It Builds Character #12: Vampire: The Masquerade

Welcome to the twelfth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the twelfth entry in this series, I’m finally escaping from Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, I’m going slightly old score with a game that was originally published by White Wolf, who were also the publishers of the game I used for the fourth entry, Aberrant. The game I’m using today is probably the most famous of the games the studio released: Vampire The Masquerade. While the game and studio have recently been revived for a fifth edition, that’s not the version I’m using here. There’s a few reasons for this, notably there’s been some controversy around the new owners of White Wolf and some of the things they’ve incorporated into the backstory (notably links between the Chechen government, real-world LGBTQ persecution and in-game vampires), other elements are changes in the game’s focus. But honestly, the biggest reason I’m sticking with the 20th Anniversary Edition released way back in 2011 is simply that I own a copy of it, and not fifth edition.

So, what’s the game itself actually about? Unsurprisingly enough, vampires. It’s set in a worse version of our world, known as the World of Darkness, where supernatural entities lurk in the shadows. Thematically, the players are vampires who are battling the beast within in order to keep their humanity (there are exceptions, of course). Since they have to drink blood, this becomes a challenge. Vampire: The Masquerade in particular has a lot of political intrigue between various sects and tribes that result in a strict hierarchical structure based on how powerful the vampires are with older vampires generally more powerful and having stronger powers linked to the potency of their blood (we’ll go into more detail than that as we create the character below because things get complicated quickly. There’s also rumors of an impending vampire apocalypse, known as Gehenna, which has been prophesied, and in the backstory of the world, some of these earlier events have definitely happened. The game is designed to be kind of angsty…

The Character

I don’t have a full concept of the character here, other than they’re definitely an aesthete, and somewhat tortured in the grand tradition of Anne Rice style vampires. Though more Louis de Pointe du Lac than Lestat de Lioncourt. Also my characters are generally less sexually charged than Anne Rice’s tend to be…

So, let’s get started.

STEP I: Character Concept

Well, this is a minor problem, since I didn’t have a concept in mind. The game uses concept as a general catch all, and based on the very short list of concepts presented in the character creation overview, it’s more the job the character held whilst still mortal than anything else.

Also in this step is figuring out the character’s Nature, Demeanor, and Clan. All of which I’ll go into in greater detail as I go.

For the overall concept, I decide that the character was a Professional in life – specifically, they were a lawyer. Not sure why, but it seemed to fit.

Nature and Demeanor are chosen from roughly the same list of options, which the game refers to as Archetypes. The game specifies that Demeanor is the “face” that the character shows to the world and Nature is their true self. They don’t have to be different, but I feel like there’s more role-playing opportunity if they are. As for most of this section, this isn’t really related to game mechanics, but Nature can make a difference to the character’s Willpower points (see STEP V: Finishing Touches below for more on that).

Also, I feel like a character who was a lawyer would definitely present a different front from their true self, or they’d probably have been bad at lawyering…

I decide since I wanted the character to come across as something of an aesthete, so they present the Demeanor of a Bon Vivant to the world, so they’re going to be role-played as having fairly low self-control and as something of a hedonist looking for a good time.

The character’s true nature is much closer to being a Director, trying to forge some kind of order out of the chaos of everyday reality. That means they can regain willpower  by influencing/aiding either a group or a particularly influential individual.

The last part of this step is to choose the clan that the character belongs to. There are thirteen different clans in the game, and they all have different outlooks on what vampirism means and also suggests the priority the character places on later steps. Each clan has a different collection of Disciplines, which can be thought of as special powers available to vampires. Arguably, a clan is the Vampire equivalent of what would be considered a class in D&D.

The clans are also predisposed towards joining a different sect. The sects are the Camarilla, which is a group dedicated to vampire politics and the titular  Masquerade, which is keeping the existence of vampires hidden from mortals, the Sabbat, which is a more anarchic group dedicated to vampiric supremacy over humanity. Then there are four independent clans who don’t really ascribe to either of the sect viewpoints.

The clans are:

• Assamite – a religious blood cult of assassins that are independent from the sects
• Brujah – a rebellious group of agitators who were originally responding to the betrayal of Carthage
• Followers of Set – A cult dedicated to the corruption of humans and vampires in the name of the Egyptian deity Set
• Gangrel – A more animalistic clan. More loners and nomads, tend to be more wilderness-based and less civilization-based
• Giovanni – A family of Italian necromancers who adopted vampirism by usurping an older clan. Very much not trusted
• Lasombra – One of the primary clans in the Sabbat. Ruthless, social Darwinist, and aristocratic tribe. Manipulates shadows.
• Malkavian – A clan that suffers from madness/mental illness, but are powerful as they share a kind of hive mind
• Nosferatu – Cursed with hideous appearances. Often live in sewers or other boundary places. Very good as spies and getting information, so often act as spies. Nominally aligned with the Camarilla.
• Ravnos – A trickster clan with origins in the East. This is a clan that is fading away in modern times.
• Toreador – A leading clan within the Camarilla. Often artistic and the most social of the clans, so they tend to have more connections to humanity and culture.
• Tremere – The warlocks of the vampire world who specialize in blood magic, and they have the most rigid pyramidal structure
• Tzimisce – Scholars and clergy among the Sabbat. they specialize in reshaping the flesh of themselves and others.
• Ventrue – The other leading clan of the Camarilla. These are the most aristocratic and “old money” of the clans, and  tend to be the power players and kingmakers.

Looking at the various archetypes, the three that make the most sense for the character as I conceive them are the slightly more cultured ones: – Lasombra, Toreador, or Ventrue. I feel like the Bon Vivant Demeanor doesn’t fully gel with my conception of Ventrue.

I also think that the vampiric politics and maneuvering among the Camarilla has more appeal than the somewhat more anarchic nature of the Sabbat for a lawyer, which effectively rules out the Lasombra. So, by process of elimination, the character will be a member of Clan Toreador.

STEP II: Select Attributes

The first step of determining a Vampire character’s attributes is deciding what to prioritize among the three categories: Physical, Social, or Mental. There are three attributes under each category for a total of nine. Each attribute is ranked from one to five “dots,” and by default most characters have a dot in each attribute. On top of that, they get seven dots to spread among their primary attribute category, five for their secondary category, and a mere three for their tertiary category.

As a Toreador, it makes the most sense for the primary attribute category to be Social. Given the character is more of a manipulator/lawyer than a fighter, it makes the most sense for Physical to be the tertiary category.  spreading the relevant “dots” around gives the following:

Physical (Tertiary)

Strength: *

Dexterity: ***

Stamina: * *

Social (Primary)

Charisma: ***

Manipulation: ****

Appearance: ***

Mental (Secondary)

Perception: **

Intelligence: ***

Wits: ***

STEP III: Select Abilities

Much like Attributes, a Vampire character’s abilities are divided among three categories that must be prioritized. Those categories are Talents, Skills, and Knowledges. A talent is an intuitive or inherent ability, a skill is an ability that the character has learned through training and determination, and a knowledge is a mental ability learned through research. Unlike attributes, there are no free dots in any ability. Primary category gets 13 dots, secondary gets nine dots, and tertiary gets five. Also, no ability can have more than three dots at this point in character creation.

Based on the character concept so far, to me it makes sense to prioritize Knowledges as primary, Talents as secondary, and Skills as tertiary. Distributing the dots gives:

Talents (Secondary)

Alertness: *

Athletics:

Awareness: *

Brawl:

Empathy: *

Expression:

Intimidation: *

Leadership: **

Streetwise: *

Subterfuge: **

Skills (Tertiary)

Animal Ken:

Crafts:

Drive: **

Etiquette:

Firearms: *

Larceny:

Melee:

Performance: *

Stealth: *

Survival:

Knowledges (Primary)

Academics: **

Computer: **

Finance: **

Investigation: *

Law: ***

Medicine:

Occult:

Politics: *

Science: *

Technology: *

STEP IV: Select Advantages

For me, this is the step where the Vampire character becomes both more distinct, and also more vampiric, since the earlier steps (other than Clan selection) could apply to human characters. Like the last two steps, this is also divided into three subcategories. Unlike the prior steps, there’s no prioritization here, instead each gets a fixed number of dots.

The first category is Disciplines which are blood-based special vampire powers. Available disciplines are clan dependent with each clan offering three disciplines, and each character gets a grand total of three dots to spread across their disciplines. As a Toreador, the character has access to the disciplines of Auspex (ESP and sensory powers), Celerity (speed powers), and Presence (emotional manipulation powers). Thinking about the character concept, I don’t see a reason for the character to have super speed, so none of the three dot are going into Celerity. Since they specialize in emotional manipulation, I opt to spend two of the Discipline dots on Auspex, which gives the character both Heightened Senses and Aura Perception. The last Discipline dot goes to Presence, which allows the character to Awe others.

Our second category is Backgrounds, where the character has five dots to spend on various aspects such as Allies, Mentors, Contacts, Resources etc. most of the background names are fairly self-explanatory. Based on the concept so far, the character should probably have a couple of dots of Resources, since they clearly have access to cash, and possibly a fairly nice place to live. They’d also have at least a dot in Contacts, since they probably know someone at the law firm they worked at in life. I also think that they probably have a little bit of either Influence or Status.

Our final category is Virtues, where we have seven dots to spend, and we also get a free dot in each of the three default virtues of Courage, Conscience, and Self-Control. There are alternative virtues that can be selected if we want the character to have less contact with their humanity. In the case of this character, it doesn’t make sense to switch from these defaults, so let’s stick with those. I go for the most boring option initially, and put two dots in each of the three standard Virtues, and the seventh dot goes into Self-Control

Disciplines

Auspex: **

Celerity:

Presence: *

Backgrounds

Contacts: *

Influence: *

Resources: **

Status: *

Virtues

Conscience: ***

Self-Control: ****

Courage: ***

STEP V: Finishing Touches

We have most of our numbers figured out now, but there’s still a few more stats to generate here. To start of with, there’s a couple of derived stats, first up Humanity, which is the total of Conscience + Self-Control, so seven dots.

We also have Willpower, which is equal to the Courage score.

There’s also a single roll of a ten-sided die (d10) to determine the amount of blood points the character starts with, in this case it was an 8.

Humanity: *******

Willpower: ***

Blood Pool: ********

And now, we have fifteen of something called “Freebie Points” to spend, and they can be used thusly:

• 5 Freebie points for an attribute dot
• 2 Freebie points for an ability dot
• 7 Freebie points for a discipline dot
• 1 Freebie point for a background dot
• 2 Freebie points for a virtue dot
• 2 Freebie points for a Humanity dot
• 1 freebie point for a Willpower dot

I opt to spend 7 of those freebie points bumping up the character’s Presence by a dot to two (which grants him the ability to use a Dread Gaze). That leaves eight to work with. I decide to spend 6 of them on three different background dots, one in Firearms (giving the character 2), one in Etiquette, and one in Investigation (also giving the character 2). That leaves two freebie points to spend, and I opt to use them both to bump up the character’s Willpower score.

Now all we have left to do is decide on some of the physical details of the character. First up, I decide that they are going to be female New Yorker who now unlives in the suburbs of Atlanta after graduating from Emory Law, and would have been in her late thirties when she was Embraced into vampirism. She’s also a willowy brown-eyed brunette, coming in at roughly five foot ten inches tall, favors business clothing in general and her name is Kaitlin di Scenza.

---

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #11: Dungeons & Dragons IV

Welcome to the eleventh in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the eleventh entry in this series, I’m returning to the game I used for the eighth, ninth and tenth entries. And I promise this will be the last entry to use Dungeons & Dragons for a while. I’ll be using the current 5th Edition rules from Wizards of the Coast.

 

The Character

Again, not much of a character concept beyond “the party needs some kind of rogue to finish out the classical D&D party archetypes.”  Let’s see what happens when we combine that with D&D character generation rules. I imagine we’ll have a character to spit out at the end of it.

STEP I: Choose A Race

For this one, I decide that for what is typically one of the stealthiest classes in the game to go for one of the most conspicuous and least stealthy races, and one that I still think of as something of a Johnny-Come-Lately among the current “core” D&D races – A Half-Orc. As per usual, this gives the character a few racial benefits and drawbacks. So let’s take a look at those:

 

Half-Orcs get +2 to their Strength score, and a +1 to their Constitution score (see STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

 

Half-Orcs are considered Menacing, which grants proficiency in the Intimidation skill. On top of that, they have a trait known as Relentless Endurance, which means if they’re dropped to 0 hit points without dying, they drop to 1 hit point instead, an ability they can use once between long rests. The final trait Half-Orcs have are Savage Attacks which lets them add an additional dice of damage to a critical hit.

 

Half-Orcs have a base walking speed of 30ft, and a 60ft Darkvision range.

Half-Orcs can read, write and speak Common and Orc.

STEP II: Choose A Class

Since I had decided that I wanted the character to be a Rogue type since that’s a class underrepresented in the D&D characters so far, the class chosen is obviously a Rogue. Since all the classes get special abilities even at first level, let’s see what this Rogue gets:

First off, Rogues get 1d8 per level as their hit dice. At 1st level that’s 8 hit points, plus their Constitution modifier (since we haven’t officially rolled ability scores yet, we don’t know what that modifier is, and we’ll solidify this number in STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

 

On top of the hit points, the Rogue class grants the character proficiencies in Light Armor, Simple Weapons, Hand Crossbows, Longswords, Rapiers, and Short Swords. They are also, perhaps unsurprisingly, proficient with Thieves’ Tools

The character also gains proficiencies in Dexterity and Intelligence saving throws and four skills from Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Insight, Intimidation, Investigation, Perception, Performance, Persuasion, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth. I opt for Acrobatics, Deception, Insight and Stealth as my quartet.

The Rogue class also grants some equipment, several of which are multiple choice options. Working through the list, the character ends up with’

• A rapier
• A short sword
• An burglar’s pack
• Leather armor
• 2 Daggers
• Thieves’ tools

 

The Rogue class grants an Expertise class feature, which doubles their proficiency bonus in either two of their skills, or one of their skills and usage of Thieves’ Tools. I choose the latter, and the character is now an expert in both Stealth and Thieves’ Tools.

 

Another thing that Rogues get is a Sneak Attack ability, which grants an extra 1d6 damage on any attack with advantage that hits, provided it uses either a finesse or ranged weapon. Since the rapier is considered a finesse weapon (we’ll clarify what that means a bit more down in STEP V: Buy Equipment later on.) Another class feature is the knowledge of a pseudo language of signs and signals known as Thieves’ Cant.

STEP III: Determine Ability Scores

In Dungeons & Dragons, characters have six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. They are determined by rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest, generating a number between 3 and 18. You do this six times and then assign the scores to the various abilities. As has apparently become my depressing standard, I forgot to record the exact dice rolls for this character, so I can’t tell you what the lowest score for each was, but my six totals were:

11, 14, 14, 14, 14, and 17.

