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Old 04-27-2020, 12:48 PM   #1
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Anyone willing to let me make up character as I go along? [UK, online]

Looking for an online game, text only, hours that make sense for UK.

GURPS, or prepared to consider other things but that and D&D 5e are the main two I'm already familiar with.

Any genre considered. Some things I'd be particularly keen on trying include (by no means exhaustive)
animal characters,
games set in the world of an existing story (e.g. Doctor Who, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Discworld, Harry Potter, all sorts of things - not Star Wars, I've never watched that),
low point-value games,
Infinite Worlds.


Is there anyone out there who's prepared to consider letting me use "quantum character creation"?
https://www.wizardthieffighter.com/2...-playing-game/
Quote:
...But the challenge remained: many times we would generate characters with a large number of skills and features that never came up in play. Imagine, you’re playing colonists exploring a space hulk, and suddenly come across an infected corpse. What does it matter that back on Terra Nova your character, Ivan Blodnitsky was a car salesman, likes mountaineering, has a hidden VPN chip implanted in his neuranet jack, and packed three original earth-silk turbans in his pack for the new colonies? I mean, it might matter—someday—but right here right now, it does not.

[...]

“Ok, the others were hunting the legendary silver-toothed ice bear. Why is Kuya here? Is she also a hunter?”

P: “No, she’s a painter. She was tagging along behind she wanted to paint the sunrise over the Verdiberg, which was immortalized in the opera To Scream A Butterfly.”

We’ve established she’s a painter, that’s a skill—let’s note that down on the character sheet.

R: “Cool. Well, the weather’s really horrible. The hunters don’t want to leave. Do you wait it out with them?”

P: “Yeah, sure, Kuya’s not some kind of mountain hero.”

R: “The bad weather lasts a couple of days and the temperatures plummit. It’s horrible cold. How good is Kuya’s Endurance? She’ll have to make a test to see how she’s handled the bad weather.”

P: “Well, it’s pretty good.”

R: “Better than average?”

P: “Absolutely–she climbed this mountain by herself!”
And so on until you've run out of points.

It sounds like a useful idea, as whenever I try to build a character, what sounds as if it would work or be interesting in theory when I'm writing out the sheet always turns out not to work in practice and something else would have been better. I end up stumbling around wordlessly with character traits I don't know how to play in practice, or the wrong skills to be any use in the scenario. Hence making up my mind only once I've seen what's happening and have at least some clue what would go well with it seems very promising.

If you think this would be an unfair advantage, and the other players don't want to do the same, you're welcome to start me out with as many points less as you think fit, to compensate. Mind you, although I could in theory pick optimal abilities to ace the first thing I met, I'd be a fool to do so, as once I'd spent all my points on that, something completely different might come up.

If going the whole hog seems too much, I'd consider spending, say, half or even more of my points at the outset and keeping the rest to spend as I go along.

Last edited by Inky; 04-27-2020 at 04:59 PM.
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