The Gaming Den

Now obviously you can't have one universal to all games, not without the background being really generic or having a bunch of 'ignore all tags marked [Fantasy] while generating your Sci-Fi character'. This thread is more towards having a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' style of character generation, inspired by the BW/Mouseguard review thread. Some thoughts.

• A tradeoff needs to be made between specificity and complexity. You can have a generic 'Urban Fantasy Monster' lifepath built into the game that spans like 45 pages of the PHB and creates a huge variety of characters. Or you can have a 'Scientific Monster', 'Nature Monster', and a 'Magic Monster' lifepath that are like 15 pages. Alternatively you can take advantage of the whizbang new application known as the Internet and just give people an application where they do this quasi-IF thing of how Steve the Crap-Covered Farmer became Steve the Angel Knight, avoiding this tradeoff.
• Speaking of Steve, the lifepath generator needs to be able to go in both directions. This means that if you're starting from the beginning, it should be rare (Theory of Narrative Causality and all that) but possible for someone to die before getting to the 'end', but you can't have a thing where Darth Vader's lifepath had him getting ghetto-stabbed by a Gungan at age 4. While it's also useful as a tool to have someone who is genuinely undecided to find a character they want to play, it's silly for Darth Vader to have a change of heart and decide to become a Nerf Herder when he was a teenager.
• It needs to actually be fairly long. Yes, seriously. Even for games with a high turnover rate where you turn in a new character sheet mid-session twice. The trick is that people actually do that on their own time; if you're hopping into a game or playing a oneshot 'mysterious stranger from across the ocean who talks in whispers and likes booze' is enough to fake your way through, but once the person commits to a character they need to put some effort into it.
• No mechanical benefits from it or if there are mechanical benefits they need to be very minor. I mean slightly more minor than 4E D&D backgrounds.
• Parts of the lifepath/background generator can be selectively ignored if the player REALLY REALLY wants this to happen. If the player wants to have as part of their background 'seduces the Assassin Prince with his manly knight and redeems him with the power of love' then they can just shove in it there or even have it overwrite part of what the background generated.
• People don't have to have the same amount of shit in their backstory as other people who go through it. It's totally okay to have someone go 'I spent 25 years locked up in a tower with my creepy grandpa studying magic and having sex with him' (well, you know what I mean ) compared to another wizard who was in the Neo Argonauts AND the Brotherhood of Mutants AND the Kohoto Pokemon League with his counterfeit Pokemon even if they went through the same generator.

Where is the generator supposed to end? Level one or level twenty? Which genres is the generator supposed to cover?

Chamomile wrote:Where is the generator supposed to end? Level one or level twenty?

Depends. If you're starting from scratch they can end at whatever level you want. If you have the end result plotted and you're fishing for past details then presumably 'high level' characters get to play with the generator longer than low level characters but it's not a hard and fast rule. Wolverine and Drizzt have showed us that you can stick a lot of backstory onto one person and not worry (theoretically) about it being overplotted. And of course there's the very real possibility that a level 7 elf will have a lot longer lifepath than a level 15 iron golem that was abandoned and decided to become a force for good.

Chamomile wrote:Which genres is the generator supposed to cover?

Any of them, it's just an issue of how much writing vs. applicability you want to do. Obviously a 'space opera' life-path is not going to give you as rich nor specific results as a 'Mass Effect' one, but if you're doing an ostensibly setting agnostic game like, oh, 4E D&D you don't have much of a choice. I suppose one of the selling points for campaign books would be to have their own specific system.

Selling point for the campaign book? Is there a specific project you plan to attach this to?

Maybe. I haven't played any Burning Wheel games. I thought the basic idea was cool, but I've heard nothing but complaints from how Traveler implemented it.

Hm. I might whip something up for generic high fantasy, then.

EDIT: Although, you might want to give me a brief sample of what you're looking for, just so I don't go barking up the wrong tree entirely.

Traveller allowed you to die during chargen if you took a risky job, like soldier or mercenary. As a reward, if you survived you get better skills and more money. Not sure that's a design decision I agree with.

