Life pre- adventure

[iTreeby]

Xanathar's guide to everything has a "this is your life" section. Explorers guide to wildemount has the "heroic chronicle" section. Do any of the other sorcebooks have tables for rolling up details about characters before the campaign started? I understand that can easily make up your own background details but, I am interested to see how many details we can generate going by the tables in the books. It's okay if the details end up being redundant but, I'd be interested in seeing how much of a life story we can get before level 1.

I'd also appreciate if you could point out if any of the tables outcomes have mechanical effects on the character. (I suspect wildemount has the most of these sorts of results)

[MaxWilson]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Note: no blue text.

Here's a crude, simplistic version of what I want: the ability to take risks during chargen. Link: https://maxwilson.github.io/Beast/AbstractDungeoneering/

[Jathaan]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Why? Wouldn't rolling up a character who died before the game begins just mean you'd have to roll up a different character?

I tried the character generator you linked; out of five characters I tried, all five were killed by their character background.

[iTreeby]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Note: no blue text.

Here's a crude, simplistic version of what I want: the ability to take risks during chargen. Link: https://maxwilson.github.io/Beast/AbstractDungeoneering/

I think there was a version of Traveler where you could die during character creation (possibly of old age?)

Imagine a table with historically accurate medieval mortality rates. "OK, first character died being born, second one got plague at seven, third times a charm? Oops looks like my mother died two months into the pregnancy, let's roll to see if my father remarried or if I come from a different branch of the family"

[Cicciograna]

I remember that there was a notoriously infamous game in which even chargen could be FATAL...

[MaxWilson]

Why? Wouldn't rolling up a character who died before the game begins just mean you'd have to roll up a different character?

I tried the character generator you linked; out of five characters I tried, all five were killed by their character background.

The character generator there is very crude and doesn't really take into account your build or your stats: theoretically e.g. a cleric or paladin should have a better chance against zombies or wights than a sorcerer does. But yes, if you keep taking big risks you will almost always die sooner or later, so when you roll good stats there's more mental pressure to take small risks so you don't lose those great stats, which means that really good stats usually lead to starting at a lower level and bad stats sometimes equate to starting at higher levels. If you theoretically roll 18, 18, 18, 12, 16, 14 you would probably be too afraid to even hit the "Go On An Easy Adventure" button, so you'd start the game as a very talented but inexperienced rookie, whereas someone else might be a 13, 15, 12, 6, 9, 11 5th level wizard with Fireball already. Nobody feels cheated even though they have different stats.

The net effect is that you wind up with a single-player game (character generation) linked to a multiplayer game (adventuring), and when you start the multi-player game you already have some attachment to the PC because you've already taken them through some dangerous stuff and survived--but you can also appreciate your PC buddies because surviving e.g. a small nest of vampires with the help of the other PCs is a lot easier than it used to be on your own.


I think there was a version of Traveler where you could die during character creation (possibly of old age?)

Imagine a table with historically accurate medieval mortality rates. "OK, first character died being born, second one got plague at seven, third times a charm? Oops looks like my mother died two months into the pregnancy, let's roll to see if my father remarried or if I come from a different branch of the family"

Yes, Traveller has definitely influenced my take on chargen including the above comments on solo play vs. group play. A key point is that you were making decisions during character generation, not just passively rolling. (I haven't actually played Traveller myself so technically my view is influenced by articles I've read about Traveler chargen as a solo play activity, not by Traveller chargen directly.)

[Laserlight]

In Traveler, your character could die during chargen. If you went for a career like Marines instead of Merchant, and aimed towards combat assignments, you had a better chance of getting skills and decorations, but also a higher chance of getting killed. I don't think you could die of old age in chargen; instead, you'd be forced to retire from that branch of service, whereupon you could try to join another branch or you could decide to start your life as an adventurer.

[Dr. Cliché]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Why? :smallconfused:

[LudicSavant]

Why? :smallconfused:

And how would that even work? A person is going to have to end up with a character by the time the first session rolls around, so is dying really a risk as opposed to a "start rolling again" reset?

[Tes]

Hm to make this somehow feasible to task my brain to work on this as a thought experiment I had to come up with a reason to do it and a way to apply it for a game.

Turns out this could be a lot of fun if you create a minigame for players to create their characters (would probably be most useful for oneshots).

Gotta admit I'm intrigued to add unique options for specific "main stats" as well as benefits for extremely bad stats and penalties for extremely good stats. The lack of an existing mechanic to balance well rolled vs chump somehow is one of my least favorite things about rolling for stats.