I decide to assign them as follows:-

Strength: 14

Dexterity: 17

Constitution: 11

Intelligence: 14

Wisdom: 14

Charisma: 14

But as we saw back in STEP I: Choose a Race, being a Half-Orc increases the Strength score by 2 and the Constitution score by 1, which results in the following. The numbers in parentheses are the ability score modifier each of these scores represents.

Strength: 16 (+3)

Dexterity: 17 (+3)

Constitution: 12 (+1)

Intelligence: 14 (+2)

Wisdom: 14 (+2)

Charisma: 14 (+2)

An average score is 10 or 11, but adventurers are seen as a bit special and so have slightly above average scores to reflect this. In the case of this character, the rolls were ludicrously high, although I think I got all four of the 14 scores by completely different dice totals. I decide to put the 17 in Dexterity since that is the key Rogue ability, it’s also (I think) used with finesse weapons and I feel like this Half-Orc is going to be using his rapier as his primary weapon a lot. I put the 11 in Constitution, mostly because the boost from being a Half-Orc bumps it up a little bit, and I am starting to see this character as a bit of a swashbuckler type, so the more mental type abilities, especially Charisma being boosted seems to reflect that.

Now that we know the character’s Constitution modifier is +1, we can finalize the hit point total. It’s a respectable total of 9 points, and between the character’s high dexterity modifier and leather armor, they should be pretty darn difficult to actually hit in the first place.

STEP IV: Describe Your Character

For this version of the character, I’m definitely going to be using one of the pre-existing backgrounds presented in the Player’s Handbook, though to be consistent with the previous D&D characters, I’m not going to use equipment provided in the background, instead choosing to purchase equipment for the character on top of what they already have from their race and class in a later step. Of course there’s a few things to do before going through the background

The first thing we do here is choose an Alignment for the character. I’ve often found D&D’s Alignment system to be slightly too rigid, but it’s generally nice to have one of the alignments as at least a starting point to inform the character development. I decide that the character can be Chaotic Good, as someone who tries to do the right thing but isn’t overly concerned with the strictures of legality and the greater good over the individual good.

Since describing them as “the character” over and over gets a little monotonous, the next aspect I’m going for is a name. The Player’s Handbook gives a decent spectrum of Orc and Human names. I decide that our Half-Orc character is going to be male, and is going to have an Orc first name and an Iluskan Human surname, so he’s officially Feng Windriver.

Rolling for height and weight, Feng comes in at 5’3” and weighs a solid 165lbs.

Because I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed 2 lately, I kind of see Feng as wearing an outfit similar to Ezio’s default white cape/armor in that game, so that’s kind of the “look” I have for him, but his attitude and how I’d roleplay him is as Westley being Dread Pirate Roberts/The Man In Black from The Princess Bride.

The standard backgrounds in the Player’s Handbook have certain skill proficiencies, as well as potential Bonds, Ideals and Flaws that inform the character. Because of the Dread Pirate Roberts thing, I decide that, like his fellow party member Cade, Feng has the Sailor background, specifically the Pirate variation thereof. This grants Feng proficiencies in the Athletics and Perception skills, as well as with Navigator’s Tools and Water-based Vehicles.

As a Pirate, Feng gets the background feature of Bad Reputation, which means that he can get away with some minor crimes like not paying for food in a tavern, or breaking down shop doors, since the townsfolk are afraid to report him to the authorities. The fact that Feng is actually kind of a nice guy these days, and would willingly submit to the authorities in these situation is an irony that he chuckles at.

Rolling on the background tables, Feng’s major personality trait is that he “never passes up a friendly wager,” though that definitely isn’t limited to just money, in that he’ll happily do dumb things for bragging rights, just to prove that he can do those things. The ideal he strives towards is Freedom in that “The Sea is freedom – the freedom to go anywhere or do anything.” His Bond is that “The ship is most important – crewmates and captains come and go,” which I’m choosing to interpret that his ultimate goal is to retire from adventuring and purchase and crew his own ship and return to the sea, presumably as his own captain. And finally his big Flaw is that he “Can’t help but pocket loose coins and other trinkets he comes across,” so he indulges in low level kleptomania. That’s probably a bit of a side effect to his enjoyment of wagers and gambling.

STEP V: Buy Equipment

Time to gear up! Since a Rogue starts with 4d4 x 10 Gold pieces, and I rolled 11, which means that Feng has 110 Gold Pieces to spend. Unfortunately, since I’m using the purchasing rules, and not the default equipment from Class/Background abilities, I interpret that as having to buy the equipment listed back up in STEP II: Choose A Class.

 

To whit with default equipment costs:

• A rapier (25 gold pieces)
• A short sword (10 gold pieces)
• An burglar’s pack (16 gold pieces)
• 2 daggers (4 gold pieces)
• Leather Armor (10 gold pieces)
• Thieves’ Tools (25 gold pieces)

 

That’s a total of 90 Gold pieces. Which leaves Feng with 20 Gold pieces left to spend. Feng Windriver decides he’ll save those coins for himself in case an interesting opportunity or stake comes up later.

As mentioned way back earlier, some of these weapons are classified as Finesse weapons (specifically the Rapier, short swords, and daggers) which means they can use either the Dexterity modifier or the Strength modifier on both to hit and damage rolls (but must use the same modifier for both) to use the weapons in combat. Given the current modifiers are identical (even though Dexterity is 17 vs Strength of 16) that means that if Feng gets to add +5 to these rolls.

I think that’s a pretty complete picture of Feng Windriver, Level 1 Half-Orc Rogue.

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #10: Dungeons & Dragons III

Welcome to the tenth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the tenth entry in this series, I’m returning to the game I used for the eighth and ninth entries. And it’s probably also going to be the case for the eleventh entry too, Dungeons & Dragons. I’ll be using the current 5th Edition rules from Wizards of the Coast

The Character

Again, not much of a character concept beyond the “So far, the party has a Cleric and a Fighter. They probably need a dedicated arcane spell caster as well.” Let’s see what happens when we combine that with D&D character generation rules. I imagine we’ll have a character to spit out at the end of it.

STEP I: Choose A Race

Once again, I go for a race that I don’t use much, and one of the classical D&D races – a Hobbit Halfling. Those little guys don’t seem to get a lot beyond being burglars and thieves. I blame either Bilbo Baggins or Tasslehoff Burrfoot for this. Since I’m going for a spell caster, this Halfling will be a little different from the standard Halfling image. Also, Dungeons & Dragons has two sub-races for Halflings – Lightfoot or Stout. I decided that the character would be a Stout Halfling. This gives the character a few racial benefits and drawbacks. So let’s take a look at those:

 

Halflings get +2 to their Dexterity score, and the Stout sub-race also gets +1 to their Constitution score (see STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below). Stout Halflings also get Stout Resilience, which manifests as advantage on Saving Throws against poison, and also have resistance against poison damage.

 

Halflings in general are Lucky, which means that if they roll a 1 on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, they get a reroll. Halflings are also Brave, which gives them advantage on saving throws against being frightened. On top of all that, they also have a Nimbleness which means they can move through the space of any creatures larger than themselves (I’m not entirely sure what this means, but we’ll see if it comes up in game)

 

Haflings have a base walking speed of 25ft.

Halflings can read, write and speak Common and Halfling.

STEP II: Choose A Class

Since I had decided that I wanted the character to be some kind of arcane spell caster, which means there are three potential classes to choose from: Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. Since I’m more of a traditionalist I decide to go for the most old school of those classes, the Wizard. Since all the classes get special abilities even at first level, let’s see what this Wizard gets:

First off, Wizards get 1d6 per level as their hit dice. At 1st level that’s 6 hit points, plus their Constitution modifier (since we haven’t officially rolled ability scores yet, we don’t know what that modifier is, and we’ll solidify this number in STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

 

On top of the hit points, the Wizard class grants the character proficiencies in Daggers, Darts, Slings, Quarterstaffs, and Light Crossbows. Notably there are no proficiencies for any Armor or Shields, which is mildly worrying.

The character also gains proficiencies in Intelligence and Wisdom saving throws and two skills from Arcana, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, and Religion. I opt for Arcana and History as my pair.

The Wizard class also grants some equipment, several of which are multiple choice options. Working through the list, the character ends up with’

• A quarterstaff
• An arcane focus (in the form of a crystal)
• An explorer’s pack
• A Spell Book

 

The obvious core of the Wizard class, though is the ability to cast spells. A first level Wizard apparently knows three Cantrips (Level 0 spells, essentially), and six first-level spells, although they can only memorize two of those to cast at a time. I decide that our Halfling Wizard is going to specialize in manipulating the elements around them, which means that they will mostly specialize in Evocation spells. That doesn’t mean much until the character progresses beyond first level, but it will be something to keep in mind as I choose their spells. In the end, these are the spells I opt for:

Cantrips

• Fire Bolt
• Light
• Shocking Grasp

First-Level Spells

• Burning Hands
• Mage Armor
• Magic Missile
• Shield
• Thunderwave
• Unseen Servant

 

For casting, there are two numbers that are important. The first is the spell save difficulty of 8 + proficiency bonus + Intelligence score modifier, and the actual casting roll is modified by the character’s proficiency bonus and Intelligence score modifier. Since we haven’t determined ability scores yet, we won’t know what the Intelligence modifier will be until we get to STEP III: Determine Ability Scores later on.

 

Another class feature a Wizard gets at first level is something called Arcane Recovery, which means that after a short rest, they can recover expended spell slots with a combined level that is equal or less than half the character’s Wizard level, rounded up. Since the Wizard level is a mere 1, in this case that “rounded up” caveat means they will recover a single first-level spell slot once per day from a short rest.

STEP III: Determine Ability Scores

In Dungeons & Dragons, characters have six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. They are determined by rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest, generating a number between 3 and 18. You do this six times and then assign the scores to the various abilities. I forgot to record the exact dice rolls for this character, so I can’t tell you what the lowest score for each was, but my six totals were:

10, 10, 10, 11, 14, and 16

I decide to assign them as follows:-

Strength: 11

Dexterity: 10

Constitution: 14

Intelligence: 16

Wisdom: 110

Charisma: 10

But as we saw back in STEP I: Choose a Race, being a Stout Halfling increases the Dexterity by 2 and the Constitution score by 1, which results in the following. The numbers in parentheses are the ability score modifier each of these scores represents.

Strength: 11 (-)

Dexterity: 12 (+1)

Constitution: 15 (+2)

Intelligence: 16 (+3)

Wisdom: 10 (-)

Charisma: 10 (-)

An average score is 10 or 11, but adventurers are seen as a bit special and so have slightly above average scores to reflect this. In the case of this character, the rolls were average enough, aside from the 14 and 16. I decide to put the 16 in intelligence since that is a key Wizard ability. I put the 14 in Constitution, because between their low hit point totals and their inability to wear armor, Wizards are infamously “squishy,” and need all the health benefits they can get.

Now that we know the character’s Constitution modifier is +2, we can finalize the hit point total. It’s an utterly mammoth total of 8 points.

Now that we have the Intelligence score modifier at +3, and know that the Proficiency bonus at first level is +2, we can calculate both the character’s standard spell save difficulty (8+2+3) = 13 and their spell attack modifier is a nice, juicy +5

STEP IV: Describe Your Character

For this version of the character, I’m definitely going to be using one of the pre-existing backgrounds presented in the Player’s Handbook, though to be consistent with the previous D&D characters, I’m not going to use equipment provided in the background, instead choosing to purchase equipment for the character on top of what they already have from their race and class in a later step. Of course there’s a few things to do before going through the background

The first thing we do here is choose an Alignment for the character. I’ve often found D&D’s Alignment system to be slightly too rigid, but it’s generally nice to have one of the alignments as at least a starting point to inform the character development. I decide that the character can be Chaotic Good, as someone who tries to do the right thing but isn’t overly concerned with the strictures of legality and the greater good over the individual good.

Since describing them as “the character” over and over gets a little monotonous, the next aspect I’m going for is a name. The Player’s Handbook gives a decent spectrum of Halfling names. I decide that our Halfling character is going to be male, and based on the listed names, he now answers to the frankly ludicrous handle of “Cade Portis.”

Being a Halfling, Cade is a short person, coming in at 2 feet 11 inches tall. And weighing a mere 39 pounds. I think that means his quarterstaff is three times his height, which is a mental image that amuses me greatly.

I don’t have a sense of Cade’s look beyond that he’s clean-shaven, ginger, and tends to favor double-breasted waistcoats as a clothing choice.

The standard backgrounds in the Player’s Handbook have certain skill proficiencies, as well as potential Bonds, Ideals and Flaws that inform the character. Looking at the various backgrounds, I decide that Cade used to be a Halfling of the sea, and give him the Sailor background. This grants Cade proficiencies in the Athletics and Perception skills, as well as with Navigator’s Tools and Water-based Vehicles.

Cade also gets the rather handy background feature of Ship’s Passage, which means that he can wrangle free passage for himself and a group of companions on a ship when he needs to, though it might not be the most direct route needed.

Drilling down a little bit into what type of sailor Cade was, it turns out that he was a navigator on an exploration vessel. I’m thinking he might have bluffed his way into that position a little bit, but the crew didn’t mind because he could use his evocation spells to help send favorable winds and becalm the seas. Anything that makes safe passage slightly safer can’t be too bad.

Rolling on the background tables, Cade’s major personality trait is that he “stretches the truth for the sake of a good story,” which seems highly appropriate for a former exploration ship crewman. The ideal he strives towards is Respect in that “The thing that keeps a ship together is mutual respect between the captain and crew.” His Bond is that he “always remember his first ship,” which I think might be his only ship, though he wouldn’t present it that way to others. And finally his big Flaw is that “Once he starts drinking, it’s hard for him to stop,” so I think he might be role played as a bit of a drunken braggart when he’s in his cups, and would probably claim to have served on a lot more ships than he has, and to have been a captain or first mate or similarly highly respected position among the crew, and wants to be afforded a similar level of respect within his adventuring party.

STEP V: Buy Equipment

Time to gear up! Since a Wizard starts with 4d4 x 10 Gold pieces, and I rolled 10, which means that Cade has 140 Gold Pieces to spend. Unfortunately, since I’m using the purchasing rules, and not the default equipment from Class/Background abilities, I interpret that as having to buy the equipment listed back up in STEP II: Choose A Class.

