20:55
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FredMSloniker posted:I wanted to contribute to this thread, but unfortunately I can't seem to find the information I'm looking for. Then it occurred to me that maybe someone in this thread would have that information. Central Casting series from Flying Buffalo .
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Mar 2, 2014 20:58
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Central Casting series from Flying Buffalo . Central Casting! That's it! (Though it appears to be a Task Force Games product.) I'll do some digging and come back once I've got a copy.
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Mar 2, 2014 21:11
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Evil Mastermind did you remember to add your level to your defenses?
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Mar 2, 2014 21:16
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W.T. Fits posted:Yeah, but you also broke a few other things. Ryuujin posted:Evil Mastermind did you remember to add your level to your defenses?
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Mar 2, 2014 22:15
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 Back in the hazy days of 1988, Task Force Games began publishing a line of books called Central Casting. These books promised to help generate interesting characters for your game of choice, be it fantasy, sci-fi, or modern. 'Interesting' is perhaps a bit of an understatement; these books make weird characters. And sometimes ones with... unfortunate implications...  But what the heck! Someone's made a FATAL character in this thread; it can't possibly be that bad. Let's dive right in to 'Heroes of Legend'! Our story begins on Table 101: Character Race. 'Heroes of Legend' assumes a human-centric fantasy land, or at least campaign. Getting 1-14 on a d20 roll is a result of 'Human'; other options are Elf (15-16), Dwarf (17), Halfling (18), Half elf (19), and 'other' (20), which leads to a further d10 roll: Beastman (1-3), Reptileman (4-5), Orc (6), and Half orc (7-10). We roll 7. Table 101 posted:1-14 HUMAN - The most common race in many game systems. If one is familiar with modern examples of humanity, then one has a good basis for humanity when found anywhere or anywhen else. Culture: May be of any Culture level. Uses standard events tables. For now, we move on to Table 102: Cultural Background. This is a D10 roll: 1 is Primitive, 2-3 is Nomad, 4-6 is Barbarian, 7-9 is Civilized, and 10 is Decadent. We roll 7 again. As a member of a Civilized culture, we have a Cultural Modifier of 4 and a native environment of Wilds/Urban. Table 102 posted:Civilized cultures are most often noted for central governments (which seem to exist solely for the purpose of collecting taxes) and large cities and stocked with the dubious benefits of civilization - table manners, royal dynasties, wizards, professional thieves, naval warfare, civil engineering and of course, tax accountants. The hereditary warrior classes have become landed gentlefolk as knights and samurai are replaced by paid soldiery. Historical examples include: Persian and Early Roman Empires, imperial China, Selenium kingdom, dynastic Egypt, feudal Japan, the Incan empire. Fictional civilized cultures include: J. R. R. Tolkein's Gondoreans, Raymond Feist's Kingdom of the Isles, and Robert E. Howard's Aquiloneans. The book offers this helpful roleplaying advice: Table 102 posted:Civilized peoples classically take a dim view of lesser cultures, often viewing them as less than human - especially true for those of Well-to-Do and higher Social Status. "Helpful" Civilized folk may feel a need to bring Civilization to lower Culture levels. A civilized character usually feels most at home in a city and will be aware of what a city has to offer. Although it's not clear at first glance, for PCs, this table determines the status of our parent or guardian. (We're noble by birth, but we don't get to roll to be king or anything.) We'll determine who that is on a later table--something else that isn't clear, so sometimes you wind up having to go back and apply an eraser because you just assumed you were rolling for your dad or something. Whoever they are, they get to roll a d100 and reference Table 758A. Rolling an 18 and cross-referencing with our culture of Civilized gives them Archduke(!!), a Special Title Modifier of +4d10, 1d3+1 Titles, and a 75% chance of Land Holdings with a Land Size of 1d10x5 square miles. The Special Title Modifier will be used when we return to Table 103. We roll 1d3+1=3 