Characters Can Be Crazy

By on
Most of my posts here are about board games, but in the last couple of weeks I've had two new RPG's start, one as a PBEM and one as a live on-line experience.  This has me in an RPG frame of mind, so today I'm all about that bass our last live gaming session.

We played in google hangout, and the system and world are home-brew D&D knock-offs created by +John Williams.  A couple of weeks ago he sent us a slimmed down rule book, some world background info, and let us make our characters.  The rules have a lot of random generation tables, and all 3 of us PC's used those to a fairly large degree. 

This, in my mind is point #1 where things started to go really right. Whenever I've made a character in the past, it has involved things like "What does the party need?" and "What's something really cool I can do?"  This isn't a terrible way to make a character, but it does lead to me often making similar characters with similar traits that all play in a similar manner.  Using the tables here gave me something I never would have come up with on my own - and that's a great thing.  It allowed me to break out of the mould I had been in for a long time, and forced to me really think about how my character will react in different situations.

How my character
spent the game
The second thing that lead to this being a great session is also a character creation tidbit. This game requires you to pck or generate things like background occupations, medical conditions, psychological traits, personality traits, and quirks.  Having some of this decided for me (again, by random table) set a base for me to build my character around.  It turns out I was a nervous person with a nervous little laugh, and a pyrophobe.

Part 3 of kick-ass game night was our GM.  +John Williams set a simple scene for us with almost no NPC's to worry about.  Instead the action centered on the relationship between us 3 PC's (myself, +C.D. Gallant-King and +Dave Geno).  We had just been thrown together and had to figure out how to deal with the scary things happening to us, all while not knowing how the other PC's may react. 

This is my legacy.
A few highlights of that interaction: +Dave Geno's character had a bit of a foul mouth and foul temper, and it irked my high-strung nerves.  I *MAY* have pushed him down the stairs in to the cellar where he *MAY* have put his hand through a putrefied corpse.  Later, after being hounded by a ghost, my character thought that burning the bones we found would be a sure-fire (pun intended) way to get rid of it.  Being a pyrophobe, I didn't have any experience on how best to accomplish this safely.  So I doused to place in oil, struck a spark, then fled while screaming at the top of my lungs.  I will admit that in hindsight this did very little to help ingratiate me with the rest of the party.  There were some harsh words as we stood out in the rain and watched the only shelter for miles around crumble in a smoking heap of rubble.

Now the real question is "What happens next time?"  I think I might have to watch my back, as I'm not so sure my friends will actually be friendly.

Comments

  1. C.D. Gallant-KingSeptember 28, 2014

    I will refrain from saying too much here as I will probably write a blog post soon to share my own thoughts (including how convincingly Dave plays creepy weirdos and how you obviously prefer John as a GM over me).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JasonSeptember 29, 2014

      I don't prefer John as a GM. I did find it interesting to compare the different styles you have. Also a lot of the character creation items are shaping up in a similar fashion in our FATE PBEM game.

      Delete
  2. John BSeptember 28, 2014

    You guys played really well, got into character, and of course, burnt something down - so all in all, a successful session. The only thing I noticed from my end was that I had some trouble hearing people, so my reaction time was a little off. But, next time we play I'll wear headphones, and that should help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. JasonSeptember 29, 2014

      Technical details like that we can iron out over time, but the game itself is the important part and that went smashingly. Or burningly I guess?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting at Rule of the Dice.

Greatest Hits

Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

By on
Image
There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I'm ...
Read more

10 More Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

By on
Image
Last year I shared a list of 10 Random Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios based on my ad-hoc zombie survival/horror game (which is kinda like a DCC Funnel but set in the modern world, and with zombies). It was actually one of the most popular posts I ever wrote on this site (people still really seem to like zombies , go figure) so I thought it was time for a sequel. Last time the set-ups were pretty standard fare. Scenarios you've seen in many zombie movies, games and books. A rag-tag bunch of strangers, thrown together in an every day situation (a crashed bus, locked in a mall, hiding in a cabin in the woods) and they must survive the overwhelming onslaught of the undead. Death is rampant and expected (each player begins with four 0-level characters), and only the best (or more likely luckiest) will survive. This time a few of the scenarios are quite a bit weirder and may take some more prep work. If you don't want them, don't pick them, or if you roll them randomly, ...
Read more

Why Clerics (Still) Suck

By on
Image
There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with. Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party. It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way whi...
Read more

Love, Sex & Dice

By on
Image
Because of the special romantic holiday we celebrate this week, I decided to come up with a special romantic theme article. Did you know that February 15th was National Flag of Canada Day? Sexy. Of course, the holiday I'm referring to is Valentine's Day, and the special theme is lovin' and bangin' in role-playing games. For those of you who are uncomfortable with this topic, you can stop reading now, and go here instead. Does love and sex have a place in table-top role-playing games? It obviously has a place in video RPGs, if Final Fantasy VIII and Dragon Age are any indication (WARNING: That second link is probably NSFW). But many players are uncomfortable acting this at the table and I can't really blame them. Sitting around the dining room table with four other sweaty guys drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Cheetos can make it hard to look into your friend's eyes and profess your undying love for him - I mean, his character, Mistress Clitoria Hexblade. It...
Read more

10 Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

By on
Image
Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN ™®© books (a...
Read more

Why My Favourite D&D Class Sucks

By on
Image
I don't get to play D&D as a player very often. I usually end up on the DM side of the screen, which is cool because I generally enjoy it more anyway. But from time to time it's a nice change of pace to only have to worry about a single character instead of an entire world. It's also fun to throw down and beat the living daylights out of some monsters. My current D&D of choice, for better or for worse, is 4th Edition. The first time I got to run my own character in this edition was at last season's D&D Encounters event ( Keep on the Borderlands ), and I made the damn fool mistake of playing the cleric. ( See here for why Clerics, especially 4E Essentials clerics, suck. And while we're at it, here's a good argument for the suckiness of Monks). Next I tried a Gnome Bard for a high-level Living Forgotten Realms game, but that turned out almost as bad as the cleric. Seriously, what was I thinking? For the new Encounters season, I almost made...
Read more

Why Star Wars is the Best RPG Ever

By on
Image
Everyone has some event in their adolescent years that shapes their lives and their outlooks as an adult. Perhaps it's a particularly bad breakup, or your parents’ divorce, or witnessing the horrifying murder of your father and vowing to avenge him. For me, I can name three things that made me the man I am today: 1) Robotech 2) The Swords of Power books by Fred Saberhagen 3) Star Wars : The Role-Playing game The first two are topics for another day, but Star Wars is always an acceptable topic for any conversation. I'm referring here to the original Star Wars RPG that was written by Bill Slavicsek and published by West End Games back in the late-eighties/early-nineties. The d20 by Wizards of the Coast was pretty good, but it doesn't deserve to hold the black felt, satin-tipped Sith cape of the original. In fact, I can't think of any other game that can compete with this masterpiece. You have to be really badass to get away with a head this shiny. ...
Read more