 

To whit with default equipment costs:

• A quarterstaff (2 silver pieces)
• An arcane focus crystal (10 gold pieces)
• An explorer’s pack (10 gold pieces)
• A Spell Book (50 gold pieces)

 

That’s a total of 70 Gold pieces and 2 Silver pieces. Which leaves Cade with 29 Gold pieces and 8 Silver pieces left to spend. Rather than purchase Navigator’s tools, he decides to buy a few more writing supplies, allowing him to update his Spell book in the future, to wit:

• An ink bottle (10 gold pieces)
• 10 sheets of parchment (1 gold piece)
• An ink pen (2 copper pieces

That leaves him with 18 gold pieces, 7 silver pieces, and 8 copper pieces to spend later or just keep hold of.

I think that’s a pretty complete picture of Cade Portis, Level 1 Halfling Wizard.

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #9: Dungeons & Dragons II

Welcome to the ninth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the ninth entry in this series, I’m returning to the game I used for the eighth entry. (Actually, I’m probably going to use it for the tenth and eleventh entry as well) because I actually found the process of generating characters in it to be fun enough that I’ll be doing an entire party of four, , Dungeons & Dragons. I’ll be using the current 5th Edition rules from Wizards of the Coast.

The Character

I have less of a character concept in mind for this character than I did for my previous D&D character, so I’ll be using the background section and rules to turn the character from a somewhat nebulous concept into a fleshed out character. Right now, the concept is basically some kind of ranged combat specialist because shooting arrows at things seems a smart way to hurt enemies without getting a sword in the face.

STEP I: Choose A Race

For once, I decided to roll up this character as a race I don’t play much in fantasy RPGs, but one that I play in real life approximately 100% of the time. That’s right, I went with a Human. Humans being something of the default racial option, they don’t get many of the boosts and bonuses that other races get. They do get a nice little way of reflecting their versatility though:

Humans get +1 to all 6 of their Ability Scores (see STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

Humans have a base walking speed of 30ft.

Humans can read, write and speak Common and one additional language of their choice. I opt for Elven as this character’s second language, completely arbitrarily.

STEP II: Choose A Class

Since I wanted the character to be a combat focused character, I looked at the more combat-attuned classes and decided on the most classically combat-based class, the good old Fighter. As mentioned before, each class gets a raft of special benefits, even down here at lowly first level. So let’s take a look at those.

First off, fighters get 1d10 per level as their hit dice. At 1st level that’s 10 hit points, plus their Constitution modifier (since we haven’t officially rolled ability scores yet, we don’t know what that modifier is, and we’ll solidify this number in STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

On top of the hit points, the Fighter class grants the character proficiencies in all Armor, Shields, all Simple Weapons, and all Martial Weapons.

The character also gains proficiencies in Strength and Constitution saving throws and two skills from Acrobatics, Animal Handling, Athletics, History, Insight, Intimidation, Perception, and Survival. I opt for Animal Handling and Perception as my two.

The Fighter class also grants some equipment, several of which are multiple choice options. Working through the list, the character ends up with’

• Leather Armor
• Longbow with 20 arrows
• Rapier
• Shield
• Light Crossbow and 20 bolts
• Dungeoneer’s Pack

At first level, a Fighter gets to choose a fighting style that gives certain bonuses to combat roles. The available Fighting styles are Archery, Defense, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, Protection, and Two-Weapon Fighting. Since the nebulous concept of the character specifically is to be ranged-combat focused, I choose Archery, since that appears to be the only one with any type of ranged combat impact. This grants the character an additional +2 to every ranged attack role they make, which between the longbow and light crossbow seems like a pretty handy ability to have. Of course we don’t yet know what that +2 stacks with until we get to STEP III: Determine Ability Scores later on.

Another class feature a Fighter gets at first level is something called Second Wind, which means that between rests, the character can use a Bonus Action to heal 1d10 + their fighter level (currently 1) hit points. The juicier Fighter bonuses come at higher levels, but we’re only dealing with first level here, so I just stare wistfully at the leveling tables in the Player’s Handbook

STEP III: Determine Ability Scores

In Dungeons & Dragons, characters have six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. They are determined by rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest, generating a number between 3 and 18. You do this six times and then assign the scores to the various abilities. I forgot to record the exact dice rolls for this character, so I can’t tell you what the lowest score for each was, but my six totals were:

7, 12, 13, 13, 14, and 15

I decide to assign them as follows:-

Strength: 14

Dexterity: 15

Constitution: 13

Intelligence: 13

Wisdom: 12

Charisma: 7

But as we saw back in STEP I: Choose a Race, being a Human increases all those numbers by 1, , which results in the following. The numbers in parentheses are the ability score modifier each of these scores represents.

Strength: 15 (+2)

Dexterity: 16 (+3)

Constitution: 14 (+2)

Intelligence: 14 (+2)

Wisdom: 13 (+1)

Charisma: 8 (-1)

An average score is 10 or 11, but adventurers are seen as a bit special and so have slightly above average scores to reflect this. In the case of this character, the roles were mostly insanely good, aside from that lowly 7. While the main stat for Fighters is generally strength if they’re melee focused, for ranged combat, Dexterity is more important. Since that’s the case, I put high scores in both of those, and also in Constitution, since the Leather Armor isn’t the most protective option. I decide that the character will have a low Charisma score, which will probably be role-played as them being standoffish and more than a little surly

This also allows us to fill out a bit more detail from earlier. Now that we know the character’s Constitution modifier is +2 we can figure out his total hit points. We know it’s 10 + Constitution modifier which in this case works out to 12 Hit Points.

Since we know the character’s Dexterity modifier is +3, and that is stacked with the Archery Fighting Style, we know they get +5 to any Ranged Attack rolls.

For melee attacks, they only get +2, so the character will definitely be more shooty than smashy.

STEP IV: Describe Your Character

For this version of the character, I’m definitely going to be using one of the pre-exiting backgrounds presented in the Player’s Handbook, though to be consistent with the previous D&D character, I’m not going to use equipment provided in the background, instead choosing to purchase equipment for the character on top of what they already have from their race and class in a later step. Of course there’s a few things to do before going through the background

The first thing we do here is choose an Alignment for the character. I’ve often found D&D’s Alignment system to be slightly too rigid, but it’s generally nice to have one of the alignments as at least a starting point to inform the character development. I decide that the character can be Neutral Good, because sometimes it’s nice to play a pure good guy, unconcerned with the balance between Law and Chaos.

Since describing them as “the character” over and over gets a little monotonous, the next aspect I’m going for is a name. The Player’s Handbook gives a lot of human names for different cultures. The first thing I decide is the gender of the character. She’s a woman. Since the idea is to be a somewhat coherent party of characters, I opt to go for the same human culture as the one our previous character adopted his forename from, Illuskan. Being slightly lazy, I chose a combination form the suggested names, and our Fighter is now Kethra Hornraven.

Kethra is 5’10” and weighs 180lbs. Like most Illuskan humans, she has very fair skin, and greyish-blue eyes. She wears her black hair at shoulder length. Kethra tends to dress in muted earth-tone colors, with her only concession to fashion being a small silhouette of a horned raven picked out in black thread on the left shoulder of her uppermost tunic.

The standard backgrounds in the Player’s Handbook have certain skill proficiencies, as well as potential Bonds, Ideals and Flaws that inform the character. Looking at the various backgrounds, I decide that the reason that Kethra’s so standoffish is that she’s not super used to people, and plump for the Outlander background.  This gives her proficiencies in the Athletics and Survival skills. She also has a proficiency with a musical instrument of her choice. In this case it’s a flute. This background also grants Kethra another language, and in this case it’s Halfling. Part of the background involves coming up with an origin for Kethra’s Outlander tendencies. I roll on the table and discover that she’s either an Exile or outcast. I think she’ll be an exile, but don’t have a reason yet. This is definitely something that could be established in collaboration with the Dungeon Master as useful backstory elements for adventure hooks. While Fighter has class features, Outlander has a single background feature. In this case it’s something called Wanderer which means she has a general geographic knowledge of her surroundings and can easily forage for food and fresh water for up to five people every day.

I decide to roll on the various background tables to build up a little more information about Kethra’s character. First, her key Personality Trait is she places no stock in wealthy or well-mannered folk. After all, money and manners won’t save you form a hungry owlbear. The ideal that Kethra aspires to is Glory. Which she wants to earn in battle to honor herself and her clan. Her Bond is that she will bring terrible wrath to the evildoers who destroyed her homeland. Finally, her biggest flaw is that she won’t save those who can’t save themselves. Apparently she’s very committed to the idea of the strong surviving and the weak perishing.

This is a fascinating combination to me. I don’t have a full sketch of the character yet, but it seems that she became an exile after her clan was destroyed by evildoers (nature of which can be established later), and that’s left her extremely self-reliant, and really not caring for other folk. I feel this is what has led her to living in the woodlands off the grid like some kind of doomsday prepper, practicing with her bow and targets every single day.

STEP V: Buy Equipment

Time to gear up! Since a Fighter starts with 5d4 x 10 Gold pieces, and I rolled 14,that means that Kethra has 140 Gold Pieces to spend. Unfortunately, since I’m using the purchasing rules, and not the default equipment from Class/Background abilities, I interpret that as having to buy the equipment listed back up in STEP II: Choose A Class.

To whit with default equipment costs:

• Leather Armor (10 gold pieces)
• Longbow (50 gold pieces)
• 20 Arrows (1 gold piece)
• Rapier (25 gold pieces)
• Shield (10 gold pieces)
• Light Crossbow (25 gold pieces)
• 20 Bolts (1 gold piece)
• Dungeoneer’s Pack (12 gold pieces)

That’s a total of 134 Gold pieces, leaving a mere 6. Kethra opts to spend 2 of those on her trusty flute, and has 4 gold pieces to start her adventuring career with.

I think that’s a pretty complete picture of Kethra Hornraven, Level 1 Human Fighter.

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #8: Dungeons & Dragons

Welcome to the eighth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the eighth entry in this series, I’ll finally be using what is without a doubt the single most famous tabletop role-playing game of all time, Dungeons & Dragons. I’ll be using the current 5th Edition rules from Wizards of the Coast. This came up for a couple of reasons. The first one is that I’ve been running the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign from the introductory starter set for my wife and son. I’ve been very loose and forgiving about running those particular adventures. Mostly this is because each of them is running two characters, which is less than ideal. I’ve also been more concerned about keeping the game running and having fun doing things loosely rather than sticking to more precise tactics and layouts for combats and so forth. I do want to run things a little bit more in depth to get the players thinking more tactically about when they do things, and holding actions and all that fun stuff. I think that only works if every player only has a single character though.

A second reason I want to come up with a Dungeons & Dragons character is that I’ve gotten bitten by the actual play podcast bug, which means I’m listening to a lot of podcasts that are actual D&D games. In fact among my far too many podcast subscriptions: Critical Role, The Adventure Zone (Balance Arc), The Cool Kids Table (The Fallen Gods arc), JemJammer, Quid Pro Roll, and Not Another D&D Podcast all feature various flavors of D&D adventures. Incidentally, I may listen to far too many podcasts.

The final reason I went with Dungeons & Dragons is that I just want to play D&D! I may end up having to run a campaign instead,but if someone is interested in running a  campaign,this is an example of the type of character I’d like to play as.

The Character

I already have a concept of this character more or less fully formed in my head,so I’m going to lay that out here before going into the mechanistic step-by-step details below. The concept I have is is a “faith healer” type religious conman. The idea is the character would visit smaller towns and villages (those not necessarily big enough to have their own temples) and claim to be an acolyte of  the local healer deity. He would then work with an accomplice who played the “afflicted” sufferer. Using sleight of hand to pull the “affliction” from the sufferer in the form of some disgusting meat or fluids that the character palmed and “pulled” from the victim, curing them. He would then take donations and attempt to heal other villagers before disappearing in the night with a small pile of silver coins.

The character had been doing this for years and something strange happened one day. He was intoning the nonsensical mantra and removing the “lameness” from his accomplice when the character’s body was suffused with light and a nimbus of divine power was channeled through the character, who then actually healed people for real. Apparently all those villagers believing that the character was an agent of the healing deity attracted the attention of said healing deity to the character. Now the character is fighting hos own greedy conman nature to atone for those past sins. I almost view role-playing this character as playing a televangelist…

Also, I imagined the character as a dwarf, but since most fantasy dwarfs are depicted as honest and lawful, I decided this character had been raised by humans. Specifically a tavern-keeper and his wife from a village in the foothills of a temperate mountain range.

Let’s see how that translates into a character…

STEP I: Choose A Race

The Dungeon’s & Dragons Player’s Handbook approach to generating characters is similar to what we’ve seen before in Pathfinder characters (which is somewhat unsurprising, as Pathfinder began as a spin-off from the 3.5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons) but presented in a different order. The first of these steps is to choose the character’s race. Options for character race from the Player’s Handbook are: Dragonborn, Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling, Human, and Tiefling.

As I mentioned above, the character I have in mind is a Dwarf, for the very simple reason that I like Dwarfs. Not everything is particularly complicated. In D&D, there are two major subraces of Dwarfs, Hill Dwarfs and Mountain Dwarfs. Since my character backstory has this Dwarf living with humans in the foothills, I think making him a Hill Dwarf makes the most sense. This does mean that the character gets some bonuses and drawbacks. Let’s take a look now:

Dwarfs get +2 to their Constitution score, Hill Dwarfs get +1 to their Wisdom score (see STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below)

Dwarfs base walking speed is 25 feet but is not reduced by wearing armor.

Dwarfs have Darkvision up to 60ft

Dwarven Resilience makes them hard to poison, giving them resistance to poison damage and advantage on saving throws against poison

As a Dwarf, the character is proficient with battleaxes, handaxes, throwing hammers and warhammers.

Dwarfs also get to pick one set of artisan’s tools to be proficient with. In honor of his adoptive tavern keeper parents, I go with brewer’s supplies. It probably doesn’t hurt for a scam artist to be able to brew a decent  beer after all.

As a Dwarf, the character is also an expert in Stonework and gets some bonuses to cover that.

Dwarfs can read, write, and speak both Common & Dwarvish.

A Hill Dwarf also gets a bonus Hit Point per level, which I think is something that will get covered in STEP II: Choose A Class below.

STEP II: Choose A Class

The character concept includes him being touched by the power of a Deity, so it’s probably not a great surprise that he’s going to be a Cleric. Other Available classes include: Barbarian,Bard, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard. All of the classes have their inherent advantages and disadvantages, and are more where the characters begin to differ compared to the races. Each of the classes gives the character a raft of special abilities, even at 1st level. So Let’s take a look at those

First off, clerics get 1d8 per level as their hit dice. At 1st level that’s 8 hit points, plus their Constitution modifier (since we haven’t officially rolled ability scores yet, we don’t know what that modifier is) and in the case of a Hill Dwarf, we get the bonus hit point from that, so the character starts out with 9 hit points, pus whatever the Constitution modifier is (we’ll solidify this number in STEP III: Determine Ability Scores below).

