Character Creation is Fun

[5crownik007]

I make this thread to invite everyone to share their best experiences from character creation. All systems and editions welcome.

Personally, when I first made a GURPS 3e character, I fell absolutely in love with it. It was just so much fun to make my character, and I felt that the advantages and disadvantages system made it so that even with point-buy, you couldn't build an exactly optimal character, and that meant that it would have to get interesting at some point, in fact, when you take disadvantages, you think about why your character has them, what led him to be a glory-hound? Etcetera.

So, the point of this thread is character creation experiences that you think are worth sharing, including but not limited to:

Dying during character creation and how.
Interesting and novel character creation systems
"So I rolled a 7 on my strength and decided to make a fighter..."
I discovered this new, interesting character build in [insert system here] and I think it's really good!

[Cluedrew]

My favourite character creation moment is I built a character, an old hardened mercenary, and had some extra points left over. So I bought an jeep. Stuck a gun on it, it was rugged but old. And I realized the character was driving the vehicular version of himself.

By the end of the campaign I had this whole speech prepared in case he died with it. Instead we had a moment that probably only I found sad, where he couldn't get it to start and had to grab some stuff from the back and leave it behind. He retired from "adventuring" after that.

[Wraith]

Dying during character creation is the main selling point of a system called deadEarth. It's a ****-show of an actual gaming system; the book is written in nearly random order, various crucial tables are missing from the index, the internal logic is screwed up, and the game itself is blatantly sexist and misogynistic, so there's no reason that you would ever actually PLAY the thing.

The character creation, however, can be mildly amusing. You roll a random amount of 'perks' - 2d6, +/- more or less depending on how old (randomly rolled) your character is - and you roll a d1000 that many times to see what happens to you.
Some of them are pretty dull - gain a dice to one of your skills. Some of them are bad - lose a dice from a skill, or a few HP from a location or something. Some of them are fractal - roll 7 new perks, which in turn can tell you to roll d more perks. About 10 out of 1000 of these random rolls will just outright kill you stone-dead, and a dozen more will give you a save-or-die effect that you have to save against every time you gain a new perk.

Basically, the golden rule for character creation in this game - literally written into the preamble - is that you're expected to make 3 characters and then play the one which survives. I made a short-lived thread about it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?278275-deadEarth-A-Post-Apocalyptic-Let-s-Play-(Almost)&p=14996875&highlight=deadearth#post14996875), a long time ago; my first guy got ~120 rolls of 2d6 in and then spontaneously fell over and died from radiation poisoning, and the second one ended up a cackling, hunch-backed, repugnant, clinically insane mad scientist with a penchant for building cyborgs. I never did get around to 3, come to think of it.....

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One of my favourite character concepts - which I unfortunately only got to play for a session or two before the game folded - is that of a Blood Bowl Player.

Blood Bowl is a strange and uniquely British concept that started life as a board-game and gradually morphed into a set of novels and comics. You all know The Lord of the Rings; now imagine that, but wherein they had replaced war with American-rules football. That's Blood Bowl; wherein the forces of Gondor regularly take to the pitch and punch the Elves of Rivendell into the dirt for being presumptuous enough to try wussy things like 'passing the ball', and Hobbits occasionally score touchdowns by grabbing the ball and then having their friendly Ent ally hurl them into the End Zone with it. Just try not to look at the Orc cheerleading squad; definitely don't look at the Troll cheerleading squad.

My character was a Blood Bowl player. In the fluff, he was a player who had failed to make the cut for a team and so was forced to resort to adventuring while waiting for the first serious injuries of the season to make room in a roster for him.
Mechanically he was a strong guy who specialised in unarmed combat and had a few more skills in Improvised Thrown Weapons (because Blood Bowl balls are ringed with iron spikes to add a bit of drama to the game), and wore Medium (or better) armour painted with his old team's colours, and his offence was exclusively tied into his playing style; running at people full speed, tackling them to the ground and punching them until they stopped moving.

He was short-lived, but his eternally upbeat attitude and team-orientated spirit was highly refreshing compared to the surly, antisocial murderhobo that usually get represented in the Old World of Warhammer, and I'd love to play with him again. :smallbiggrin:

[5crownik007]

Dying during character creation is the main selling point of a system called deadEarth. It's a ****-show of an actual gaming system; the book is written in nearly random order, various crucial tables are missing from the index, the internal logic is screwed up, and the game itself is blatantly sexist and misogynistic, so there's no reason that you would ever actually PLAY the thing.
Sounds like my kind of game!(I jest)

This story has less to do with character creation, but I remembered something funny.
2 years ago I was a player in a 3.5e game that my friend was running, and we had a party of 3, including me. I could tell that we were going to die very quickly when the other two members of my party decided to both be clerics of the death god. This prompted me to make an absolutely suicidal character build. A one-eyed, one-legged, late middle-aged, neutral good human rogue. The best part of this was despite my serious disabilities I was still the most athletic member of our party.

Predictably, we died, though I died to "friendly fire". They shot me in the back when I decided to flee an encounter we had no chance of winning. Then they died to the encounter. It was funny.

