The Gaming Den

For some time now I have been using something called "Archetypes" to guide players through character creation. This is a tool I developed to try to solve two problems at once.

Problem One: Minimum Expectations.

It is, of course, possible to simply wait for the players to design their characters and then write adventures and settings which those characters will be able to navigate. However, there are several reason you might not want to do this

--Maybe you had an adventure idea first, and that's why you want to run the game
--Maybe you want to create characters and play the game at the same session
--Maybe you want to explore a particular area of the rules, or have a "generalist" party that can interact with all the mechanics. This is especially likely if you're a new MC. (The first time I ran Shadowrun I insisted on having a hacker and a magician so I could learn those subsystems).

If any of these things is true, then you have a set of challenges that the party is expected to overcome let's stick with a Shadowrun example. You've written up a short run and you want to make sure your PCs can complete it. You might write out a list of "expectations" like

The group must have

--someone able to disable big drones
--someone able to disrupt spirits
--someone able to kill a rent-a-cop quietly
--someone able to fight multiple enemies
--someone able to speak Russian
--someone able to hack a mainframe
--someone able to pass a security checkpoint

And then lets the player confer with one another as they created, making sure each task was checked off.

PROBLEM TWO: DECISION PARALYSIS

I mostly play with people who are into gaming but have limited time to devote to it and limited experience. Unlike you and me, they have been poring over their gamebooks dreaming up characters for months before the game. If you tell them: "make a Sundown character, anything you like" they will stare at you silently and make puzzled fish faces. They need some kind of inspiration to get going. A traditional solution might be to make them flip through the game book and looks at the pictures by each character class, or to verbally throw out ideas until one sticks. But my preferred solution is to address the need for inspiration and the minimal expectations in one intervention.

The Solution: Step A

The first thing you do is take some of those minimal expectations and rephrase them as people rather than characteristics.

Someone must be able to disrupt spirits -> The Ghostbuster: This runner has some serious mojo and is ready to law the smackdown on some ghosties.

Someone able to disable large drones -> The Breaker: When it's not so much The Man as The Man's Tanks that got you down, this is the runner to call.

Someone able to speak Russian -> The Russian: Nobody knows what this guy did in the USSR. It's probably better that way.

The Solution: Step B

Now you take these skeletal profiles and flesh them out. You do this two ways. First, specify everything that is within MC's purview. What this covers depends on the game and the group. For instance, in my gaming circle, it's generally accepted that nationality is up to the MC. A given game might be pitched as a "Pueblo game" or a "UCAS" game. So feel free to specify nationalities on the profiles, and maybe mix them up in an interesting way.

Then, add suggestions about mechanical ways of achieving the profile's function and possible secondary schticks. Make sure these are actually suggestions; they're not there to limit player creativity, they're there if the player doesn't know how to proceed.

Putting it all together

The Ghostbuster: Flavor text flavor text fights spirits
Suggested Themes: Adept with magic weapon, Astral nukemage, high-force conjurer
Suggested Secondary Schticks: Healer, Diviner, or other combat schticks
Nationality: Pueblo

The Breaker flavor flavor disables vehicles
Suggested Themes: Hacking, piloting, carrying a rocket launcher
Suggested Secondary Schticks: antipersonnel combat, demolitions, security & infiltration
Nationality: Pueblo

The Russian
Suggested themes: Fixer, Sniper, Rigger
Suggested Secondary Schticks: disguise & forgery, self-defense, any appropriate to major role
Nationality: Russian, actively hunted in Pueblo

1) That's fine if your players don't know what they are doing, and you are introducing a game to them, but that sort of thing is extremely limiting, and down right insulting, to people who want to play actual characters that they have thought of.

2) The MC determines the nationality of the characters? Do you smoke crack or something? The MC determines the location, and then the PCs determine if they are Russians hiding in Pueblo or Pueblo, or a French guy who happens to be in Pueblo when his plane explodes. That's what PC choices about their character are. Do you think you get to decide if the PCs are Orcs or Kobolds or Elves too?

3) Your archetypes, for the example in Sundown:

You determine: The supernatural type and subtype, the Allegiances, the Driving Passion, what skills and Disciplines they are good at.