On top of the hit points, the Cleric class grants the character proficiencies in Light Armor, Medium Armor, Shields, and all simple weapons.

The character also gains proficiencies in Wisdom and Charisma saving throws and two skills from History, Insight, Medicine, Persuasion, and Religion. I opt for Medicine and Persuasion as my two.

The Cleric class also grants some equipment, several of which are multiple choice options. Working through the list, the character ends up with’

• A warhammer
• Scale mail armor
• A hand axe
• An explorer’s pack
• A shield
• A holy symbol

The real meat of the Cleric class, though, comes in the form of their spellcasting ability.  At 1st level a Cleric knows three cantrips (I choose Light, Spare The Dying, and Thaumaturgy as my trio), and also has two 1st-level spell slots they can spend between long rests to cast prepared spells. The number of prepared spells is dependent on the cleric’s wisdom modifier,which we officially haven’t rolled yet, so once more we’ll have to fill that in when we get to STEP III: Determine Ability Scores later on. However, thanks to something called a Divine Domain feature, every Cleric gets two spells prepared that don’t count against the prepared spells limit. There are seven domains to choose from: Knowledge, Light, Life, Nature, Tempest, Trickery and War. Based on the con man back story for the character, I went with the Trickery domain, which gives him the spells Charm Person and Disguise Self. These are a little unusual in that they aren’t typically Cleric spells, so taking the Trickery domain is the only way a Cleric has access to them. The Trickery Domain also grants the character the ability to confer a slight Stealth bonus to allies in the form of the Blessing of the Trickster. Clerics do get access to quite a few other abilities,but not at 1st-level, which is what we’re dealing with here.

STEP III: Determine Ability Scores

Much like Pathfinder, in Dungeons & Dragons, characters have six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. They are determined by rolling 4d6 and discarding the lowest, generating a number between 3 and 18. You do this six times and then assign the scores to the various abilities. I forgot to record the exact dice rolls for this character,so I can’t tell you what the lowest score for each was,but my six totals were:

8, 10, 12, 14, 15, and 17

I decide to assign them as follows:-

Strength: 14

Dexterity: 12

Constitution: 10

Intelligence: 8

Wisdom: 15

Charisma: 17

But as we saw back in STEP I: Choose a Race, being a Hill Dwarf alters those numbers, bumping up both the Constitution and Wisdom scores, which results in the following. The numbers in parentheses are the ability score modifier each of these scores represents.

Strength: 14 (+2)

Dexterity: 12 (+1)

Constitution: 12 (+1)

Intelligence: 8 (-1)

Wisdom: 16 (+3)

Charisma: 17 (+3)

An average score is 10 or 11, but adventurers are seen as a bit special and so have slightly above average scores to reflect this. In the case of this character, his lower intelligence shows that hes kind of “book dumb.” Hopefully the higher Wisdom score for his “street smarts” overcomes that. Also, even though Wisdom is the main ability for Clerics, I opted against making it the highest stat here,since the con man back story implied that he had to be charismatic enough to talk his way out of any trouble.

This also allows us to fill out a bit more detail from earlier. Now that we know the character’s Constitution modifier is +1 we can figure out his total hit points. We know it’s 8 + Constitution modifier + Dwarven Toughness which in this case works out to 10 Hit Points.

Now that we know the Wisdom modifier is +3, we know that the character has 4 prepared 1st-level spells they can spend their spell slots on (as well as the Cantrips and Trickery Domain spells mentioned earlier). After looking through the Cleric spell lists, I’ve opted for Bane, Command, Cure Wounds, and Guiding Bolt.

STEP IV: Describe Your Character

This is definitely the area with the most leeway for character development. The Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook does include a chapter on sample backgrounds for the characters which allows some customization of backstory and other elements. Since the character already has a little bit of backstory already established I’m going to pick and choose various elements from the different backgrounds that make sense for the character. I’m also not going to use equipment provided in the background, instead choosing to purchase equipment for the character on top of what he already has from his race and class in a later step.

The first thing we do here is choose an Alignment for the character. I’ve often found D&D’s Alignment system to be slightly too rigid, but it’s generally nice to have one of the alignments as at least a starting point to inform the character development. In the case of this character I think Chaotic Good makes the most sense. Chaotic because a conman character doesn’t really strike me as falling in the Lawful or Neutral sides of that aspect. Good because his overall goal is to atone/redeem himself for his sins,so he is generally trying to work towards what he perceives as being Good overall.

Since describing him as “the character” over and over gets a little monotonous, the next aspect I’m going for is a name. The Player’s Handbook describes Dwarf names as being a big deal, often granted by a tribal elder, and that it’s a great shame to be stripped of a Dwarven Clan name. The character, though, was raised by humans, so he doesn’t have a Dwarven name. He goes by the very human name of Ander Storsson after his adoptive father Stor. In the long term of the Campaign, he might seek out his Dwarven Clan or parents and discover his true name or even earn a Clan name. All opportunities for the Dungeon Master and player to work together and use elements in the campaign in the future (I find it pays to leave little story hooks in a character’s backstory for the DM to use to their advantage.)

Being a Hill Dwarf, Ander is 4 feet 3 inches tall and weighs in at 192 pounds. He has slightly ruddy skin with jet black hair and beard. Unlike most dwarfs, Ander waxes his beard and mustaches into distinctive points. He dislikes teh common dwarven fashion of leaving their beards mostly ungroomed, and spends slightly longer than necessary combing and waxing his out as part of his morning routine. His eyes are a dark grey and often described as “flinty.” Ander’s never been quite sure if that’s an anti-Dwarven epithet but usually lets it go.

Aside from his scale mail armor, Ander tends to dress in white outfits in attempt to both look pristine, and stand out as someone marked by a deity, whether or not that’s true.  He also wears cheap jewelry in the forms of amulets and rings that at least look like they might be gold, provided they aren’t subject to too much scrutiny.

For his personality traits, Ander is something of a fast talker, relying on his mouth to get him out of trouble that his brain doesn’t always see coming. He thinks he’s pretty clever,but unfortunately that’s mostly because he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know things. This can lead to a higher than average share of misunderstandings. In Ander’s view, if those misunderstandings result in him having more coin than he did beforehand then it was a good thing.

The standard backgrounds in the Player’s Handbook have certain skill proficiencies, as well as potential Bonds,Ideals and Flaws that inform the character. Looking at the various backgrounds, elements of the Charlatan, the Criminal, and the Entertainer all make sense for Ander. I base things loosely on the Charlatan, which gives Ander proficiency in the Deception and Sleight of Hand skills, as well as proficiencies with Disguise and Forgery kits. The False Identity background feature doesn’t make sense for Ander, so I look elsewhere for that. I see in the Criminal background, the feature is a Criminal Contact. Since the faith healing scam Ander used to run needed an accomplice, I decide that the accomplice can be Ander’s criminal contact. I figure I can collaborate with the Dungeon Master on the type of character that is and how they can be reached. This gives the DM a potential NPC and a bunch of possibleplot hooks they can use as well…

Looking at the various options for Ideals, Bonds and Flaws over and above what I’ve already established about  Ander, I decide that his Bond is that he fleeced the temple of his patron deity in the village he grew up in, and so he must make up for that to grant his adoptive parents full funereal rights that they may move on to the afterlife (I decided that his adoptive parents are dead simply as a consequence of the longer lifespans of Dwarfs vs Humans). That his ideal is Friendship. When he puts aside his petty facades and personas and reveals the real Ander underneath, he’s intensely loyal to those he calls friends. His flaw is an obvious one. Ander is greedy.He firmly believes that all money in the world should be his, and takes risks to ensure that more of that money ends up in hs coffers.

STEP V: Buy Equipment

Time to gear up! Since a Cleric starts with 5d4 x 10 Gold pieces, and I rolled 11, that means that Ander has 110 Gold Pieces to spend. Unfortunately, since I’m using the purchasing rules, and not the default equipment from Class/Background abilities, I interpret that as having to buy the equipment listed back up in STEP II: Choose A Class.

To whit with default equipment costs:

• A warhammer (15 gold pieces)
• Scale mail armor (50 gold pieces)
• A hand axe (5 gold pieces)
• An explorer’s pack (10 gold pieces)
• A shield (10 gold pieces)
• A holy symbol (5 gold pieces)

That’s a total of 95 Gold pieces, leaving 15 left over. While a Forgery Kit is 15 gold piecesand would theortically be in Ander’s budget (unlike the Brewer’s tools and Disguise kit he’salso proficient with), Ander opts to save that coin for now and hope to purchase them during the course of his adventuring.

I think that’s a pretty complete picture of Ander Storsson, Level 1 Dwarf Cleric.

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #7: Pathfinder II

Welcome to the seventh in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the seventh entry in this series, I’ll be returning to Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder RPG, which I also covered in the second entry of this series. This arose for a few reasons: firstly, I’m planning on GamesMastering a Pathfinder campaign once I find a local group of players. Secondly, I’m working with my wife to help her generate a character (possibly for that campaign also). Finally, I ran a Twitter poll recently because I wanted to generate a new character now that I have a tiny bit more familiarity with the rule set. It got very few votes, because I’m not a particularly known online person but I’m forging ahead anyway.

The Character

STEP I: Determine Ability Scores

The rule book lists five different methods for generating ability scores, four of which revolve around the number of dice rolled and how they are assigned, and the fifth one uses a points buying system (we’ll see an example of points buying in the next entry in this series) – Once again, I opt for the “Standard” method which is to roll four six-sided dice (4d6) and discard the lowest one six times and then assign those scores to each of the six abilities – Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom & Charisma. So, let’s roll!

The rolls

16 (6+5+5+1)

12 (6+4+2+1)

9 (5+2+2+1)

15 (6+5+4+3)

12 (4+4+4+2)

12 (5+5+2+2)

This is quite the range. We have one below average score (that accursed 9), as well as 2 scores that are notably above average in the form of that 15 and 16. Everything else falls into the more average range for adventurers. Since the poll referenced above determined that this character will be a Bard, I assign the scores as follows:

Str: 9  Dex: 12  Con: 12 Int: 15  Wis: 12  Cha: 16

 

STEP II: Pick Your Race

Since I’m already going for an unfamiliar class, I decided to go all in and go for a  Pathfinder race that I also seldom play (I tend to favor dwarfs, humans, and the occasional half-elf), a Half-Orc. I’m not hugely familiar with them as player characters, but I’m familiar enough with orcs from general fantasy pop cultural osmosis, (and from playing a surprising large amount of Warhammer Fantasy Battle 4th through 6th editions) so I have an idea of how I’m going to play the character. One advantage Half-Orcs get is a +2 to any one ability score.  I decide it’s going to boost the Constitution score to 14. They get a few  other bonuses, most notably a +2 to intimidation, and the chance to fight on for a round with 0 hit points or less.

STEP III: Pick Your Class

As I’ve mentioned, this character is going to be a bard, so that class is decided for me. The first thing this gives the character is a mighty 10 hit points (8 for the d8 hit die, +2 for the Constitution modifier). There’s also a list of class skills, which we’ll get into in Section IV below. I’ll note the character has 8 skill ranks per level currently, since that’ll be useful later. The character is proficient with simple  weapons, rapiers, longswords, saps, shortswords, shortbows, and whips (as well as greataxes and falchions from being  a half-orc), so I’ll be able to choose from a wide range of weapons later. The character’s also proficient with light armor and shields, so will be able to defend against some blows easily.

Bards, like wizards get the ability to learn spells. Based on that Charisma score of 16, the character can cast  unlimited level 0 spells, 2 level 1 spells, 1 level 2 spell, and 1 level 3 spells per day. That’s not truly the case though, as this 1st level bard will only know 4 level-0 spells and 2 level 1 spells. Looking at the Bardic spell list, I decide these will be:

0-Level

• Light
• Message
• Daze
• Ghost Sound

1st-Level

• Summon Monster I
• Cure Light Wounds

A small role

A couple of other features of Other things the character gets from being a bard are bonuses to knowledge checks, limited performance bonuses that allow them to either counter or distract from magical effects, fascinate a foe, or inspire courage in an ally. That’s about everything for the first-level bard class, so on to Skills.

STEP IV: Pick Skills and Select Feats;

This character has 8 skill ranks to distribute, and being 1st-level can’t have more than 1 rank in any skill. From the non-class skills, I  opt for Ride, so the character can handle a mount if needed. The other seven skills I end up choosing from the Bard skills: Perform, Knowledge (local), Bluff, Intimidate, Perception, Sense Motive, and Sleight of Hand.

On to Feats. and I opt for Point-Blank Shot, making the character  especially deadly with ranged weapons within 30 feet.

STEP V: Buy Equipment

Time to gear up! A bard starts out with 3d6 x 10 gold pieces for buying equipment. Which, in this case, came out to 90. Since I went with that Point-Blank shot feat, the character needs a ranged weapon, so I spend 33 of those gold pieces to buy a shortbow and 20 arrows. The character is also going to be wearing studded leather armor, so there goes another 25 gold. I also buy a dagger for 2 gold pieces in case things get hairy at close range. That leaves 30 gold pieces to spend on non-martial equipment.  I pick up a musical instrument (specifically, a drum) for the bard to perform with, for another 5 gold pieces. We round things out with a few adventuring vitals, a backpack (5 gold), bedroll (1 silver), 2 days rations (1 gold), and a tent (10 gold). That leaves the character with 9 gold pieces and 9 silver pieces to spend later.

STEP VI: Finishing Details

 

There’s more than  few finishing touches needed to turn this bard from a spreadsheet to a character, but first we need a few more details on the spreadsheet. I opt to make the character male, and he goes by the name Zirg Cech. My campaigns generally don’t make a big deal out of alignment, but I decide that Zirg is Chaotic Good, should it become relevant. Rolling for age, Zirg is only 16. He’s 5 foot 6 inches tall, and weighs 206 pounds. Zirg also has black hair, which he wears closely cropped to his skull and has yellow eyes.

Zirg grew up with the semi-nomadic Dark Mountain Orc Clan, where he was often bullied due to his short stature and semi-human heritage. This led him to hide from his peers, and frequently also the elders among the clan, which has engendered a fiercely independent streak in him. This eventually meant that he was marked for execution by the clan for desertion, since he didn’t join them in a short territorial conflict with the kobolds and goblins that were attempting to seize clan farmland. Through sheer force of personality, he was able to barter his sentence down to mere exile, and was ceremonially drummed out of the Clan. His last act as a Clan member was to steal the drum from the herald conducting this ceremony and flee into the marshlands.