Regarding a lifepath generator, it's not so much the rules system thats the problem, its the setting. Anything other than a traditional setting really needs its own options, unless you go with something vague enough to fill in the blanks yourself.

You pretty much have to do that. I have played in a lot of homebrew settings and obviously no DM is going to write 30 pages to create a lifepath for eeeevery heartbreaker that pops into their head. Popular settings like, well, Shadowrun and Forgotten Realms can have their campaign-specific lifepath and if people are using web tools you can make them extra-specific (such as clicking the 'guns', 'lizardmen', 'airships', and 'post-apocalypse' tags) but sadly the lifepath included in the basic book needs to be somewhat generic unless you're running a game that exists in a narrow confine like Mouseguard or Hunter.

Still waiting on some kind of sample or specs as to what it is this is supposed to look like when finished.

How do we feel about how Traveler did this, guys?

Imma gonna disagree with your basic set of goals on this one Lago.

I think your backstory generation should look more like.

1) Embrace the faceless mystery nameless guy, then corrupt him over time
There are reasons players go for the "man with no name and no background" option for their character backgrounds, reasons BEYOND a fear of bad GMs using backgrounds to fuck them over.

These reasons are things like being able to fit into a generic setting they are unfamiliar with, leaving room for adaptive background details to be added later, and cutting character creation and emotional investments to a minimum for a character that might not be very long lived.

Ideally your character background generator needs to meet those goals as well or better than the faceless nameless guy.

My suggestion is that the faceless nameless guy IS an option. Indeed the actual default option and barring any volunteered decisions to the contrary this is how your background generation mechanics insert ALL your PCs into the game.

2) I just had a flashback to my childhood, I am now proficient with tridents.
So what should happen is that over time as you invest more game play in your character you ALSO invest more into the generation of their background. This means your background generation should be designed to work in small discrete chunks DURING game play, as the nameless nobodies with no backgrounds reveal (and indeed generate) little pieces of their backgrounds.

Yes. Dynamic IN GAME background generation. It makes more sense for many reasons. Not the least of which is that if you demand players hand in a half page each of background at game start (generated or not)... many people around the table aren't going to pay attention to all those details. Introduce a detail at a time, especially one relevant to the game situation at hand that they are already engaged in (hey guys don't worry, I know how to drive chariots! Because this one time at band camp...) and people WILL notice.

3) Randomized generation? I think not.
Your background generator should include a randomizing table or other mechanic for lazy bastards who couldn't be assed. But the default assumption should be that players pick the results off the table rather than roll for them. The roll is purely optional for emergency "couldn't be assed or took too long to decide" scenarios.

4) System agnostic? Well then who gives a fuck?
You want players to CARE about backgrounds. So you want backgrounds to give them SOMETHING. Even if it's token bullshit it should somehow give them some sort of minor mechanical flavor. That means to some degree background details really WANT to tie into actual mechanical bonuses.

You COULD make that (mildly) system agnostic with open ended tags like [Insert minor horse riding option here] or with a truly disassociated mechanism like "each background detail filled grants you +X character build points/XP/pixie dusts"

But really ideally this sort of thing should be IN the standard mechanics of your system, or better yet as some minor sub set of mechanics from your system designed to integrate well with the rest of your character building/advancing mechanics.

You WANT mechanical impact from your fluff decisions, it engages the players more with the fluff, rewards them for generating fluff and encourages them to fill their backgrounds. In general you want MOST mechanics, tables and details that you demand players spend time interacting with to have SOME sort of mechanical impact/reward. Character background is no exception, indeed it's a rather big flagship for this sort of thing.

5) Standardized background spaces are important
Variable sized character backgrounds? Hell no.

Variation should only come from how many of your character background details have been filled in or not. Ideally you should include a mechanic that enforces similarity among the group (no more background flashbacks until everyone is caught up!) or the lets players catch up as required (the only thing stopping bob from having as many background details as alice is his own choice NOT to)

There should be some sort of cap of maximum details or what have you to fill out. And your system's aspiration should be that by an appropriate point in game play (I would say the end of whatever amounts to "low level") EVERYONE has a similarly sized and completed background generated during that period of game play.