You want to be a Dragon slaying hero starting the campaign? Sure free drinks for you everywhere in the kingdom, but you're frightened by anything more flary than a bonfire. #scarred4lyfe #justherothings

Rolled abysmal during chargen? No worries the generator will give you the chance to die a miserable death or compensate you with a the Lucky Feat if you beat the odds.

You want a reason to play an old Character?" Start at Level 2 with negative 300 XP, but you're out of shape and won't regain your full stats till level 3.


By the time everyone rolled up a breathing character you'll have a background for everyone with their individual reasons to be at the same place at the same time for the whole party. Also a nice opportunity to hand out a chunk of those garbage fire Feats that wouldn't even get bought for an ASI if you would get two of them. Also everyone will have played that Character for about 5-15 minutes already.
Hmmmm... time to open up a spreadsheet and get going.

[Chronos]

Quoth MaxWilson:

But yes, if you keep taking big risks you will almost always die sooner or later, so when you roll good stats there's more mental pressure to take small risks so you don't lose those great stats, which means that really good stats usually lead to starting at a lower level and bad stats sometimes equate to starting at higher levels. If you theoretically roll 18, 18, 18, 12, 16, 14 you would probably be too afraid to even hit the "Go On An Easy Adventure" button, so you'd start the game as a very talented but inexperienced rookie, whereas someone else might be a 13, 15, 12, 6, 9, 11 5th level wizard with Fireball already. Nobody feels cheated even though they have different stats.
But if you kept on hitting the buttons, eventually you'd get a character with great stats who also survived a lot of previous adventures. You're basically just making it so the more patient you are, the better your character will be. Except with enough of a random element that sometimes the impatient guy will still end up more powerful than the guy who spends all day re-rolling.

[MaxWilson]

But if you kept on hitting the buttons, eventually you'd get a character with great stats who also survived a lot of previous adventures. You're basically just making it so the more patient you are, the better your character will be. Except with enough of a random element that sometimes the impatient guy will still end up more powerful than the guy who spends all day re-rolling.

Well, yeah--like I said the first time, it's a crude model to get the idea across, not a fully-fledged, well-balanced minigame. It's still up to the DM to say what level range of PCs is acceptable to bring to a given adventure, but you're right that technically high level and high stats are not mutually exclusive, merely unlikely. You're totally right that in this version, infinite rerolls and infinite patience can theoretically lead to unlimited power eventually.

I don't think it's an unsolvable problem though. In real play, I've noticed that if players are given theoretically-infinite rerolls, but at the cost of (1) donating the unwanted PC to the DM as an NPC, and also (2) creating 5 NPCs by rolling 3d6-in-order, and donating them to the DM as well, rerolls become rare in practice. (I suspect that part of this is because seeing what 3d6-in-order NPCs look like recalibrates player expectations for stats, so they realize that e.g. Str 15 is actually fairly impressive.)

I suspect a similar solution (making the PCs "real", not just numbers) would probably work for a character generation mini-game as well. If the gameworld is littered with hundreds of thousands of PC discards and corpses that you made since last week, all in an attempt to generate a 20th level NPC with 18s in three stats, I suspect your gaming group is going to take notice and you won't do it again. Most human beings just don't like looking like cheaters.

======================================


Why? :smallconfused:

Answered already upthread.


And how would that even work? A person is going to have to end up with a character by the time the first session rolls around, so is dying really a risk as opposed to a "start rolling again" reset?

If you take too many risks and die you lose all the experiences/contacts, XP, and magic items you gained during solo play (character generation) and have to start over. It's exactly as mechanically punishing as dying during group play (normal adventuring), except that in group play you also lose relationships you have with other PCs/players. Hopefully there's some kind of a PC graveyard for the players to remember you by...

Yes, I realize that a lot of people play differently, so that you don't lose anything even if you do die during group play--you just create another PC of the same level as the last one and continue. That's a different playstyle.

[WaroftheCrans]

Its a shame having a 20 in charisma and 4 potions of dragon control didn't help me survive my first epic and deadly one against a "huge red dragon." Who knows, maybe the 2 dragon wyrmlings hurt my chances?

[WaroftheCrans]

On the other hand, with an 18 in Srength and Con, and 16 in all the mental stats, lvl 16 might be a nice spot to park this character.

But I am quite insulted to find out that you consider my dear partner Bill the bronze wyrmling to be an item. I demand restitution!