titles, for which we have to divert to Table 871, Special Titles for Nobility. This turns out to be a Mad-Libs style title generator in three parts, each involving a d20. Rolling d20 nine times gives us our parental unit's titles: 'Swordmaster of the Northern Uplands', 'Iron Tower of the Lower Marches', and 'Vindicator of the Lowland Reaches'. So... yeah. Back to Table 758. We roll his chance of Land Holdings and get 40, so they have land holdings of 1d10x5=40 square miles of land. Not a bad plot to grow up on! Back to Table 103. At this point, we have to reroll or Social Status, but in addition to adding the Cultural Modifier, we also add our Special Title Modifier of +4d10. On the 1d100, we roll... a 1. Thankfully, the 4d10+4 brings this up to 23, so we're merely Poor, not Destitute. This would give us a Social Level Modifier of -1, but because we're nobility, we get a +5 to that, so we're at +4. We also get +1 rank of Survival for being Poor, but -1 rank for being Nobility, so that's a wash. Our literacy chance is reduced 15%, but we have a 50% chance to get Rank 3 in Dagger and Brawling as an adolescent. (I'll hold off on rolling until then in case there are further modifiers.) We start with 50% of normal starting money. At long last, we can move on to Table 104, Birth Legitimacy! This is a simple d20 + Cultural Modifier roll, with 19+ meaning illegitimacy. We roll a 9, so we're safe and head straight to Table 106, The Family, which again is d20 + Cultural Modifier. We get a total of 14, which means we have a single grandparent (apparently mom and dad died when we were young). I flip a coin and decide our granddad raised us. Then swiftly on to Table 107, Siblings, to determine how many siblings we have; a straight d20 gives us 5, which means (1d3=)3 siblings. For their genders, for some reason, we roll a d20, but only on 9 or less are they male; we wind up with one brother and two sisters. Then we nip off to Table 108, Birth Order, rolling d20 to determine that we're a 'middle' child, though it doesn't specify whether we're second oldest or second youngest. (I go ahead and flip a coin because why not? We're third born.) Table 109, Birth Order, isn't a table at all; it simply says that, if time of birth is important, we should randomly generate it. But why wouldn't we want to randomly generate every aspect of our lives? Here, I do fudge it a bit and ask OpenOffice to generate a random date and time; it gives me February 6, 12:31 PM. Table 110, Place of Birth, determines where we were born, which is possibly slightly more important. d20 + a Legitimacy Modifier (we don't have one, because we're legitimate) gives us 18, which... sends us to Table 111, Exotic Birth Locations. Oh dear. Rolling a d20 here gives us 14, which is... a GM-only entry. Oh dear. So technically speaking we wouldn't be aware of what this means, but the GM would go to Table 978, GM's Specials, and look at entry #111. But that's no fun, right? Let's have a peek. Table 978 posted:111: Character was not born, but was magically created by a powerful wizard. At your discretion, the character may or may not be a true living being. Continue to roll his family history, but all rolls are fictional. You may even wish to go so far as to have the character's entire background be nothing more than implanted memories. The wizard who created the character is automatically the character's guardian. So that's an... interesting tidbit about dear old granddad. Makes you wonder. Or would if we knew about it. Which we don't. We also get a Birth Modifier of 25 from it. Anyway. From here we go to Table 112, Unusual Births. This is an optional table, but what the heck! We roll a d100 and add the Birth Modifier for a result of 47, which means nothing unusual occurred. We skip Table 113, Unusual Birth Circumstances, and go to Table 114, Parents and NPCs, which will let us flesh out dear old grandad. Rolling a d20 on Table 114A, Occupations, gives us 10; grandpa has one job. We now divert to Tables 420-423 to find out what it is... or would, except we already know he's an archduke. Whew. Dice hand's starting to get tired. But we press on to Table 114B, Noteworthy Items. We roll d3=1 time on this table, and a roll of 12 on d20 tells us: Table 114B posted:12 NPC is very religious and contstantly seeks to evangelize others to join his religion, faith, or cult. Select the deity worshipped on Table 864: Deities. Table 864 posted:5-6 Earth goddess: (Earth mother) She is often mother to other gods, sometimes the most ancient of all deities in a pantheon. Our Character Sheet posted:Name: ???
