Fugu
2012-01-05, 03:20 PM
Yesterday, one of our four group members canceled on us for the second week in a row, meaning we have to skip our session for the fourth week in a row! I can't stand it! Our DM is reluctant to helm a session with only two PCs, so I'm going to step in with a one-shot 2-PC session. Since it's such short notice and I'm the only one who's off work today, I'll have to create the characters.
My instinct is that the easiest way to get players to accept pre-made characters is to construct them in a way that makes it easy for the players to (somewhat) reliably guess their abilities. Giving someone a typical D&D character with a list of feats they've never read before is going to put a barrier between the player and the character. So instead, I'm going to set the game in the modern day and give each player a blank character sheet except for a name and physical description. They'll have expectations about their abilities based on typical action-move protagonists, and every time they use an ability or skill, they'll have the opportunity to infer the score by comparing their d20 roll to my announced DC. By the end of the night, they'll have almost everything filled in. They'll not only explore the game world, they'll explore their characters.
To keep this process interesting, each character will have several scores that are well beyond their expectations. (The plot will reveal why around the half-way point.) The players will spend the first few scenes discovering what each of them is awesome at.
The plot should justify all of this mystery, and provide a clear, desirable goal to draw the PCs on in spite of their uncertainty. My solution is the following:
The game begins on a plane approaching an exotic city (e.g. India). A flight attendant brings each character a Mission: Impossible style mission briefing. The mission is to assassinate a dangerous target (e.g. an Afghani opium warlord). They'll fight their way towards him through chases, gunfights, fistfights, and battles of wits while discovering that they possess well beyond human capability in certain skill-sets and trying unsuccessfully to remember their lives before the plane flight. One of the secrets they'll uncover as they pursue their target is that they are androids built to perform covert ops. When they complete their current mission, they'll be deactivated and reprogrammed for the next, retaining no memory of their nature. The organization that deployed the PCs will notice their discovery and attempt to deactivate them before they do something unpredictable.
And that's probably four to five hours of gaming. I posted this in hopes of being warned about potential problems lurking in my plan and receiving advice about how I can better implement it.
?
My instinct is that the easiest way to get players to accept pre-made characters is to construct them in a way that makes it easy for the players to (somewhat) reliably guess their abilities. Giving someone a typical D&D character with a list of feats they've never read before is going to put a barrier between the player and the character. So instead, I'm going to set the game in the modern day and give each player a blank character sheet except for a name and physical description. They'll have expectations about their abilities based on typical action-move protagonists, and every time they use an ability or skill, they'll have the opportunity to infer the score by comparing their d20 roll to my announced DC. By the end of the night, they'll have almost everything filled in. They'll not only explore the game world, they'll explore their characters.
To keep this process interesting, each character will have several scores that are well beyond their expectations. (The plot will reveal why around the half-way point.) The players will spend the first few scenes discovering what each of them is awesome at.
The plot should justify all of this mystery, and provide a clear, desirable goal to draw the PCs on in spite of their uncertainty. My solution is the following:
The game begins on a plane approaching an exotic city (e.g. India). A flight attendant brings each character a Mission: Impossible style mission briefing. The mission is to assassinate a dangerous target (e.g. an Afghani opium warlord). They'll fight their way towards him through chases, gunfights, fistfights, and battles of wits while discovering that they possess well beyond human capability in certain skill-sets and trying unsuccessfully to remember their lives before the plane flight. One of the secrets they'll uncover as they pursue their target is that they are androids built to perform covert ops. When they complete their current mission, they'll be deactivated and reprogrammed for the next, retaining no memory of their nature. The organization that deployed the PCs will notice their discovery and attempt to deactivate them before they do something unpredictable.
And that's probably four to five hours of gaming. I posted this in hopes of being warned about potential problems lurking in my plan and receiving advice about how I can better implement it.
?