PCs determine:.... Umm. The name of the character? Maybe if they want to be using Attract or Authority for their predetermined role.

It's not all that bad considering that most of it is "suggestions". If the GM has an adventure in mind, asking the players to meet some bare minimums isn't out of line.

It would cut down on decision paralysis too, and sometimes having a suggestion is enough for a player to spark a full character.

It would cut down on decision paralysis too, and sometimes having a suggestion is enough for a player to spark a full character.

Kaelik wrote: 3) Your archetypes, for the example in Sundown:

You determine: The supernatural type and subtype,

Lol no. The profile says suggested monster types and they are in fact suggestions. I had trouble even getting it down to 3 recommendations for each profile, cause there are too many good options. I 100% pinky-promise not to get mad if you pick something off the list; the list is there for those who don't want to read 18 monsters.

the Allegiances

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If it's cults, there was only one archetype that actually required a cult membership, and that's the Oracles. That's equivalent to saying you want to run an "oracle campaign." I wanted to use the Oracles as an info-dump.

If it's Syndicate-allegiance, then... I think that's MC perview. It's fine to run a Crime League game, a Covenant game, or a half-Crime League half-Cauchemar intrigue game.

the Driving Passion

Nope. The Social Climber just has to be interested in gaining stature, it doesn't matter what her *ultimate* goal is. Wealth, power, protecting her kid sister, love, revenge, whatever. The Archivist has no motivation specified. The Turncoat just has to be willing to betray his bosses, the why is up to you. The Vigilante and the Oracle has obvious implied motives, but you don't have to use the obvious ones.

what skills

Apart from Research for the Archivist, and Larceny for the Vigilante what skills do you imagine are necessary for each archetype? Remember that Sundown skill allocations are incredibly generous and putting 4 points down on one or two skills is dead easy.

and Disciplines they are good at.

No. Just no. None of the profiles requires any disciplines at all to do their thing.

1) No you don't get to choose syndicates, because that's part of the character. It is very defining, and choosing a syndicate also means choosing a cult, because cults are largely incompatible with syndicates.

2) Yes if I build a character that ignores your suggestions, then I am not limited by your suggestions. But that's not meaningful.

If you say I have to make an iconic Dwarven Fighter, but it's not actually limiting my choices, because I can make an Iconic Dwarven Fighter who is actually an Elven Wizard who is light and bubbly instead of gruff.

Likewise, if I make a Kaibit Ash Walker who works to plant mirrors for demons to kill everyone, that is not the Vigilantee, and so yes, if I did what you asked, it would limit my choices, but instead, I ignored it.

3) Choosing the supernatural type chooses 8 disciplines. Then you choose the cult, which limits the 9th. 9/12ths is choosing the disciplines.

You don't get it. At all. In the case of the last game I ran, the *point* of the archetypes was:

--If I plant an ancient codex for the PCs to find, they will be able to use it
--If people are going missing in the slums, the PCs will hear about it
--The opportunity to do a favor for the Prince of Chicago would be valauble to at least some PCs
--The PCs have access to the Stellar Oracles' prophecies
--One and only one PC is in the Sabbat Covenant

The *reason* for that was that the big plot hook was a group of rogue Sabbat Covenant disappearing people from the slums in a way which resembled some stellar oracle prophecies which the Prince of Chicago wants covered up. I tend to run a "half-sandbox" kind of game: I have a metaplot of background events that are advancing, but it's up to players where and how to get involved and which factions to side with. I do want the players to get involved in some capacity, and to make that happen I seed the PCs with hooks during char gen.

So yeah, if you made a Kaibit Ash Walker who was planting magic mirrors in the slums that would absolutely count as the Vigilante, because the whole point of the vigilante is having a PC with gang contacts.

EDIT:

The fact is, the reason I said you don't have to use archetypes if you don't want to is that you'd have a damn hard time NOT using one. I mean, for that game, you would have had to make a character with no academic ability or gang contacts, who wasn't in the Covenant or the Oracles, and didn't care about his Syndicate status. That's certainly possible, but the vast majority of PCs people generate will *accidentally* tag one of those flags.