Of course, you did say that this simulator was crude, but as far as I can tell, it's quite easy to game the system. First two adventures easy, till lvl 2, and then daring, till lvl 6, from there on out its "exciting and difficult." A few exceptions, and a small chance to die, but aside from that its quite safe. Epic and deadly seems to be 50/50 of dying at 17, and pretty safe at 18.

That being side, I also like complex Char gen, with a chance of dying. The problem with any random chargen ofc, is infinite re-rolls, and paradoxical situations. Take 5e.tools, I rolled a random character, got a 1 yo elf paladin, with 3 younger siblings, who was forced to enlist in the local lord's army, and had served 2 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. As an aside, this is considered "an ordinary childhood," and the only siblings of his who were successful were the evil ones.

This was without rerolling at all.
https://prnt.sc/sa8tj0
https://prnt.sc/sa9l7z

[iTreeby]

In the spirit of honorable mentions, the dungeon masters guide has some tables for npcs, that could be used to flesh out the npcs alluded to in the other tables. If anyone else knows of any published character tables let me know so I can try to cludge them all together into a narrative morass.

[Dr. Cliché]

Answered already upthread.

Not really, to be honest.

Let's say I have a character I want to try. I roll a couple of times on the Adventure-tron 3000 and he immediately gets killed. It's not a fun or interesting death because it accomplished bugger-all and I was given zero opportunity to prevent said death short of not playing the game, but I digress. So now the character I wanted to play has died before the adventure even started. I guess I have two options:

1) Play the clone/identical twin of said character and basically just keep rolling until one of them is permitted to survive to play the sodding game. What does this add, exactly?

2) Alternatively, I can just keep rolling different characters until one of them survives. In this case, I have demonstrably less attachment to my character than I had to my initial one because I know I'm playing my second (or third or forth or fifth . . .) choice, and not the character I actually started out wanting to play.

But even if I went with option 1, I fail to see how this would possibly make me more attached to my character. If anything, it encourages me to see my characters as nothing but disposable clones, no different to the nameless mooks in a Star Wars Battlefront game.

I know personal taste is a thing but I'm just not understanding the logic here. :smallconfused:

[MaxWilson]

Its a shame having a 20 in charisma and 4 potions of dragon control didn't help me survive my first epic and deadly one against a "huge red dragon." Who knows, maybe the 2 dragon wyrmlings hurt my chances?

Apologies that the simulator is so dumb right now--it's not a proper game and the probabilities it generates don't really take your abilities or items into account.

I'd like to make it an actual 5E rule engine where your stats and items matter and you can make choices during combat, but that's a long ways off. Today I'm working on saving throw analysis per-CR instead: https://maxwilson.github.io/Simple-SavingThrowGraphsFor5E/

[Admael]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Then you should try out Modiphius's Infinity RPG. Depending on how well/poorly (depending on how you view things) you roll, your character can die up to five or six times before the game even begins. Which, to me at least, is absolutely hilarious.

[Jathaan]

The character generator there is very crude and doesn't really take into account your build or your stats: theoretically e.g. a cleric or paladin should have a better chance against zombies or wights than a sorcerer does. But yes, if you keep taking big risks you will almost always die sooner or later, so when you roll good stats there's more mental pressure to take small risks so you don't lose those great stats, which means that really good stats usually lead to starting at a lower level and bad stats sometimes equate to starting at higher levels. If you theoretically roll 18, 18, 18, 12, 16, 14 you would probably be too afraid to even hit the "Go On An Easy Adventure" button, so you'd start the game as a very talented but inexperienced rookie, whereas someone else might be a 13, 15, 12, 6, 9, 11 5th level wizard with Fireball already. Nobody feels cheated even though they have different stats.

The net effect is that you wind up with a single-player game (character generation) linked to a multiplayer game (adventuring), and when you start the multi-player game you already have some attachment to the PC because you've already taken them through some dangerous stuff and survived--but you can also appreciate your PC buddies because surviving e.g. a small nest of vampires with the help of the other PCs is a lot easier than it used to be on your own.

It's a cool tool, and it puts out some interesting results. Clearly you've enjoyed making this, and maybe your table will enjoy playing this way. I'm not here to say your fun is wrong. I wouldn't allow this at my table because it doesn't fit the kind of game I'd want to run.

1. It allows too much disparity between players. Your 5th-level (or 15th-level) wizard with rare magic items and a ton of GP is simply not going to play well in the same party as the next player's 1st-level nobody.