Zirg has no desire to end his exile, but had grown lonely, so now he frequents a small human town that he doesn’t know the name of. Some of the townsfolk are afraid of his orcish visage and tend to give him a wide berth. Others are less kind, with small children frequently hurling stones and pebbles at him in the cobbled streets. He leaves them be, outside the occasional glower to scare off some of the more vicious attackers. Zirg will often be found in the common area of the local tavern, enjoying a thick, dark pint of ale. When he’s in his cups, Zirg bashes out a beat on his drum and sings bawdy songs to the other patrons. This has made him more popular than he realizes with some of the more disreputable town folk. If you ask Zirg, he’ll tell you he’s friendless. If you ask the bartender, you’ll get quite a different story…

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #6: Star Trek Adventures

Welcome to the sixth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the latest entry in the series, I’ll be using the rules of Modiphius Entertainment’s  Star Trek Adventures RPG, which is set in the Star Trek galaxy. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you have at least a passing familiarity with that setting.

This isn’t the first iteration of a Star Trek RPG, and I have fond memories of Last Unicorn Games’ Deep Space Nine RPG from late 1999/Early 2000.

Since the canon Star Trek  universe covers the year’s from the launch of the NX-01 Enterprise in 2151 in the Enterprise episode “Broken Bow” through to the end of Star Trek Nemesis in 2379 in the ‘Prime’ timeline as well as alternative versions of the years 2233-2263 in the ‘Kelvin’ timeline reboot movies, then Star Trek Adventures has to zero in on a specific time period for simplicity’s sake (I’m sure other time periods will be covered in supplements, etc.) and it does so, Opting to take place in the year 2371 in the ‘Prime’ timeline, roughly contemporaneous with Season 3 of Deep Space Nine and the first season of Voyager. The game does include suggestions on how to adapt to earlier time periods, though.

The Character

I have an approximate idea for a character, and since that character would fit nicely into Starfleet, I have to assume that the character creation process should be able to spit out that character fairly easily. There are two methods for generating characters introduced in the fifth chapter of the rule, either using a “Lifepath” methodology or generating them during play. While the latter sounds intriguing, I don’t have a local group to play yet,so the former method will work better with this article. So let’s take a look at our character’s Lifepath.

Step 0: Default Scores

The first step isn’t really a step at all, but each character starts with 6 Attributes each starting at 7. Those attributes are: Control, Fitness, Presence, Daring, Insight, and Reason. I’d say this are mostly self-explanatory,but that’s never stopped me before. Control covers self-control, precision and discipline type situations. Fitness covers physical conditioning including endurance and general strength. Presence is basically force of personality or how persuasive/diplomatic the character is. Daring represents bravery and gut instinct type situations. Insight covers a character’s empathy, wisdom and experience of situations. Reason covers a character’s analytical abilities. In addition to the 6 Attributes, each character starts with 1 point in each of 6 Disciplines. The disciplines are roughly equivalent to Federation training tracks and are Command, Security, Science, Conn, Engineering, and Medicine. So that’s our base, and now it’s time to start applying our Lifepath to these defaults to form a a character around them.

Step 1: Species

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first step that we apply is figuring out what species the character is, since the galaxy of Star Trek has an awful lot of aliens in it. Since the game kind of assumes that the characters are part of a Starfleet crew, we only have Federation or Federation-adjacent races to choose from. There are 8 races in total, but I’ve decided that my character is going to be a Trill, so that’s the species I choose.

This gives various benefits and drawbacks. The first benefit is +1 to my Control, Presence and Reason attributes, bringing all of those to 8.

Being a Trill also gives me a species Trait. Since my Trill will not be a joined Trill (see a little bit later), they gain improved resistance to parasitic infection but suffer from stronger allergic reactions to insect bites and venom, a consequence of them being adapted for symbiosis.

Additionally, at this stage, the character gains a Talent. There are a lot to choose from, but there are two that are only available to Trill at the character creation stage, and I opt for one of those. Specifically, I opt for the Former Initiate challenge, which means that this Trill went through the process to be selected as part of the Symbiosis program, but wasn’t able to complete that program. This manifests as a slight benefit for certain Control or Reason tasks.

Step 2: Environment.

The next step for our Star Trek Adventures character is to determine how they have been affected by the environment they were raised in. Since I didn’t have a concrete idea of the type of environment I wanted my Trill to have in their background, I opted to roll a D6 on the environment table rather than just choose the most appealing option as I had for the species. A roll of  ‘4’ and this Trill grew up o a Frontier Colony. The game suggests that makes my character a little more hardy, and perhaps a touch more stubborn. This is represented in the game by a Value which is a credo, motto, or personal value that the character lives by,and is clearly used as a role-playing aid. Values are very free form, and I decide that this experience has made the Trill very aware of the importance of co-operation so give them a value of “None can stand alone.” As part of this background, I can increase either Control or Fitness. I opt for Fitness, bringing that to 8. I’m also able to increase one of the Conn, Security or Medicine disciplines. I opt for Medicine, so the Trill now has 2.

Step 3: Upbringing

Similar to the character’s environment, how they were raised within that environment affects their Lifepath. Again, there’s an option to roll for the upbrigning, but this time I choose it. This Trill was brought up in a Science and Technology path on their Frontier Colony. They didn’t rebel against such an upbringing, which means that they gained 2 points to their Control attribute (bringing it up to 10) and 1 point to their Reason attribute (bringing that up to 9). Because of that Science focus, I can raise one of the Trill’s disciplines, either Conn, Engineering, Science or Medicine. I decided that the Frontier Colony this Trill was raised on was used as an observation post for monitoring a pre-Warp species, and so a lot of maintenance had to be done to keep the facilities hidden from the native planet life, so that manifests as a point of Engineering discipline, bringing that to 2 points. It also means that the character gains a Focus on Xenobiology. The character also gains a further Talent as part of this upbringing. Looking through the ones that make the most sense, I opt for Constantly Watching, since the character would have to always be vigilant to make sure they’re not observed by the pre-Warp species. In game terms, this gives the Trill a slight advantage in detecting danger or hidden enemies.

 

Step 4: Starfleet Academy

Now we know what the character went through before the Federation/Starfleet got their grubby little mitts on them, it’s time to see what happened to them at Starfleet Academy. Again, you can roll to decide what track the character ends up on, but given what I’ve established about this Trill thus far, it made more sense to just choose the right track, and so we opted for the Operations track. This first manifests itself as a Value. I actually like one of the sample ones suggested: “Exploring to Test New Theories,” and go with that. It also gives 3 points to spend on any attributes I choose, but no more than 2 can be spent on a single attribute. I spend 2 on Reason (bringing that to 11) and 1 on Insight (which is now 8).

The character also increase their Disciplines here. First they need to choose either Security or Engineering as their major, which results in a +2 increase. Given my character’s background so far, I go for Engineering (which now has a score of 4, the Maximum any discipline can have at this stage). I can select 2 other Disciplines as minors and increase those by 1 each. Given his previously established Xenobiology interest, 1 of those minors is Medicine (bringing that score upto 3) and the other ends up being Science (bringing that up to 2). The character also gains 3 Focuses, one of which should be related to Operations on some level. For that one, I opt for Infiltration. For the two other focuses, I go for Emergency Medicine and Computers. The character also gains another Talent. In this case, that Talent is Intense Scrutiny, which helps with extended tasks that rely on Reason or Control.

 

Step 5: Career

So, how long ago was the character at Starfleet Academy? There’s no rolling here, the game gives you three choices to choose from: Young Officer, Experienced Officer, or Veteran Officer. I plump for the middle option, feeling like the colony backstory doesn’t give the character enough time to have been a true Starfleet lifer, and that the character has too many hard edges to be truly a Young officer. So this Trill is an Experienced Officer. This provides one Value, which I decide is “Friend to all Cadets,” the character also gets a Talent, which in this case is Field Medicine.

Step 6: Career Events

In contrast to the prior step, the game recommends rolling for this step, presenting a D20 table that characters should roll on twice, and then apply the effects of those rolls. I roll an 18 – Solved An Engineering Crisis and a 5 – Required To Take Command.

Solved an Engineering Crisis asks “What technology malfunctioned and why was it dangerous?” I decide that it was some kind of camouflage or cloaking technological failure which could lead to a disastrous violation of the Prime Directive, and the question “How did the character solve the problem?” was answered by jury-rigging the transporters to supplement the camo with transportation patterns of organic matter to act as visual shielding. It’s pretty basic, but could be elaborated into something more interesting either later, or while interacting with a Game Master and talented crew mates. This increases the characters Control attribute to 11, and their Engineering discipline to 5. This also grants the character another Focus, which really should be Transporters based on this history.

Required to Take Command asks “What was the mission? What went wrong?” I decide it was a routine mineral survey/sensor sweep mission, that resulted in a parasitic infection taking hold among the crew of the vessel, something that the character’s Trill biology allowed them to not succumb to, making the character the highest ranking non-incapacitated crew. It also asks “Was the mission successful despite the loss of the leader?” I decide it wasn’t, as the character more or less immediately abandoned the mission to return their craft to the nearest Starbase for medical and hospital treatments. This increases the character’s Daring attribute to 8, and his Command discipline to 2. The character gains another Focus, in this case Compusure.

 

Step 7: Finishing Touches

The first finishing touch is to add another Value. this time I go with “Death is the easy option. Really living, that’s the hard way.”

The second of the Finishing Touches is to make sure that no Attributes are above 12 only one can be 12. So far, the character’s attributes are

Control: 11, Fitness: 8, Presence: 8, Daring: 8, Insight: 8, Reason: 11

Which are within the limits. Next I get to increase any 2 of those Attributes by 1 point, still adhering to only one can be 12 rule. I opt o boost Insight & Presence both to 9.

You then do something similar with the Disciplines, but there can be none higher than 5, and only one 5. The character has the following disciplines

Command: 2, Security: 1, Science: 2, Conn: 1, Engineering: 5, Medicine: 3

I only have one at 5, and I can raise any two of the others by a point each. I decide to increase Medicine to 4 and Science to 3.

 

Now it’s time for some final checks.

Apparently the sum of the Attributes should be 56. Let’s see (11+8+9+8+9+11) = 56, so that’s good.

The sum of the Disciplines should be 16. Let’s see (2+1+3+1+5+4) =  16, also good.

Supposed to have 4 Values:

1. “None Can Stand Alone”
2. “Exploring To Test New Theories”
3. “Friend To All Cadets”
4. “Death is the easy option. Really living, that’s the hard way.”

That’s 4.

Supposed to have 4 Talents:

1. Former Inititiate
2. Constantly Watching
3. Intense Scrutiny
4. Field Medicine

Also 4

Apparently, I should have picked up 6 different Focuses:

1. Xenobiology
2. Infiltration
3. Emergency Medicine
4. Computers
5. Transporters
6. Composure

That would be 6.

Apparently there are some derived scores, including Stress, which is (Fitness + Security) or in this character’s case: 9 My damage bonus is apparently 1 Starfleet logo.Now, time to figure out a few personal details. I decide that this Trill is male, and his name will be Malko Inazin (though I’m always open to better alternatives that still sound Trill-like) and is roughly equivalent to 40 human years old. (I see no evidence that unjoined Trill hosts live any longer than humans, but I’m hedging my bets with that description). He’s kind of a gruff guy, but is always willing to lend a hand to anyone, especially those personnel found among the lower decks or among the wet-behind-the ears new recruits. He sports a fiercely disciplined crew cut, with slight sideburns fading into his Trill spots, which do indeed continue all the way down.

Based on his Discipline and his role as a main character within the story, Malko is clearly the Chief Engineer among the crew of his ship, and has enough medical training he can sub in for ahead nurse or deputize a Chief Medical officer where necessary, avoiding the need for his ship to have an Emergency Medical Hologram installed. Malko Inazin has never particular sought promotions or advancement, and so is more than content to rank as a Lieutenant.

For starting equipment, Lieutenant Malko Inazin has his uniform (Early Deep Space Nine/Voyager style black jumpsuit with gold divisional shoulders version), Communicator, Tricorder, a Type-1 Phaser for a sidearm (he just prefers the way it feels to the Type-2) and an Engineer’s toolkit.

 

The Ship

It strikes me that you can’t have a true Star Trek RPG without either a ship, starbase or space station, and Star Trek Adventures provides a creation guide for those. So consider this an It Builds Character bonus section as we create the ship that Lieutenant Malko Inazin serves as the Chief Engineer aboard. Chapter 9 of the Core Rules provides a multi-step process for creating the vessel. There’s only five steps here, so we’ll go through them now.

Step 1: Service

Since we’re assuming the default setting of 2371, we only want ships that could conceivably be in service that year. Since the ship class I’m going to be selecting in the next step entered Starfleet service in 2368, I can just about fudge that. The three-year time span means that the ship is probably still on its first major mission, so we’ll keep in mind that it’s almost fresh from the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards.

Step 2: Spaceframe

Their are several example ship classes in the Core Rulebook to choose from, including just about all the “hero” ships from the preexisting Star Trek series (which doesn’t include Star Trek Discovery, likely due to publishing and production lead times). I opt for one of my favorite under-rated little ships, the Nova-class, as seen in the pilot episode of Voyager.  In game terms, the default Nova-class has the following stats:

SYSTEMS

Comms: 10, Engines: 9, Structure: 8, Computers: 10, Sensors: 10, Weapons: 8

DEPARTMENTS

Command: -, Security: -, Science: +2, Conn: -, Engineering: +1, Medicine: –

Scale: 3

Phaser Arrays, Photon Torpedoes, Tractor Beam (Strength 2)

Talent: Advanced Sensors

Step 3: Mission Profile

Each of the Federation’s ships have different types of missions assigned to them, and that mission heavily influences some of the design considerations for the ships in question. In the case of this particular vessel, it’s mission profile is to take part in Pathfinder and Reconnaissance Operations, assigned as it is to map making and fact finding in various solar systems near the Federation side of the infamous Romulan Neutral Zone. This results in the following Department statistics, incorporating the Spaceframe modifiers above:

Command: 2, Security: 2, Science: 4, Conn: 3, Engineering: 3, Medicine: 1

The ship also receives the Improved Reaction Control System talent.

Step 4: Refits

This vessel hasn’t been in service long enough to get any refits, so nothing changes here.

Step 5: Putting It All Together

Let’ see what we have. first of all the ship has a single Trait: Federation Starship, which it kind of, y’know, is. Systems and Departments stats are already shown above in the earlier steps, so I won’t regurgitate them here. Apparently, the ship should have Talents equal to its scale. Since the Nova-class is scale 3, but only has two Talents (Advanced Sensors & Improved Reaction Control System) currently, I guess we’d better add one more: Improved Hull Integrity.

Other statistics –

Resistance: 4 (Baseline 3 +1 for Improved Hull Integrity), Shields: 10, Power: 9, Crew Support: 3

Weapons: Phaser Arrays (5 Damage, Medium Range, Versatile 2), Photon Torpedoes (5 Damage, Long Range, High Yield

Doesn’t feel like the ship has been in service long enough to pick up any other Traits yet.

