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Old 09-05-2018, 08:34 PM   #21
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
I've noticed that lifepath systems tailored to the outcome work better. If you say you want to be a Wizard, that's one lifepath system. If you want to be a powerful noble, that's another. It gets you over the simple fact that more than 90% of people in medieval societies were farmers with no other options.
That's a good point, and one that I think applies far more generally than just in fantasy. Something was funny about Traveller in that the characters it produced were all former-something but weren't currently anything; and in particular weren't currently a party of all the same thing. And that made it harder to imagine, let alone set up and play, several types of campaign that would otherwise have been promising and extended the scope of the game.

I feel that this is related in a way to a difficulty that I often have in getting character-players to decide on (and explain) a character concept before they start character generation in a point-buy system like GURPS. I keep getting backstory instead of character concept. It's very often all about what the character did in the past and too seldom about what he or she is going to be like on adventures. But that is perhaps a de-rail.

The character generation system in the original version of ForeSight depended strongly on a random roll for age. Players tended to resent that, and grumbled, so a new version came out with a system in which the GM set the power level for PCs by specifying how many "background factors" they ought to be built on. Players then chose elements of backstory from the tables, and this set the sizes of the several pools of generation points on which the characters could be built. Players were encouraged to arranged the background factors into a skeletal character history and think about the specifics, and this might possibly guide the choice of skills and abilities. I knew some players to generate their characters as a series of accumulations, spending the results of each background factor on specific knowledge, skills etc. before moving on to the next.

The background factors were rather abstract and un-specific, and the players in my fantasy campaigns found them not quite comfortable. So I devised a set specifically for my fantasy setting Gehennum; crafted to a specific setting they were able to be a lot more explicit about what life experiences they represented. They were kind of satisfactory, but some players found that they were okay for any generally conventional Gehennese life, but lacking when it came to generating unconventional characters and backstories. That's a general problem with life=path generation systems, I think.
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