2. You're not actually playing these "adventures" your char-gen generates. I don't see the fun in that, personally, but your mileage may differ. More importantly, you aren't coming up with these past adventures with your GM and party to fit into the world and adventure you all are going to be playing together. How did these randomly generated escapades lead your character to the point in which they met the party? How do they fit with the persona you're trying to play? They won't, unless you craft a character around the random results, and discard anything that doesn't fit into the world your GM is trying to run - in which case, why aren't you coming up with your character from scratch?

2.b It's easy to abuse the tool as it stands right now to get just about any result you want, with sufficient clicking. You'll go through a few hundred "characters" in a couple of minutes this way, and at that point to be honest it's just like picking your stats manually and selecting all the arbitrarily powerful magic items you want, but more random and less interesting.

3. The underlying idea seems to be similar to the old-school concept of having characters that you bring to any game you happen to play. Instead of making a character specifically for the adventure, you play every adventure as Robur the 20th-level Human Fighter, with Boots of Quaking +5 and the Sword of Extreme Manliness. Only instead of building up your character slowly over time, and shoehorning it into any game you sit down to, you're generating it randomly all at once and then shoehorning it into whatever game you're about to sit down to.

As I said, your results may vary, and maybe this looks like fun to you. It doesn't fit the kind of game I'd run, or want to play in.

[MaxWilson]

Not really, to be honest.

Let's say I have a character I want to try. I roll a couple of times on the Adventure-tron 3000 and he immediately gets killed. It's not a fun or interesting death because it accomplished bugger-all and I was given zero opportunity to prevent said death short of not playing the game, but I digress.

This was answered upthread: meaningful solo play require meaningful choices. To the extent that you feel you had zero opportunity to affect the outcome, that's a failure of the solo game design, not a problem with the concept of chargen as solo play (that feeds back into group play). Yes, that particular solo game I linked upthread is really crude and not that much fun. It's a proof of concept that I only spent an evening making, several years ago. A better game would make your choices and abilities matter and also let you fight tactically (especially in the fight that ultimately kills you--it might be fine to skip over fights you're expected to win, but you should never lose without a tactical battle, and ideally also a roleplaying choice). I'm working on that better game but it's not easy to create.


So now the character I wanted to play has died before the adventure even started. I guess I have two options:

1) Play the clone/identical twin of said character and basically just keep rolling until one of them is permitted to survive to play the sodding game. What does this add, exactly?

2) Alternatively, I can just keep rolling different characters until one of them survives. In this case, I have demonstrably less attachment to my character than I had to my initial one because I know I'm playing my second (or third or forth or fifth . . .) choice, and not the character I actually started out wanting to play.

But even if I went with option 1, I fail to see how this would possibly make me more attached to my character. If anything, it encourages me to see my characters as nothing but disposable clones, no different to the nameless mooks in a Star Wars Battlefront game.

I know personal taste is a thing but I'm just not understanding the logic here. :smallconfused:

I don't understand how you can make a clone in the first place (at minimum you'll have different stats, and depending on chargen method you might have different relationships or history), or why you'd be most attached to the first character you rolled up. Can you explain?

Say I roll up a 18 Str Barbarian, and send him out on a few adventures. He saves a girl and gets married, but then dies saving his family from orc raiders. I then roll up his younger brother and have him hear about his brother's death. Why does the younger brother have to be a clone of the older brother and why would you care less about him?


=======================



1. It allows too much disparity between players. Your 5th-level (or 15th-level) wizard with rare magic items and a ton of GP is simply not going to play well in the same party as the next player's 1st-level nobody.

2. You're not actually playing these "adventures" your char-gen generates. I don't see the fun in that, personally, but your mileage may differ. More importantly, you aren't coming up with these past adventures with your GM and party to fit into the world and adventure you all are going to be playing together. How did these randomly generated escapades lead your character to the point in which they met the party? How do they fit with the persona you're trying to play? They won't, unless you craft a character around the random results, and discard anything that doesn't fit into the world your GM is trying to run - in which case, why aren't you coming up with your character from scratch?

2.b It's easy to abuse the tool as it stands right now to get just about any result you want, with sufficient clicking. You'll go through a few hundred "characters" in a couple of minutes this way, and at that point to be honest it's just like picking your stats manually and selecting all the arbitrarily powerful magic items you want, but more random and less interesting.

3. The underlying idea seems to be similar to the old-school concept of having characters that you bring to any game you happen to play. Instead of making a character specifically for the adventure, you play every adventure as Robur the 20th-level Human Fighter, with Boots of Quaking +5 and the Sword of Extreme Manliness. Only instead of building up your character slowly over time, and shoehorning it into any game you sit down to, you're generating it randomly all at once and then shoehorning it into whatever game you're about to sit down to.