[Cluedrew]

Basically, the golden rule for character creation in this game - literally written into the preamble - is that you're expected to make 3 characters and then play the one which survives. I made a short-lived thread about it (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?278275-deadEarth-A-Post-Apocalyptic-Let-s-Play-(Almost)&p=14996875&highlight=deadearth#post14996875), a long time ago; my first guy got ~120 rolls of 2d6 in and then spontaneously fell over and died from radiation poisoning, and the second one ended up a cackling, hunch-backed, repugnant, clinically insane mad scientist with a penchant for building cyborgs. I never did get around to 3, come to think of it.....I found another thread, on a different forum even but I think there is a link from your thread to it... somewhere. Where someone rolled up all three of their possible characters. Two died and the third was incapable of sitting up unassisted.

I think they were quite happy with these results. This is one of those games I can't decide whether having a conversation with the creator would be a revelation, horrifying, frustrating or all three.

[Marcloure]

I really enjoy playing D&D 4e Character Builder. Yes, playing it. Sometimes I open it, image a character concept, and I try to build it there, and somehow I find it fun.

One of my favorite creations is a spellslinger pirate. She is funny, charming, drinks a lot, likes a gun and can get very technical. I built her as an hybrid Artificer/Bard focused on Charisma and Int (afterall, she is both a pirate and a mage), and ranged weapon powers.

She had a lot of debuffs and arcane shots, could enchant weapons and do some very cool stuff. I really wish to play her some day...

[Florian]

Ok, so Traveller is totally random character generation including life paths and also the ability to come out of it damaged or dead.

One time, the dice gods really smiled on me. My character climbed from humble deck hand, to junior fleet officer, all the way up into the upper echelons of fleet high command, became a noble of the third empire and got rich enough for regular youth treatments. Overall, he passed the full amount of 22 checks, making him around 120 year old at the end of character generation, with masses of allies and rivals and a truck load of plot hooks and little story snippets.

All in all, that was a glorious stretch of luck (with I´d been in Vegas for that), but ultimately, I decided against playing him. It simple didn't see fitting to have that old war horse A.D. and multimillionaire truck around with a Firefly-style crew of adventurers.

[JMS]

I really enjoy playing D&D 4e Character Builder. Yes, playing it. Sometimes I open it, image a character concept, and I try to build it there, and somehow I find it fun.

One of my favorite creations is a spellslinger pirate. She is funny, charming, drinks a lot, likes a gun and can get very technical. I built her as an hybrid Artificer/Bard focused on Charisma and Int (afterall, she is both a pirate and a mage), and ranged weapon powers.

She had a lot of debuffs and arcane shots, could enchant weapons and do some very cool stuff. I really wish to play her some day...

I loved that! Built Elsa from Frozen once, just to see if I could, and some fun builds like a two-shield warrior.

[Wraith]

I found another thread, on a different forum even but I think there is a link from your thread to it... somewhere. Where someone rolled up all three of their possible characters. Two died and the third was incapable of sitting up unassisted.

Dyson's Dodecahedron (https://dysonlogos.blog/2009/09/29/deadearth-the-pain-never-ends/) perhaps? That's where I originally heard about the game and found the link to the rulebook, and that also includes a bunch of the craziest characters ever made among the pre-rolled corpses - the guy with a sentient crotch-fungus that turned him into a nigh-omnipotent god, and the speed-freak who had ~60 actions per combat round (my characters optimised at somewhere between 7 and 15, for comparison).

I can't tell if it's the greatest or the worst character creation process ever made, but it's definitely one of them.

[hotflungwok]

Played a game called Hol where you could die during character creation. 'Cornholed by God' was the actual result rolled, and it was common enough that we just started rerolling when it happened. One of the skills you could get during character creation was 'Shoot (blank) guns', where you had to fill in the blank with a descriptor. I chose 'green', then bought a can of spraypaint. :smallbiggrin:

Another game I liked making characters for was Tales of the Floating Vagabond. It had skills like 'Stick Long Pointy Things Into Things that Scream and Bleed' and 'Make Things Stop Computing With My Fist'. It was quite silly.

[DeTess]

I've really enjoyed makin characters for Shadowrun 5e in Chummer (an electronic character creation tool). I ussyalky start by opening the negative qualities tab because so many of those help tell your character's backstory and just work from there.

I've made everything from ex-military infiltration experts to british nobles to rock-stars working doing side jobs as hackers, and the tool streamlines an otherwuse extremely cumbersome process ibto actually being quick and fun.

[Cluedrew]

Dyson's Dodecahedron (https://dysonlogos.blog/2009/09/29/deadearth-the-pain-never-ends/) perhaps?Not that one, I think it was on rpg.net or something with a similar name to that. That one does have some good characters.


One of the skills you could get during character creation was 'Shoot (blank) guns', where you had to fill in the blank with a descriptor. I chose 'green', then bought a can of spraypaint. :smallbiggrin:"Shoot (working) guns". I have no idea how to work weapons that don't work, but if give me one that works and I can go crazy with it. Although judging from you description I think green or "Shoot (oversized) guns" might be more in keeping with the feel of the system.

[Pauly]

Playing an old superhro rpg many years ago. I rolled up a character who offensively was a normal human with a blackbelt in judo.
Defensively he was effectively immune to impact damage, and highly resistant to electricity/poison/radiation/magic and had wolverine like regeneration.

I called him “la cucuracha”