I feel like the layout of the ship’s bridge closely matches that of the U.S.S. Voyager from the eponymous series.

Now, let’s get down to the last two fun details of the ship. Its named the U.S.S. M’Clintock after Thomas M’Clintock and sports the registry number NCC-72758.

 

---

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #5: Star Wars – Edge of The Empire

Welcome to the fifth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the latest entry in the series, I’ll be using the rules of Fantasy Flight Games’ Edge of the Empire RPG, which is set in the Star Wars galaxy. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you have at least a passing familiarity with that setting.

Edge of the empire is one of three compatible games set in the Star Wars galaxy (The other two are Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny.) Edge of the Empire deals with those individuals who make their living in the shadier corners of the galaxy away from the prying eyes of the Empire, and aren’t necessarily connected to the Rebel Alliance. The default time line for this particular game is shortly after the destruction of the Death Star during the Battle of Yavin at the end of Episode IV: A New Hope but before the Battle of Hoth seen at the start of Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

The Character

I have a sketchy idea of a character concept, so let’s see how well this system deals with creating them. Per the introduction to the Character Creation chapter of the book, this is a ten-step process, and as with earlier “it builds character” entries, the rule book itself puts the emphasis on narrative concepts over game-mechanic based ones, though we’ll definitely cover the mechanics as we go. I’m intrigued to see how the specialized Star Wars dice fit into this.

Step 1: Determine Character Concept and Background

While this step, to my mind, should obviously come almost entirely from the players vision, the rule book does present a few guidelines for getting that vision into playable character form. I want the character to be a doctor who is fleeing from a crime syndicate after botching surgery on the head honcho’s right hand man. It’s not much, but it is a hook to hang deeper characterization on.

The rule book first asks the player to consider their social background, and presents four broad strata to use. since one of those strata “The High And Mighty” actually mentions the idea of the character as a doctor (which I didn’t know going in) having fallen on hard times, I read that and see if anything in the descriptive capsule makes sense for the character.

The next section here asks why the character has found themselves on the murkier fringes of the galaxy far, far away. Since I already have the crime syndicate and botched surgery concept, I guess that’s already resolved for me, with the simple motivation of “run away!” so as not to be killed by vengeful criminals. Since we already have that established, I think we can move on to

Step 2: Determine Starting Obligation

As the rule book puts it “Obligation represents the debts a Player Character owes.” I’m assuming these debts go beyond financial into the realm of spiritual, mental, physical or pure intangibles like honor. Apparently there’s a mechanical component to this, as the character has to start with at least one Obligation. There’s even a d100 table to roll on if you’re not sure. Since I have a rough idea for the character, I’m opting not to roll, but instead choose a starting Obligation that fits the skeleton of a backstory that’s been sketched so far. The one that makes the most sense to me is Bounty as our doctor evidently has a price on his head. There’s also a magnitude associated with each Obligation, which, assuming I understand correctly, seems more of a way for the GM to use different party members Obligations in adventure hooks or gaming sessions. It looks like the average group of players has a magnitude of 40 points of Obligation. Assuming that the character would be a member of a four-player party, I assume that the magnitude of his bounty Obligation is 10 points.

There are various notes about group Obligation, how it can represent the party’s reputation both positively and negatively as well as ways to pay down Obligations. Since these all seem like something that would only come up in game after characters have been created and played for a while, I’ll ignore that here and jump to

Step 3: Select Character Species

Since the Star Wars  galaxy is positively teeming with life, both human and alien, I’m actually a little disappointed that the rule book only lists eight species options. Fortunately, one of those species options covers what I want this character to be. The good doctor is going to be a Rodian. (For completeness sake, I’ll mention that the other seven species are Bothans, Droids, Gands, Humans, Trandoshans, Twi’Leks and Wookiees.) What does the choice of species mean in the game? Well, for starters, a character’s species determine their starting characteristics and experience points. Certain species also confer other abilities on the character. Let’s see what that means for our Rodian Doctor, shall we?

His basic characteristics are –

Brawn: 2

Agility: 3

Intellect: 2

Cunning: 2

Willpower: 1

Presence: 2

Which gives further characteristics of –

Wound Threshold: 12

Strain Threshold: 11

As well as 1 Rank of Survival and 1 Rank of the Expert Tracker talent. On top of all that, he has 100 XP to spend on the character creation process.

Step 4: Select Character Career

Much like with species, the character’s career helps determine the character’s initial skill set. There are six career choices offered here: Bounty Hunter, Colonist, Explorer, Hired Gun, Smuggler and Technician. To my mind, the only one of those that makes sense for a doctor is the Colonist, so that’s what the character will be. That makes the following as career skills for him:

Charm

Deception

Knowledge (Core Worlds)

Knowledge (Education)

Knowledge (Lore)

Leadership

Negotiation

Streetwise

He also gets to invest  rank in four of those skills for free. I decide that our former crime doctor has ranks in Deception, Knowledge (Education), Negotiation and Streetwise.

Step 5: Select Specializations

Within each of the careers there are various specializations that add yet more career skills to their list. Within the Colonist career, the three specializations to choose from are Doctor, Politico or Scholar. Since I already have the character as a doctor in his back story, I go with the Doctor specialization.This grants the following four skills:

Cool

Knowledge (Education)

Medicine

Resilience,

And means the character can invest ranks in two of them. In this case, I put ranks in both Cool and Medicine. Incidentally, because Knowledge (Education) appears here and under Colonist, it would have been the only career skill the character could have two ranks in without having to spend experience points for the privilege. Of course, now it’s time to think about that as we reach…

Step 6: Invest Experience Points

The character has 100 Experience Points and four different ways to spend them:

1. Increase Characteristics
2. Purchase Skill ranks (may not have more than 2 ranks in a skill during character creation
3. Purchase Talents within Specializations
4. Purchase new Specializations

I feel like I need to explain that 3rd one. Each of the career specializations has a talent tree diagram with multiple rows and columns as a grid. some of the items are stand alone, and some are connected by lines. You can choose any box in the first row to spend XP on, and can also choose any box in the next rows that connect to that box. Here’s a picture of the Smuggler talent tree that I found online to clarify. (WordPress won’t let me upload it, so a link will have to do).

For example, the Doctor talent tree has the following top row options: Surgeon, Bacta Specialist, Grit, and Resolve. Of those four, Bacta Specialist and Resolve don’t link to anything, but Surgeon links to Stim Application in the second row and Grit links to Surgeon in the second row.

Since I’ve gone into this amount of detail explaining it, it makes sense for the character to spend at least some XP making purchases from the Tree. To that  end, I spend 5 XP (leaving me with 95) on that Grit talent, and via the magic of connectivity, use that to allow me to spend a further 10 XP (leaving me with 85) on the Surgeon talent in the second row. This means that in future, I could spend on the other top row talents, the second row talents connected to Surgeon (more Grit and Resolve, not sure if they stack) or the third row talent connected to Surgeon, which would be another Bacta Specialist. For now, though, I’m done with the Talent Tree, so let’s see where else I can spend those 85 remaining XP.

The first thing I opt to do is boost some of my characteristics. Each of the characteristics is from 1 to 6, but are capped to 5 during character creation. To boost a characteristic to a new value costs 10 XP times that value and is cumulative. So if I wanted to increase a characteristic from 2 to 4, I’d first have to spend 30 XP to increase it to 3, and then a further 40 XP to increase it to 4.

As it happens, I’m a little worried about the character’s low Willpower characteristic of 1, so I opt to spend 20 XP (Leaving me with 65) to boost the Willpower to 2. Since I feel that doctors are supposed to be smart, I also opt to increase the character’s Intellect from 2 to 3, at a cost of a further 30 XP (Leaving me with 35 to spend)

Now it’s time to invest in some skill ranks. Currently, I  can’t boost any skills above 2 ranks. It costs 5 XP to get a  Career skill (see above) to 1 rank, and then 10 XP to boost a 1 rank career skill to 2 ranks. For non-career skills, 1 rank  costs 10 XP and boosting a 1 rank non-Career skill to 2 ranks costs a further 15 XP.

Looking at the career skills the character has so far, I choose to boost his Medicine skill from 1 rank to 2, at a cost of  10 XP (Leaving me 25 to spend), I do the same for Negotiation (So now he only has 15 left). For non-career skills, I decide that the character knows his way around a pistol, and so purchase 1 rank of Ranged (Light) combat skill at a cost of 10XP (Leaving a mere 5 to spend).

Since the only thing the character can afford now is a single rank of a career skill, I opt to spend the last 5XP on a single rank of the Resilience skill.

Step 7: Determine Derived Attributes

This step uses the characteristics (including any increases from XP purchase to calculate four different values: Wound Threshold, Strain Threshold, Defense and Soak Value.

Wound Threshold is how many wounds the character can sustain before being rendered unconscious and is simply 10 (for being a Rodian) + their Brawn characteristic, which in this case gives a score of 12.

Strain Threshold is similar in that it shows how much mental or psychological damage the character can sustain before becoming dazed and confused. This is 10 (for Rodians) + the Willpower characteristic, which in this case is also 12. However, because we purchased that Grit talent, we get +1, so it’s actually 13.

Defense starts at 0 and changes based on equipment and cover. Since the character currently has neither of those things, his score is 0.

Soak Value determines the amount of damage a character can sustain before suffering a wound and is based on their Brawn characteristic, so in this case it would be 2.

Step 8: Determine Motivations

This is almost a companion step to the Obligations from step 2. In that an obligation is why they’re forced to the fringes of the galaxy, and a motivation is why they’re staying there. Like Obligations, Motivations can be picked out specifically or rolled for. I decide to leave the character’s motivations in the hands of the Force and roll for them. The first d10 roll determines what kind of motivation it is. Which in this case is a Cause, and a d100 roll breaks down what that cause might be. As it turns out the cause is Emancipation, so the character is an ardent believer in abolishing slavery and indentured servitude in wherever they rear their ugly heads in the galaxy. I decide that’s because he was an indentured servant of the crime syndicate he was forced to serve initially, and doesn’t want anybody else to have to go through that, which seems reasonable.

Step 9: Choose Gear and Description

Our character is starting to come together a little bit, but is currently rather under-equipped, not even having the clothes on his back yet! Since it would be nice to have some stuff to go adventuring with, he gets 500 credits to buy starting things. So, let’s spend some creds. The first thing the good doctor purchases is  a Light Blaster Pistol, which eats up 300 of his credits (Leaving only 200). Specifically, I decide it’s a BlasTech DL-18 despite that having no effect on the rules.

He spends a further 50 credits (leaving 150) on Heavy Clothing, which I decide is basically a thick scrub-like garment, almost a medical jumpsuit. This does increase his Soak Value by 1 up to  total of 3.

100 of the 150 remaining credits go towards an Emergency Medpac. After all a Doctor needs some tools and field dressings.

Of the last 50 credits, 25 go to a hand held comm-link, and he decides to pocket the rest just in case.

Now that he’s equipped, it’s time to figure out what this character looks like. We’ll go down each of the appearance categories in turn and see from there.

Physical Description

Height, weight and build: Rodians are generally a little shorter than humans, and this guy is no exception, he stands at 1.4 meters tall (About 4’6″). He’s also of a fairly slender build, almost lithe. Not sure what the weight would be , but something commensurate with that.

Hair and eye color: As a male Rodian, he doesn’t have hair, so no color there. His eyes are a deep navy blue that contrast strongly against his slightly mottled green skin.

Skin, scale or fur color: As established above, a mottled green.

Scars, tattoos or other identifying marks:  He has a black sun tattooed on his left shoulder, marking him as property of that crime syndicate. Since escaping, he’s tried to obliterate it unsuccessfully, so it has some fairly livid scar tissue over it, trying to strike through the design. If he had access to sufficient Bacta or a dermal medi-droid, he’d have it removed fully.

Personality: The good doctor is both fiercely dedicated to his independence and extremely paranoid. He knows that he has a price on his head, and every single new person he meets is just going to be the one who claims it. This does make him a little bit panicked as a negotiator as he tends to see things in the very short term, convinced that he’ll be dead within a couple of standard months. He’ll also very seldom forge alliances with people. He belongs to himself now, and that’s not going to change.

Since it isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the character creation, this is where I’ve decided to name our Rodian doctor, so say hello to Silugg Ceega, or “Sil,” to his very few friends.

Step 10: Group Chooses Starting Ship

Since the crew that would be the gaming party needs a home base, they need a ship. The rule book suggest 3 possibilities as good beginner starters, and I’m inclined to agree with one of their choices, so Sil is going to be the medic aboard a Wayfarer Medium Transport known as the Mynock Moon.

---

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #4: Aberrant

Welcome to the fourth in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

The Game

For the latest entry in the series, I’ll be using the rules of White Wolf Game Studio’s Aberrant RPG (Now owned by Onyx Path Publishing), which is a 1999 game set in the not too distant future of 2008. A quantum event has led to the eruption of “Novas,” individuals with superhuman abilities.

The game is basically a superhero game with strong conspiracy theory overtones and an arguable deconstruction of superheroes as beneficial themes that feel very much of a piece with the Watchmen graphic novel. Given that this was a White Wolf game, there’s elements of cynicism that abound and it definitely deals with shades of grey type characters rather than explicitly good or evil ones. There’s also a bunch of factions/organizations for characters to interact with, the main ones being:

• Project Utopia: A UN-affiliated group that fosters co-operation between Novas and normal humans to improve the world.
• The Teragen: A Nova-supremacist group that states that Novas can only be governed by Novas, so human laws don’t apply to them.
• The Aberrants: A new, small, faction worried about potential corruption within Project Utopia
• The Directive: A multi-government-aligned intelligence agency with controlling interests from The United States, Russia, Japan, The United Kingdom & Germany

As you might imagine, each faction is rather more complex than the public face described in the capsules above. This is also the middle game of the Trinity Universe timeline, with Adventure! set in the past, and Aeon/Trinity set in the future of the timeline, and so there’s an overacrhing plot that leads in those directions, but I never played those or read most of the sourcebooks so I can’t give any information on them.

 

The Character

Since this is a kind of a superhero game, I’m going to be basing my Nova character on a pre-existing superhero. And since a key part of the backstory is that all Novas share a genetic element that activates their powers at a time of great stress, I’m thinking along the lines of X-Men rather than my actual favorite superhero, who’s on the DC side of the house. Instead, I’m going to be attempting to create a character based loosely on this guy:

Nightcrawler. Art by Dave Cockrum © Marvel Comics

Kurt Wagner, Nightcrawler, is easily my favorite X-Man. He has teleportation powers, some religious humility and the swashbuckling attitude of a circus performer. His powers have also left him looking inhuman, with blue skin, a prehensile tail and two gripping toes on each foot.