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Mar 3, 2014 01:25
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On an unrelated note, I'm really digging Reign's character creation deal. I think it could pretty easily be adapted to other systems, at least point-buy ones: make a series of packages that are each worth the same number of points and have fun. If you wind up with more than ten in either category of package (common being the ones you need at least a pair to get, uncommon being the ones from a single die), put them on cards and draw and/or choose ten before rolling.
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Mar 3, 2014 03:01
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Ars Magica: 420 make wizards every day When we left Malik, we’d learned that he was 34 years old and, therefore, had 420 points to spend. First, we’re going to beef up some of his stats a bit. He’s got a Mentem spell but no Mentem at all, so we’ll fix that and drop 21 points into Mentem, raising it to 6. With our next 399 points, let’ see…we put 2 into Auram, hitting 8. We drop 6 in Perdo, to get to 8, too. That leaves us with 391. We drop 8 into Intellego, getting us 12 xp - enough to boost us just past level 10. pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 2 (15 XP) Spanish (Slang) 1 (5 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 3 (20*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 3 (30 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 1 (5 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 1 (5 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Intellego 10 (38*1.5 XP), Perdo 8 (36 XP), Auram 8 (36 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP), Mentem 6 (21 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local) pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Etiquette (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 3 (30 XP) Spanish (Slang) 3 (30 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 3 (20*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 3 (30 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 1 (5 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 1 (5 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Intellego 10 (38*1.5 XP), Perdo 8 (36 XP), Auram 8 (36 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP), Mentem 6 (21 XP), Corpus 6 (21 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local)
So, after grabbing a level 25 spell, two level 20s and a level 15, we have 242 points left. pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Etiquette (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 3 (30 XP) Spanish (Slang) 3 (30 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 3 (20*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 3 (30 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 1 (5 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 1 (5 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Intellego 10 (38*1.5 XP), Perdo 8 (36 XP), Auram 8 (36 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP), Mentem 6 (21 XP), Corpus 6 (21 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20), Sight of the True Form (InCo 25), Whispers Through the Black Gate (InCo 15), The Inexorable Search (InCo 20), Tracing the Trail of Death’s Stench (InCo 20) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local)
So, we grab those last three. A level 15, 20 and 25 take us down to 182. Going back to skills, let’s see...we’ll drop 30 XP, gaining 50 XP in Code of Hermes, to raise us to Code of Hermes 5. We’ve got 152 left. I decide we’ll sprinkle it around a bit to get basic Technique competence - always handy. We drop 15 each in Creo, Rego and Muto to raise them all to 5. That’s 107 points left. Since we just grabbed Creo, let’s go grab a basic Creo Auram combat spell, too.
