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Old 01-21-2021, 02:32 AM   #1
David Bofinger
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Sydney, Australia
Default 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?
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Old 01-21-2021, 06:35 AM   #2
hcobb
 
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Default Re: TFT Life History Character Generation

My suggestion is that wizards start training at age 6, not just to avoid talents, but to avoid the techniques of learning talents.
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Old 01-21-2021, 07:56 AM   #3
Oneiros
 
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Default Re: TFT Life History Character Generation

Quote:
Originally Posted by hcobb View Post
My suggestion is that wizards start training at age 6, not just to avoid talents, but to avoid the techniques of learning talents.
Qui-Gon Jinn: He's to be trained, then.
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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Old 01-21-2021, 01:31 PM   #4
larsdangly
 
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Default 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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Old 01-21-2021, 01:52 PM   #5
TippetsTX
 
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Default 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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Last edited by TippetsTX; 01-21-2021 at 04:18 PM.
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Old 01-23-2021, 02:00 AM   #6
Steve Plambeck
 
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Default Re: TFT Life History Character Generation

Quote:
Originally Posted by hcobb View Post
My suggestion is that wizards start training at age 6, not just to avoid talents, but to avoid the techniques of learning talents.
I use a rule like that already, to justify (rationalize) why a PC that starts as a "hero" cannot decide to make a career change and become a wizard sometime after character creation. My prerequisite talent for wizards (Adept) takes 7 years to learn, and must be completed before puberty. A child's innate psychic ability to sense and focus mana becomes lost if it isn't developed before the hormones kick in :)

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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Old 01-23-2021, 09:23 AM   #7
larsdangly
 
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Default 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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Old 01-23-2021, 01:59 PM   #8
tcr25
 
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Default 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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Old 01-23-2021, 11:36 PM   #9
David Bofinger
 
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Default Re: TFT Life History Character Generation

Quote:
Originally Posted by larsdangly View Post
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.
Absolutely agree. As I said in the original post, if this is used to generate a PC I'd expect a lot of editing. It might be for:
  • inspiration when generating a PC ("So he's on a ship, and there's a disaster, and someone he loves died, and then he learnt Diving, OK, he learnt that so next time he could save her from drowning..."),
  • a GM to generate pregen characters
  • generating NPCs.
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Old 01-24-2021, 12:01 AM   #10
David Bofinger
 
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Default Re: TFT Life History Character Generation

Quote:
Originally Posted by tcr25 View Post
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.
Judging by that first page I see it mostly as a thought experiment, rather than a character generation system.
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