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01-21-2021, 02:32 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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TFT Life History Character Generation
Inspired by the discussion of TFT versions of Traveller, I was thinking of doing a character generation system based on describing a character's life history. Inspired by a combination of the Traveller system and the TFT jobs. This might be used to generate a PC or NPC, though I'd expect a fair bit of editing in the PC case.
The story would start with the character at age, say, 14. The first couple of things they picked up would very likely be mundane talents related to their childhood. (Maybe I'd relax the rules and give them those for free.) It would end with the character around 20 years old, 32 attribute points and filled with talents or spells. The final output might look something like, "Grew up in a fisherman family [Boating, Fisherman], at 16 became a bandit [ax/mace], at 17 almost killed, at 19 joined a barbarian clan [bow], at 20 hunted by someone, at 20 made a close friend," etc. And at the end a character. Has anyone tried something like this? If so, what lessons did you learn? Were you happy with the results? |
01-21-2021, 07:56 AM | #3 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
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Mace Windu: No. He will not be trained. Qui-Gon Jinn: No?! Mace Windu: He is too old. Qui-Gon Jinn: He is the Chosen One! You must see it! Master Yoda: Hmmm. Clouded, this boy's future is. |
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01-21-2021, 01:31 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
Cool idea! I'd be even more interested in some sort of formal organization of the way in which talents map onto jobs, where jobs are ordered into hierarchies. This sort of goal-setting in the way a skill/talent system works does wonders for helping PC's fit into a game world as something other than murder-hobos.
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01-21-2021, 01:52 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: North Texas
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
As I've mentioned previously in this forum, I have such a system although I've never applied it backwards to create a character's pre-game history. If I was to do so, I'd have to first determine where the hero's education or apprenticeship should begin. For a human, mid-adolescence seems appropriate, say 12 or 13, with starting attributes of 6/6/6 plus 6. The youth would then automatically gain one attribute point per year up to the normal starting level of 32. XP earned from their chosen 'jobs' would be dictated by the inherent risk (high/medium/low) and can only be applied to talents or alternatively, specific talents could be assigned after a certain amount of time. Rolls for critical success/failure would also be based on the risk of their chosen path and aggregated to an annual frequency instead of weekly.
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“No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.” -Vladimir Taltos Last edited by TippetsTX; 01-21-2021 at 04:18 PM. |
01-23-2021, 02:00 AM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jun 2019
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
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I actually came up with that rule after my Wizardry talent was criticized way back in an older thread by folk who feared it blurred the lines too much between "heroes" and "wizards", not that it was ever intended to allow PCs to change career paths after they had been established.
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"I'm not arguing. I'm just explaining why I'm right." |
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01-23-2021, 09:23 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
I'm not a fan of the idea that all characters should be built through a process that makes fixed assumptions about ages and stages because it rules out so many interesting alternatives, without any obvious advantages. But I do like the idea of linking related jobs to each other through a sort of ladder of qualifications, just because that sets goals for character advancement that let players develop sides to their characters other than killing people in an arena.
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01-23-2021, 01:59 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Jul 2018
Location: Hyattsville, Maryland
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
There was an article in Adventure Gaming #5 that used the idea of job risk rolls to map out a character's first 15 years. Notable successes or trouble would add or subtract points from the 8 points a character starts with to improve their base stats. There might be more to it, but I haven't track down a full copy of the article and am going off what's in this image at RPG Geek: https://rpggeek.com/image/5352188/ad...sue-5-nov-1981
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01-24-2021, 12:01 AM | #9 |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
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01-23-2021, 11:36 PM | #10 | |
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Re: TFT Life History Character Generation
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