This is especially important because you DO want some sort of mechanical effect/benefit from your character background details. So they really MUST be similarly sized.


I think that's all I can think of for now. But it's directly counter to much of your fairly questionable design goal list. And I think in general much better for practical game play uses.

Schwarzkopf wrote:How do we feel about how Traveler did this, guys?

Chargen is a mini-game unto itself. It's both cool and kind of a pain in the ass.

Plus, are we talking old traveler or Mongoose Traveler?

I'll start with the cons first.

Cons-

* Takes a long time to generate a character. Probably about an hour or so. Sometimes more if you're not comfortable with the system

* It wasn't laid out well. Lots of page flipping

* It's random as fuck. You start with a general idea of where you want your character to go, and odds are the character ends up somewhere else entirely different. Want to play a scout? I hope you make your career rolls and had favorable events- otherwise you get drummed out of the scouting service and there goes your character concept.

* "Geriatrics in space"- I don't have a problem with this, but some people have an issue with playing someone in their 30's or 40's or even later in life. The 4 year "terms" mean that a character of any advanced skill is not going to be in his 20's any more.

Pros-

* Detailed enough that you generally have a great idea of what your character did for 10-20 years

* Generates friends, allies, and enemies as part of your back story, making it way easy for the GM to create hooks for you

* Most characters have a sordid past. It's rare that you make it to retirement in just one career

* When you muster out of your careers, you gain significant advantages. I went from an average social standing in one character to a max'd social standing through good rolls.

* Aging- It is a gradual process that happens in chargen as you get older, and it doesn't strike everyone the same.

* In original traveler, you had a strong balance between capability and survivability. Failing your career roll in the original game killed off your character. So the longer you stayed on the lifepath developing the character, the more you were risking. It prevented 60 year old PCs with metric assloads of skills. In Mongoose Traveler, you don't die, but "bad things" happen to you if you fail a career roll. In original traveler you tended to have younger, less experienced characters, and occasional an older, better trained character. In Mongoose Trav, you end up with characters who have far more sordid histories. This can lead to better roleplaying, but accentuates the whole "geriatrics in space".

In my Traveler games, at the whim of the dice, I have rolled:

* A retired fleet admiral who is the most brilliant space strategist alive and of the past century (max'd out the skill), who through three brilliant victories managed to achieve fame and social status sector-wide and is accepted in the highest social circles. Think Admiral Nelson in space. However, he was absolutely useless at almost anything else. The rest of the party was more his retinue who kept his shoes tied. He had been married and divorced twice and had a reputation as something of a rake.

* A police officer turned secret agent who had gone deep undercover with criminal gangs, running smuggling missions to work his way up to the head of a slaver ring. He managed to bring the ring down, but the ringleader escaped. Some time later he discovered that his own fellow agents tipped the slaver off and he burned the rest of his promising career exposing his associates before turning to drifting, looking for "the one that got away".

* A mercenary soldier who started out as a line officer on a naval warship that crashed on an alien planet where he was stranded for several years fighting the natives off before rescue. During this time, he was exposed to, and developed, minor psychic powers. On his recovery, he joined the psi corp and developed himself as a guerrilla warfare specialist using his psi to augment his capabilities.

Most of the events in the lifepath weren't that specific, but looking at the events themselves it became easy to create a narrative to explain the mechanical adjustments. The hardest part of creating a character in traveler is coming up with a reason why you are teamed up with other such oddballs. Thankfully, you can single out would-be NPCs in your life here and there that are actually other PCs, giving you contact points with the party so that you all know each other somehow.

I love traveler. I know it doesn't get much love on this board, but it's had some of the most fun moments in roleplaying, and I've generated some wonderfully memorable characters with the lifepath. It just... isn't good for designing a specific *kind* of character. It's just too random.