PHASE 1: Human

In Aberrant character creation is done in two phases, firstly you create the character as the baseline human they were before the power-triggering event (“Eruption” in Aberrant parlance) made them a Nova. The second phase is the post-Eruption version of the character.

Step I: Concept

Since I’m basing this off of a pre-existing character, I already kind of have a concept in mind for the character, but let’s go through everything the rulebook suggests for creating the overall concept of the character, and who knows, maybe they will mutate away from being a straightforward Nightcrawler rip-off.

Under Concept, the rulebook has three separate categories: Concept, Nature & Allegiance. Concept in this case is a broad category that can be used to describe the character’s profession, personality or interests. I decide that this character is a  bit of a showman, and looking at the broad archetypes (and the rulebook does encourage you to come up with your own if you don’t want to pick from the list), I figure that the character concept that fits best is the Gambler, specifically the daredevil type. After all, what better fit could there be for a circus acrobat?

Nature is a further personality archetype that describes how the character perceives themselves. Again, the game recommends coming up with your own if nothing on the list fits. they also suggest that the character’s nature inform both how they are role-played, a little bit of the mechanics in how the character regains Willpower (more on that later), and how the Nova’s powers are manifested.

The final part of the Concept step is the character’s allegiance, which covers whether the belong to any of the groups mentioned in “The Game” section above, other smaller factions and generally how they interact with the larger game world. I’m keeping this character as an unaffiliated independent for now, partly because I don’t want to get too bogged down in setting detail, and partly because I’m not quite sure which group makes the most sense at this early stage of the character creation process.

Step II: Select Attributes

Now we get to the first crunchy bits of game mechanics for developing the character. Each character has nine attributes divided into three categories :-

Physical Attributes

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Stamina

Mental Attributes

• Perception
• Intelligence
• Wits

Social Attributes

• Appearance
• Manipulation
• Charisma

Each attribute is measured in dots, and attribute scores for baseline humans can range from one to five dots for each. Characters get a free dot in each attribute to begin with. The next step is to prioritize each of the three attribute categories as primary, secondary and tertiary. Characters get 7 additional dots to spend on their primary category, 5 for their secondary category and 3 for their tertiary category. Based on the character concept so far, I decide that physical attributes will be primary, social attributes will be secondary, and mental attributes will be tertiary.

Thinking about the character as a circus acrobat, I spend four of the seven physical attribute dots on Dexterity, giving him a total of five, or peak human Dexterity. Two of the remaining three dots are spent on Stamina for a three dot score, leaving just one for Strength, which now totals two dots.

I divide the three additional dots for mental attributes evenly across the three attributes, leaving a score of two dots for each.

For the five dots of social attributes, three of them go into Charisma bumping that up to four dots, the last two extra dots go into Appearance, for three dots total. That leaves Manipulation at the default one dot, which isn’t very good. In fact, the rulebook describes one dot of Manipulation as “Poor: You rarely get what you want.” I decide that this is because the character is unfalteringly honest and straightforward, so he doesn’t try to manipulate people as a general rule.

Atribute Scores:

Strength ••

Dexterity •••••

Stamina •••

Perception ••

Intelligence ••

Wits ••

Appearance •••

Manipulation •

Charisma ••••

Step III: Select Abilities

Abilities are skills that are tied in to attributes. For example, a character’s Awareness ability is a Perception ability, so to take an Awareness test, the character combines their Perception attribute dots with their Awareness ability dots and roll that number of ten-sided dice (d10). Like attributes, abilities are rated in dots. However, abilities max out at three dots for humans. They also have a minimum of zero dots and don’t get any freebies. Starting characters have twenty-three dots that they can use to purchase abilities.

Tying a little into his backstory as a performer/acrobat, I put three of the character’s twenty-three dots into Athletics, an ability tied to his Dexterity. That leaves me with twenty to play with, two of which go on Drive, since I figure the character is likely to need to operate a vehicle under stressful circumstances at some point. I also add three dots of Legerdemain, figuring that a co-worker at the circus might have taught him a few sleight of hand tricks.

Two dots of Awareness, because he needs to be aware of his surroundings from the acrobatics thing , at the very least so he knows how and where to land. I also decide that a couple of dots of Linguistics wouldn’t go amiss as the character would have picked up some language skills in the nomadic circus life style. Either dialects that Cajun or Creole if he’s American, or some different European languages if he’s from overseas, like his inspiration, who is German.

I also decide that the character is a bit of an orator and poet, represented by two dots in Arts. He also has a certain sense of swagger as a human that gives him a little je ne sais quoi, represented by two dots in Style.

I also think that he’d be fairly good at scrounging things from people and finding out local gossip, represented by two dots of Streetwise. I also figure he’d be good at working the crowds, which I represented with two dots of Command. Finally, as he’s a but of  ham, I figured three dots of perform would be entirely apt.

Athletics (Dexterity) •••

Drive (Dexterity) ••

Legerdemain (Dexterity) •••

Awareness (Perception) ••

Linguistics (Intelligence) ••

Arts (Wits) ••

Style (Appearance) ••

Streetwise (Manipulation) ••

Command (Charisma) ••

Perform (Charisma) •••

Step IV: Select Backgrounds

Only seven dots to play with here. Theses categories are things the character has that informs more of the roleplaying aspect, but might occasionally need to roll against things. For example, an Allies background might require a roll to see if an ally can come to aid the character in any given situation. There are several backgrounds and each can have between zero and five dots. These were slightly easier to spend for me as the backgrounds are a limited selection and at least a few of them (notably Attunement) don’t make sense at this pre-Eruption stage of the character.

I opt to spend a single dot on Cipher, which means he has a couple of hidden secrets. I decide those are his real name, country of origin and true parentage. Basically much  of his pre-circus days info is hard to find.

He also has a smattering of minor contacts and a major information broker he’s in touch with. Not quite sure who the broker will be, but I have decided she’ll be female, a petty criminal of some kind, and the only witness to the character’s initial Eruption event. She’ll be the one dot of Contacts the character has. I also figure that the character is comfortable financially, but not spectacularly so, which translates into two dots of Resources. That leaves three more dots to play with and I’m not totally sure where to put them.

I figure that the character could be seen as a local celebrity, at least in a subculture (either circus performers or a theatrical community), so that’s a dot of Influence. For the last two dots, I put them into Node, which doesn’t mean much for a human, but will help him recover from power use once he becomes a full Nova in Phase 2 of character creation.

Cipher •

Contacts •

Influence •

Node ••

Resources ••

 

Step V: Phase One Finishing Touches

The first part of this is recording certain starting statistics, so let’s go ahead and cover those. Like all beginning characters, the starting Willpower is 3 points. In Aberrant, Willpower points can be spent to guarantee a success on a roll, or to resist certain things, or to “max out” a power usage.

Also, as all beginning characters, his initial power level is represented by a single dot of Quantum.

The next statistics are derived ones. The character’s Initiative is the total of his Dexterity & Wits, which gives this character a score of seven. Movement rates are expressed in meters and are partially derived based on the character’s Dexterity scores. I’ll not break them down fully, but you can see them listed at the end of this section.

Now we have 15 bonus points to spend on different dots. Costs vary, as it’s 5 bonus points for an Attribute dot, 2 for an Ability dot, 1 for a Specialty (which are limited to 3 per ability), 1 for a Background dot, 2 for a Willpower point, 7 for a Quantum point and 1 for an Initiative dot.

My first thought for the character is to look at the Specialties available for the Abilities he has and see which make sense. Under Athletics there are many Specialties that seem like they would work. In the end I go all out and give him three: Acrobatics, Dodge & Tumble.

That leaves 12 bonus points to work with. I spend 4 of those to increase his Willpower by 2 dots to a total of 5 (or “Certain” rating). I don’t really have ideas of what to do with the last eight points, so I arbitrarily decide to bump up his Quantum by 1 dot for a total of 2, and do the same to Initiative, which brings that to a total of 8. And we’re all spent on the Human side of things.

Willpower •••

Quantum •

Initiative •••••••

Movement

Walk 7 m

Run 17 m

Sprint 35 m

Bonus Point Purchases

Acrobatics (Athletics Specialty)

Dodge (Athletics Specialty)

Tumble (Athletics Specialty)

Willpower •• (For a total of •••••)

Initiative • (For a total of ••••••••)

Quantum • (For a total of ••)

Phase 2: Nova

 

Now we have the baseline human created, it’s time to make him a Nova (the in-game term for Superheroes), which is also done by a points buying system, but the first part of all Superhero type tales is of course…

Step I: Origin

…the origin story. After all, when you think of mainstream superheroes the phrases “Last son of the dead planet Krypton,” “bitten by a radioactive spider,” or “saw his parents gunned down in an alley” aren’t far from the public consciousness. Of course, this character won’t be anywhere near as iconic as those three guys. So, how did this character (who I’ve been thinking of as “Not-Crawler”) first manifest  as a Nova?

At the tender age of sixteen, Curtis Wallace was an acrobat touring with the Brazeley Circus. Brazeley were performing in Cleveland, Ohio and Curtis had decided to take a break and explore the city. He bumped into a street vendor along the banks of the Cuyahoga river. the vendor (falsely) accused Curtis of stealing some of his merchandise.

Curtis ran away rather than protesting his innocence. The vendor gave chase, and also called the police  on Curtis. Eventually, he had an angry mob chasing after him. As Curtis carried on running, he was experiencing major headaches as his Mazarin-Rashoud node began to swell with the stress of the chase. As he ran, Curtis did something he rarely ever did, and tripped. As he plunged towards the river, his powers manifested and Curtis teleported away from the area and back to the circus with no recollection of how he got there. 

It’s not a great origin, but at least it’s a start. I would probably work on it and expand it out if I was playing Curtis as a character in a campaign.

Step II: Nova Points

More points to spend on dots. This time, we have thirty points to play with. Since the one thing I’m aware that I want Curtis to be able to do is Teleport, I buy the Level 2 Quantum Power Teleport which costs 3 Nova points per dot. Curtis has become pretty good at Teleportation in the 12 years since his power first manifested, so I feel like three dots is appropriate. I also decide that he’s become pretty good at short, quick teleports, and to represent that, Curtis has the Combat Teleport Extra, which changes the cost from three points per dot to five points per dot, so that’s fifteen of Curtis’ 30 Nova points spent.  Combined with his Perception that gives Curtis a dice pool of five for using the power.  Since I also want Curtis to be able to teleport another human when he uses his power, I decide that he could use the full five points in the Attunement background, which costs another Nova point, so he has 14 points left. Since he wants to be able to use his power when necessary, Curtis decides to increase his Quantum by 2 dots for a total of 4 dots, which costs 10 Nova points.

Curtis only has 4 Nova points left. I decide that he has some pretty spectacular non teleportation powers related to being able to move quickly, represented by two dots of the Hypermovement Level 1 Quantum Power, which costs 2 of those 4 Nova points. I opt to spend those on two more dots of Willpower, bringing Curtis’ total to 7 dots.

Quantum •• (for a total of ••••)

Willpower •• (for a total of •••••••)

Backgrounds:

Attunement •••••

Quantum Powers:

Hypermovement ••

Teleport (with Combat Teleport Extra) •••

All done. So we have a rough outline of a character, though not quite as good a handle on him as I’d like. He also doesn’t have Nightcrawler’s significant appearance disadvantages, but based on the Taint system that Aberrant has, I think he could develop those through the course of playing the game.

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!

It Builds Character #3: King Arthur Pendragon 5.1

Welcome to the third in an occasional series called It Builds Character in which I use the character generation rules of various tabletop role-playing games to create a character and attempt to flesh them out into something distinctive.

It Builds Character #3: King Arthur Pendragon

The Game

For the third entry in this series, I’ll be using the rules of Nocturnal Media’s King Arthur Pendragon RPG (which I’ll be referring to as Pendragon hereafter), specifically the 5.1 Edition that was released in 2010. I’ve ran one game of Pendragon’s  third edition a number of years ago. I confess that I don’t remember a whole lot about it, so I’m mostly looking at this with a fresh pair of eyes. As something of an Arthurian lore fanboy, I’m seriously looking forward to going through this process.

The Character

By default, Pendragon’s character generation concentrates on the dynastic, feudal and heraldic dynamic within the kingdom of Camelot, which is a very different approach to other RPG’s (and therefore also to the previous “It builds character” blog entries.)

In the standard character generation rules, Pendragon assumes your character is a male vassal knight of the Earl of Salisbury, so that’s going to the basic skeleton which this character hangs on.

STEP I: Personal Data

The creating a character section starts off with information that’s not mechanistic or based on the rules and dice rolls. Instead we begin with some of the more basic facts of the character. First of all, the character needs a name. As we’re dealing with a somewhat anachronistic 5th-14th century timeframe in the best Arthurian tradition, the character only has one name. Pendragon lists a number of more obscure character names from Le Morte d’Arthur as examples. Since I’m creating this knight specifically for this blog entry, I opt for one of those choices: Gilmere.

Next up are the choices of Homeland, Culture & Religion. Homeland and Culture are assumed to be Salisbury and Cymric respectively, whereas Religion is a choice between Christian & pagan. I decide that Gilmere will be a Pagan, much to the disappointment of his father.

And speaking of his father, the next step is to decide on that father’s name. I opt for another from the list: Selivant. Next up, deciding on a title or honorific for the character. I decide that, since at some point Gilmere converted from Christianity to Paganism that he’s referred to as “the Lost” but taking a page from Malory, I decided to make it French (or at least French-ish, I’m not fluent) via the power of Google, so “Gilmere the Lost” is now “Gilmere la Perte.”

The next four items of personal data are all decided for Gilmere. Father’s Class is “vassal knight,” Son Number is “1” (being the oldest son is incredibly important in the age of primogeniture as it is really the only way an adventurer could afford to be such.), Liege Lord is Sir Roderick, Earl of Salisbury (Though I’m just saying Earl of Salisbury without naming a specific one because a lot depends on the timing of later steps in the character creation process. Current class is “squire,” but that will change as this process goes on. The next section is Current home, and for the first time, we’re busting out a die. Specifically a 20-sided die (d20) to see which of the twenty Salisbury manors will be Gilmere’s inheritance. I rolled a two, so Gilmere will be the heir to Berwick St. James manor.