But see, then your archetypes are actually a lie.

If every single archetype, which includes eight or so elements is secretly a reference to a single thing, and nothing else matters, then they aren't really archetypes. They are really (Someone please have contacts 1: Gang resource), which is something that I would not have anticipated being the main point of the vigilante, and thus kind pointless, since the example Kaibit does not have a gang contact, and is not a member of a syndicate, because they are an Ash Walkers, and thus does in fact avoid every single one of your tags. And so do lots of builds.

But more importantly, there is no reason for someone to look at the Vigilante archetype and see:

1) a List of super types.
2) a suggestion of cults
3) a single mandatory syndicate
4) a driving motivation of hating demons
5) Grudge against King of Three Shadows
6) The name "Vigilante"
7) absolutely no reference to slum contacts at all.

And then interpret a Kaibit who is friends with demons, has a cult choice different, has no syndicate, much less the mandatory one, is a different supernatural type, does not have it out for the King of Three Shadows, and happens to have slum contacts as meeting that archetype, but a Fallen who hates Demons, King of Three Shadows, is Cauchemar, and doesn't have slum contacts doesn't meet the archetype.

That's retarded. Because one of those meets every single thing you said, and the other doesn't meet a single thing, and you say that the latter meets the type, but the former doesn't.

Just FYI, Sundown characters are expected to have a Syndicate membership AND a Cult Membership; they're not exclusive in any way. That's not a "me" thing either, that's in the book.

That said, if people would prefer I present a list like

--have someone familiar with ancient languages
--have smeone familiar with the wilderness
--have someone familiar with corporate culture

rather than

The Survivalist
The Businessman
The Scholar

that's fine with me.

Orion wrote:Just FYI, Sundown characters are expected to have a Syndicate membership AND a cult membership; they're not exclusive in any way.

Just FYI, After Sundown characters are not expected to have a cult and syndicate membership, because while being a member of a "syndicate" and a "cult" does not itself come into conflict, being a member of the Ash Walkers, Church of Set, Chain of Coronis, The False Face, Rolnicy, Stellar Oracles, The White Lotus, or The Wreckers renders you incapable of belonging to a Syndicate, and many of the other Cults are incompatible with all but one of the Syndicates.

EDIT: Or, you could just let people make their characters, and if they don't have knowledge of ancient languages they can take the ancient languages stuff to their contacts/cults/syndicates/research skill, or just not have 100% access to every single plot hook you can come up with, and instead, possibly be limited by their character concepts to only catching 3/4ths of the plot hooks you might think up.

Once again, you have something that is useful for teaching people who don't know how to play the game to play the game. Why are you so damn intent on shoving it down the throats of people who do know how to play the game?

Re: Archetypes-- okay, you've convinced me.

Re: Cult/Syndicate, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.

The White Lotus are explicitly members of the World Crime League.

The Rolnicy are explicitly part of the Cauchemar

Membership in the Wreckers is a secret deal, and wreckers members are all also members of a Syndicate.

As for the others....

Remember that when a Supernatural is created, they automatically and involuntarily become a member of the syndicate of the supernatural who created them, or the first supernatural they make contact with if they weren't created by a supernatural. In the mean time, the Ash Walkers, the False Face, and the Stellar Oracles are *voluntary* associations you might be recruited for later.

Now, the Stellar Oracles might not *agree* with everything the Prince does, but they don't really have a choice. The Syndicate is the Law. You can't renounce your Syndicate membership any more than you can renounce your citizenship while living in the states.

I was reading my copy of After Sundown today, and I was amused to find this tidbit:

After Sundown wrote:Even above and beyond the basic category of game (Origin Story, In Media Res, or Power Fantasy), the expected direction of the chronicle may place additional constraints on the PCs. Maybe everyone has to be able to swim, or no one is to be or speak Romanian, or whatever. Talk this all out before you commit too hard to any particular character traits. Ideally, these constraints won’t just be the MC jerking you around, but will instead be actual well thought out guidelines to make sure that the chronicle can and will be completed

No comment.