09-05-2018, 08:34 PM | #21 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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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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09-06-2018, 05:37 AM | #22 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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LBB-era Traveller was much more amenable to this kind of hacking than its later iterations.
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09-06-2018, 06:16 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
Maybe the class system has a role to play here - as noted, if you're aiming for a specific class, you need a specific life path - and I tend to associate class-and-level systems with fantasy. Okay, with that RPG since, say, RuneQuest doesn't have such. If your system simply needs a guy with adventuring chops, lifepathing is probably easier.
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09-06-2018, 08:30 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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Something to watch out for is that the Central Casting books (at least earlier printings, don't know about reprints) are artifacts of the culture of their era, and the author at the time had some very firm Opinions. They include a screed in the introduction that sets those Opinions down which I'd recommend reading just so you understand where the book stands and don't stumble face-first into it.
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09-06-2018, 11:13 AM | #25 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: The Enchanted Land-O-Cheese
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
One of the couple who ran our gaming group when I lived in Darkest Iowa was rather dismissive of the Central Casting books. She was an English teacher in her day job, and felt that creating backstories ought to be a creative process and that leaving them to the roll of a die was using a crutch. And I can see her point of view.
But I found the Central Casting tables fun to play around with, even if I did not get a whole lot of use out of them. For one thing, despite the author's best intentions, when I used the table the characters I rolled up began to have a kind of sameness about them. For one thing, they all seemed to have tattoos. My Wacky Brother Steeve used Central Casting to make up a character in a Star Trek campaign, and he wound up with a star tattoo over one eye. We mocked his tattoo, but Steeve enjoyed playing goofball characters and so he just went with it. When I got married and moved to the Enchanted Land-O-Cheese, I left my Central Casting books with my former roommate who was an aspiring writer and thought they'd be useful as a tool for developing characters for his fiction. And maybe they were. I think I found them most useful when I mined the table for ideas rather then following die rolls.
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09-07-2018, 03:12 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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Setting's great; 2e mechanics are not. |
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09-07-2018, 10:17 AM | #27 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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Roll 1d6. 1-2 You (or your father) worked on a farm. 3-4 You (or your father) worked in a factory or manufacturing workshop. 5-6 Other (roll on table 5b, which doesn't yet exist) Not every fantasy setting is low tech. Not every low tech setting is fantasy.
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09-08-2018, 08:59 AM | #28 | ||
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
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09-10-2018, 06:13 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
Hmm ... now I'm reminded of a couple of cRPGs, not least Mount and Blade and the long-overdue-a-remake Darklands, where the "lifepath" is controlled by a series of player decisions: social status, childhood education (early and late) and then one or more adult jobs.
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09-10-2018, 10:56 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Shoreline, WA (north of Seattle)
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Re: Lifepaths in Faaantasy!!!
How many mechanical effects do the various lifepath systems have? I'm most familiar with Burning Wheel's system, in which each lifepath grants resource points and unlocks traits to be taken; someone who takes Born Noble as their first lifepath has access to traits that a Born Villager doesn't, for example. (They also probably have more resource points, because BW is all about spotlight time over mechanical balance.)
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