The last section on personal data is Age & year born. We’re told to leave this blank as it gets filled in later, but I threw in what will be the default values. Gilmere would be 21 at the start of the campaign, which is in 485AD in the reign of Uther Pendragon. this means he was probably born in 464 or 465AD

Name: Gilmere

Homeland: Salisbury

Culture: Cymric

Religion: Pagan

Father’s Name: Selivant

Title: la Perte (“the Lost”)

Father’s Class: Vassal knight

Son Number: 1

Liege Lord: Earl of Salisbury

Current Class: Squire

Current Home: Berwick St. James

Age & Year Born: 21 years old. 465AD

 

STEP II: Traits and Passions

In the Arthurian tradition, many of the knights are driven by passionate goals and ideals. In Pendragon this is represented by various traits and passions on the character sheet.

Firstly, we hit on Traits, which are shown as paired virtues and vices. There are thirteen pairs to begin with. The total of each pairing has to add up to 20, so if one side of the virtue/vice pairing is 13, the other side has to be 7.

Initially, the Traits are influenced by the character’s religious background, with five of the traits ascribed as virtues within the Religion and assigned a score of 13. As Gilmere is a Pagan, he gets 13 in Generous, Energetic, Honest, Lustful & Proud.

Since Gilmere’s a knight and has undergone martial training. he automatically gets 15 for Valorous and a corresponding 5 in Cowardly. All the other Traits get a 10 initially, so we’ll do that now for Gilmere. Finally, a player gets to choose a famous trait, which the character is known for, and will likely heavily influence role-playing the character going forwards.  That trait gets 16, and so it’s companion paired trait gets a 4. in Gilmere’s case, I’ve decided he’s going to be famous for being Worldly, so that’s where his 16 goes, and the corresponding 4 goes to Pious. This might be connected to him converting from Christianity to Paganism, but I haven’t fully sketched that out yet.

The second part here are Directed Traits, but we’re told to leave those blank for now, presumably to come back to later.

So off we go to the third section, Passions. All starting Pendragon characters begin with five Passions – Loyalty to their Lord (or else the feudal system would break down), Love of their family, Hospitality, Honor and in the case of Salisbury residents like Gilmere, a Hatred of the Saxons. The first four of which are assigned values of 15, and the final of which is assigned a 3d6 value, in this case 11. But note that the Hatred of Saxons value will change if the character uses the optional Family History section as part of their character creation (which we will be doing, so that 11 is not going to be staying put). Starting characters also get 3 additional points of Passion they may assign among those 5 (though they don’t have to). I decide that Gilmere is going to spend one additional point on Hospitality, raising it to 16, and 2 points on Love of family, bringing that to 17

 

Traits:

Chaste 7/13 Lustful

Energetic 13/7 Lazy

Forgiving 10/10 Vengeful

Generous 13/7 Selfish

Honest 13/7 Deceitful

Just 10/10 Arbitrary

Merciful 10/10 Cruel

Modest 7/13 Proud

Pious 4/16 Worldly

Prudent 10/10 Reckless

Temperate 10/10 Indulgent

Trusting 10/10 Suspicious

Valorous 15/5 Cowardly

 

Directed Traits:

None

 

Passions:

Loyalty (Lord): 15

Love (family): 17

Hospitality: 16

Honor: 15

Hate (Saxons): 11 (3d6: 2,6,3)

 

STEP III: Attributes

Now we’re getting into the more mechanistic cores of the Pendragon system. There are five main attributes that each character has:

1. SIZe
2. DEXterity
3. STRength
4. CONstitution
5. APPearance

I feel like these are mostly self-explanatory, but that’s never stopped me from explaining things anyway, so let’s take a look at each of these, and figure out how to divide up the 60 attribute points that Gilmere has to spend.

Size, is as one might expect a descriptor of just how large (height and weight wise) the character might be. As a Cymric character, Gilmere can have a size score between 8 (around eighty pounds) and 18 (closer to 215 lbs, or your author’s actual weight…).

Dexterity is a summary of the characters agility, balance and similar related qualities, and can range between 5 and 18 for Cymric characters.

Strength also ranges between 5 and 18 for Cymric characters and reflects the combat abilities, carrying capacity and movement rate, as you might expect.

Constitution ranges between 5 and 21 for Cymric characters (as to why it’s 21 rather than 18, Cymric characters get +3 CON as a cultural modifier.) and reflects how healthy the character is, at least in terms of how much damage he can take.

Appearance reflects how attractive/handsome the character is, which is of equal if not greater importance than combat statistics in this age of chivalry and courtly love that is the reign of Arthur. Again, this ranges from 5 to 18 for Cymric characters.

The rules strongly recommend that initial characters have a combined SIZ + STR of 21 and a minimum CON of 8, which becomes 11 thanks to the Cymric  modifier. I keep this in mind as I assign the initial 60 points among the 5 attributes.

I opt for a size of 13, making Gilmere on the larger size, but not gigantic. Since he’s on the larger side, a decent strength of 12 makes sense to me. I feel like being a little big probably affects Gilmere’s co-ordination and so he gets a DEX of 10. That leaves 25 points for CON and APP. I decide that Gilmere la Perte is a good looking chap indeed and assign 14 points to his APP. That leaves 11 points for CON, which the Cymric cultural modifier turns to a 14.

As well as the five core attributes, each character has a series of Derived Statistics calculated based on those attributes. In each case, the derived statistic is rounded to the nearest whole number. The first of these is Damage, which represents the amount of damage that the character can inflict on an enemy in combat. It’s calculated by adding together the character’s size and strength and then dividing that total by 6. Given Gilmere’s attributes so far, his Damage score would be (13+12)/6 = 4. Healing rate is to do with how many hit points the character recovers during a week of resting up. It’s calculated by dividing the combined STR & CON of the character by 10. For Gilmere that would be (14 +12)/10 = 3.

To calculate the movement rate of the character, the STR & DEX are totaled and then divided by 10. Gilmere has a Movement rate of (12+10)/10 = 2.

Hit points represent how much damage the character can take before being killed. It’s simply the total of STR & CON, which for Gilmere means 26 hit points. The final derived statistic is Unconscious and represents how many hit points the character can have remaining before losing consciousness and is simply the character’s hit points divided by 4, so Gilmere will remain conscious until he has fallen below 7 hit points.

Now that the statistics are covered, there’s one more part of the attributes step to consider, and that’s Distinctive Features, which could be done organically or mechanistically. Since I like rolling dice and will be using Gilmere merely as a sample character, I’ll go for the mechanistic approach. With an APP score of 14, Gilmere has two distinct features, which should be positive things. Rolling on the Distinctive Feature Detail table, apparently Gilmere has a very distinct face, as he rolled a facial feature and facial expression. I decide that these are high cheekbones and a disarming smile.

Attributes:

SIZ 13

DEX 10

STR 12

CON 14 (11 Points + 3 Cymric)

APP 14

 

Derived Statistics:

Damage 4

Healing Rate 3

Movement Rate 2

Total Hit Points 26

Unconscious 7

Distinctive Features:

2 – High cheekbones & Disarming smile.

STEP IV: Skills

Now we come to another mainstay of roleplaying character generation: skills. The skills in Pendragon come in two distinct groups: Non-combat skills and combat skills. Within those groups, certain skills are considered either Knightly, neutral or Non-Knightly.

Knights can take Knightly and neutral skills, but not Non-Knightly ones, which aren’t even listed on their character sheets. Cymric sons of knights, like Gilmere, start with the following non-combat skill values: Awareness 5, Boating 1, Compose 1, Courtesy 3, Dancing 2, Faerie Lore 1, Falconry 3, First Aid 10, Flirting 3, Folk Lore 2, Gaming 3, Heraldry 3, Hunting 2, Intrigue 3, Orate 3, Play [harp] 2, Read [Latin] 0, Recognize 3, Religion [Paganism] 2, Romance 2, Singing 2, Stewardship 2, Swimming 2, and Tourney 2.

As the Cymric son of a knight, Gilmere’s combat skills start at: Battle 10, Horsemanship 10, Sword 10, Lance 10, Spear 6, Dagger 5.

Now, Gilmere gets to personalize his skills somewhat in a multi-step process. First of all, he gets to decide which Knightly skill he excels at and make that 15. Gilmere is quite the rider, and plumps for Horsemanship.

Next step is to raise any three non-combat skills to 10 points. Gilmere chooses Heraldry, Flirting & Stewardship.

One more step is to heighten any four stats, with each heightening raising either a skill by 5, a trait by 1, an attribute by 1 or a passion by 1. For simplicity’s sake, I’m opting to use all 4 heightening options on skills, so Gilmere’s Romance, Read [Latin], Sword & Hunting all get boosted by 5.

Last of all, Gilmere gets 10 additional points to distribute among his skills as he sees fit. So, 3 of those go to Hunting, 4 to Intrigue and 2 each to Swimming & Tourney.

Non-Combat Skills:

Awareness 5 [K]

Boating 1

Compose 1

Courtesy 3 [K]

Dancing 2

Faerie Lore 1

Falconry 3

First Aid 10 [K]

Flirting 10

Folk Lore 2

Gaming 3

Heraldry 10

Hunting 10 [K]

Intrigue 7

Orate 3

Play [harp] 2

Read [Latin] 5

Recognize 3

Religion [Paganism] 2

Romance 7

Singing 2

Stewardship 10

Swimming 4

Tourney 4

Combat Skills:

Battle 10 [K]

Horsemanship 15 [K]

Sword 15 [K]

Lance 10

Spear 6

Dagger 5

Skills marked with a [K] above are considered Knightly skills

STEP V: Previous Experience

In this step, players can opt to age their characters between 1 and 5 years. Each additional year of experience confers two benefits in terms of Attributes, Skill, Traits or Passions. I opt not to do that for Gilmere as i want him to start at age 21, and also to use the Family History option that comes later on.

STEP VI: Other Information

While a lot of this section is optional, it’s mostly still worth doing to get a better idea of just what resources a starting character has.

The first part of this is to derive the character’s Glory score, which is the level of fame and renown he has within the kingdom. This is a hereditary score in that every son has a starting Glory that is 1/10th of their father’s score. Since i am going to use the Family History section later for Gilmere, we’ll derive it then rather than using the 6d6 + 50 starting value. The act of being knighted also confers 1,000 Glory points on a character, but Pendragon suggests using the first adventure session to confer the actual knighthood on to the character, so Gilmere will technically remain un-knighted throughout his character creation.

The next part is coming up with a coat of arms for the character. Since I’m fond of heraldry, I’ll likely come up with something good later, but for now, I’ll go with what heralds would refer to as “sable, a saltire or” as his blazon. To translate, that’s a black shield with a golden/yellow diagonal cross.

We also record Gilmere’s Joust Score. This is easy, since he hasn’t jousted anyone, so his score is a big fat zero.

As a starting character, Gilmere has four horses to keep track of. A charger (warhorse), a rouncy for himself, a rouncy for his squire (effectively, a rouncy is the horse equivalent of a “daily driver” in car terms) and a sumpter (pack horse) for carrying extra equipment.

Gilmere also has a squire to attend to him. Since it makes no difference in game terms, I decide his squire is 15 and goes by the name Elias.

By default Gilmer has the following starting equipment: Chainmail, shield, 2 spears, sword, dagger, fine clothing, personal gear, travel gear and war gear. He also gets one or more additional belonging representing a family heirloom or the like derived from rolling a 20-sided die. For Gilmere, that additional belonging turns out to be an additional £1 of money.

Next would be determining life and family events for Gilmere, but as a starting character, most of tehm don’t apply other than he was born in 465AD and squired in 480AD.

After that, Gilmere gets to roll a Family characteristic that represents something that the males in his family line have in common. Apparently Gilmere’s family are natural healers, so they get a +5 bonus to their First Aid skill.

Now that’s done, it’s time to figure out the army that Gilmere has at his disposal thanks to being the heir of a manor. Rolling various dice determines that Gilmere can call upon 4 middle-aged knights and 3 young knights, for a total of 8 family knights (including Gilmere himself). As well as knights, Gilmere can summon 9 other lineage men, (who are males of the family line who are not knights) and a levy of 53 able-bodied men from Berwick St. James manor..

Glory: TBD

Coat of arms: Yellow diagonal cross on a black shield

Joust score: 0

Horses: Charger, sumpter, two rouncys

Squire: Elias, a 15 year old blonde boy

Equipment: Chainmail, shield, 2 spears, sword, dagger, fine clothing (worth £1), £1 money, personal gear, travel gear and war gear.

Family Characteristic: Natural healers (+5 First Aid)

Army: 4 middle-aged knights, 3 young knights, 9 non-knight family men, levy of 53 able-bodied men.

That’s technically everything needed for Gilmere’s character generated pre-knighthood, but as I mentioned before, we’re also going to be looking at his…

STEP VI: Salisbury Family History

This is based on a lot of twenty-sided die rolls representing different years before the campaign start year of 485AD, and some of the things here will influence Gilmere’s current stats.

We begin with the year 439AD, when Gilmere’s father, Selivant was born. However, Selivant is too young to be accumulating much of a history or any Glory score yet, so we begin by seeing what Gilmere’s grandfather, Alein of Berwick St. James was up to. Alein’s starting Glory score is 1,144 (120 inherited from his father, 1,000 for being knighted and a further 24 for his knightly actions so far).

439: Nothing significant occurred

440: Served Garrison duty. Killed by Pictish raiders. End of Alein’s history. +20 Glory

So Alein of Berwick St. James died with a total Glory score of 1,164. Which means Selivant will inherit 116 Glory from his father.

Since Selivant won’t be active until 460AD, we skip to that year and see what Selivant is up to. Since it’s assumed that Selivant is knighted in late 459AD, he begins 460 with a Glory score of 1,116.

460: Served Garrison duty. Saw little or no combat.

462: Served Garrison duty. Saw little or no combat.

463: “Night of Long Knives” treachery. Selivant gains Hate (Saxons) Passion of 16

464: Selivant marries. Gains 200 Glory from his bride (Glory score is now 1,316)

465: Gilmere is born

466-467: Selivant fought and survived at the Siege of Carlion. Gained 90 Glory for participating (1,406 total)

468: Selivant fought and survived the Battle of Snowdon. Gained 60 Glory (1,466)

469-472: Selivant gained 50 Glory aiding Uther in fighting the Saxons, Picts & Irish (1,516)

473: Selivant fought and died in the Battle of Windsor. Gained 60 Glory (1,576). Gilmere gains Hate (Saxons) Passion of 16.

So, going into the first scenario of the campaign, Gilmere has an inherited Glory score of 157 (Which will increase to 1,157 after his knighting ceremony) and a Hate (Saxons) Passion of 16 in addition to everything generated in the first five sections above.

That’s all for Gilmere for now. I realize the Pendragon system is more than a little complex, and so the next It Builds Character entry will hopefully be looking at a somewhat simpler system for creating a character. My current thought is that it will probably be a Superhero character…

What do you think, loyal blog followers? Is this a series worth continuing? If so, are there any particular games and editions you’d like me to use to create characters?

Please leave some comments and let me know!