So that’s 25 points gone. We’ve got 82 left. I’ll drop 9 xp to raise Auram to 9, to make our combat spells easier to cast. We’ve got 73 left. Why don’t we pick up some Vim? 21 XP gets us to 6 - a good amount, since we have a Vim spell. 52 points left. We’ll drop 10 each in Finesse and Parma Magica, raising both to 2. We’ve got 32 left. We’ll put 5 in Philosophiae for when we learn a Ritual spell, since it’s useful for that, leaving 27. 20 of that will raise Magic Theory to 4. Our final 7...6 of it will go to raising a random Art to 3, and 1 to raising a random Art to 1. Animal and Imaginem. pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Etiquette (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 3 (30 XP) Spanish (Slang) 3 (30 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Philosophiae (Ritual Magic) 1 (5 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 5 (50*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 4 (50 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 2 (15 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 2 (15 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Creo 5 (15 XP), Intellego 10 (38*1.5 XP), Muto 5 (15 XP), Perdo 8 (36 XP), Rego 5 (15 XP), Auram 8 (36 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP), Mentem 6 (21 XP), Corpus 6 (21 XP), Vim 6 (21 XP), Animal 3 (7 XP), Imaginem 1 (1 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20), Sight of the True Form (InCo 25), Whispers Through the Black Gate (InCo 15), The Inexorable Search (InCo 20), Tracing the Trail of Death’s Stench (InCo 20), Perception of the Conflicting Motives (InMe 15), Posing the Silent Question (InMe 20), Thoughts Within Babble (InMe 25), Broom of the Winds (CrAu 15), Wreaths of Foul Smoke (CrAu 10) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local) Step 10 is simple: Confidence. Since we have no Virtues modifying it, we have Confidence 1 and 3 Confidence points. You can spend a Confidence point to add 3 to a roll after rolling, and can add up to your Confidence score in Confidence points to any given roll. Step 11 is gear. You get whatever you might reasonably have, and realy the only gear worth tracking is armor and weapons, unless you have special-quality goods or magic items. Only Redcaps begin the game with magic items, and quality gear...well, for the most part, magi will be using standard stuff at the start. I do that for ease of everyone - you want better than that, be or find a skilled a craftsman. So, let’s look at our final sheet! pre:Malik ibn Darras, Avendaras House: Guernicus Characteristics Strength -3 Intelligence +3 Stamina +2 Perception +2 Dexterity -2 Presence +1 Quickness +0 Communication +2 Personality Grumpy +2 Pious -1 Inquisitive +3 Abilities General Area Lore: Andalusia (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Area Lore: Castille (Geography) 1 (5 XP) Brawl (Dodging) 2 (15 XP) Charm (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Etiquette (Magi) 2 (15 XP) Folk Ken (Peasants) 3 (30 XP) Guile (Keeping Secrets) 2 (15 XP) Intrigue (Negotiations) 3 (30 XP) Spanish (Slang) 3 (30 XP) Arabic (Poetry) 5 (75 XP) Survival (Hills) 2 (15 XP) Academic Latin (Hermetic Usage) 4 (50 XP) Artes Liberales (Logic) 2 (20 XP) Philosophiae (Ritual Magic) 1 (5 XP) Arcane Code of Hermes (Political Intrigue) 5 (50*1.5 XP) Magic Theory (Intellego) 4 (50 XP) Parma Magica (Mentem) 2 (15 XP) Penetration (Intellego) 2 (15 XP) Finesse (Precision) 2 (15 XP) Virtues (FREE) Hermetic Prestige (0) Flawless Magic (3) Affinity with Intellego (1) Piercing Gaze (1) Affinity with Code of Hermes (1) Educated (1) Puissant Intellego (1) Skilled Parens (1) Inventive Genius (1) Flaws Weak Scholar (-1) Weak Spontaneous Magic (-1) Dependent (-3) Driven: Root our corruption (-1) Pessimistic (-1) Outsider (-3) Arts Creo 5 (15 XP), Intellego 10 (38*1.5 XP), Muto 5 (15 XP), Perdo 8 (36 XP), Rego 5 (15 XP), Auram 8 (36 XP), Herbam 8 (36 XP), Mentem 6 (21 XP), Corpus 6 (21 XP), Vim 6 (21 XP), Animal 3 (7 XP), Imaginem 1 (1 XP) Spells Hunt for the Wild Herb (InHe 5), Shriek of the Impending Shafts (InHe 15), Converse with Plant and Tree (InHe 25), True Sight of the Air (InAu 15), Whispering Winds (InAu 15), Ask the Wind (InAu 25), Room of Stale Air (PeAu 15), The Invisible Eye Revealed (InVi 15), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20), Sight of the True Form (InCo 25), Whispers Through the Black Gate (InCo 15), The Inexorable Search (InCo 20), Tracing the Trail of Death’s Stench (InCo 20), Perception of the Conflicting Motives (InMe 15), Posing the Silent Question (InMe 20), Thoughts Within Babble (InMe 25), Broom of the Winds (CrAu 15), Wreaths of Foul Smoke (CrAu 10) Reputations Dogged Investigator 3 (Hermetic) Filthy Moor 2 (Local) Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 19:03
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