As I said, your results may vary, and maybe this looks like fun to you. It doesn't fit the kind of game I'd run, or want to play in.

Points #1 and #3 are exactly correct, spot-on. I've found that low-level characters can adventure with high-level characters okay, but there are limits, and you wouldn't want a high-level character trivializing a low-level adventure. To integrate solo play into a multiplayer campaign you'd want to restrict which characters are allowed on a given multiplayer adventure ("four to six PCs of levels 1-8, level 5+ strongly advised") and you'd also want to keep track of time ("you can't bring Hrothgar to this week's adventure, he's still on the solo play Viking expedition until November 462"). Integrating solo play and group play is a nontrivial amount of work. I think it sounds fun and I have ambitions to do it, but there's a lot of work that needs to happen first.

Points #2 and #2a are also spot on. Solo play needs to be interesting, and while the crude app I linked to sort of gives the basic *idea* of chargen as a game, frankly that game stinks. It's a proof-of-concept that I spent an evening making once, a few years ago, but it's not a good game. You're right that it's boring, and exploitable. This is one of the things that needs to be worked on, see above, but I spent this weekend working on saving throws analysis instead.

Hopefully that makes it clear (1) why I want a game where you can die during character creation (or between adventures), and (2) why I am not already running such a game. It is not ready yet.

[Sparky McDibben]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

This sounds awesome - let me know if you get that simulator fixed.

[MaxWilson]

This sounds awesome - let me know if you get that simulator fixed.

Out of curiosity... I'm a long way from having the full game done, but if the simulator upthread had four simple changes as follows, would that make it fun enough to play?

1.) You get a meaningful roleplaying decision before any fight that could actually kill you. E.g. "abandon the civilians and save yourself, or fight the Vampire?"

2.) You get to play out fights that could kill you with HP, damage rolls, Theater of the Mind, etc., but only as a restricted set of classes (e.g. Samurai, Champion, Thief, Elemental Monk).

3.) You accumulate relationships as well as possessions, e.g. a Moderately Attractive but Very Gentle and Very Thoughtful wife, whom you once rescued from zombies, and your four children. WarOfTheCrans could have his dragon wyrmling buddy Bill.

4.) If you die you can choose to take over one of the NPCs from Relationships instead of starting fresh. (Bill wouldn't gain XP though because he's a dragon. He'd only gain relationships and treasure.)

I'm a long way from having a full game ready but I could crank out the fixes above relatively quickly. Should I?

[LordCdrMilitant]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.

Note: no blue text.

Here's a crude, simplistic version of what I want: the ability to take risks during chargen. Link: https://maxwilson.github.io/Beast/AbstractDungeoneering/

You can play Traveller. It has great chargen that's basically a minigame in and of itself.

[Sparky McDibben]

Out of curiosity... I'm a long way from having the full game done, but if the simulator upthread had four simple changes as follows, would that make it fun enough to play?

1.) You get a meaningful roleplaying decision before any fight that could actually kill you. E.g. "abandon the civilians and save yourself, or fight the Vampire?"

2.) You get to play out fights that could kill you with HP, damage rolls, Theater of the Mind, etc., but only as a restricted set of classes (e.g. Samurai, Champion, Thief, Elemental Monk).

3.) You accumulate relationships as well as possessions, e.g. a Moderately Attractive but Very Gentle and Very Thoughtful wife, whom you once rescued from zombies, and your four children. WarOfTheCrans could have his dragon wyrmling buddy Bill.

4.) If you die you can choose to take over one of the NPCs from Relationships instead of starting fresh. (Bill wouldn't gain XP though because he's a dragon. He'd only gain relationships and treasure.)

I'm a long way from having a full game ready but I could crank out the fixes above relatively quickly. Should I?

I was actually thinking of how, if you died, did you come back? Who brought you back and what was the cost? That's an interesting backstory option for a shadow sorcerer or any warlock. But I get that that's maybe a hard sell for a simulation.

Other options, as you laid out, is that your death is the catalyst for someone else to become an adventurer, taking over the relationship and bringing them forward. Nifty idea!

So, yes please!

[Tawmis]

Xanathar's guide to everything has a "this is your life" section. Explorers guide to wildemount has the "heroic chronicle" section. Do any of the other sorcebooks have tables for rolling up details about characters before the campaign started? I understand that can easily make up your own background details but, I am interested to see how many details we can generate going by the tables in the books. It's okay if the details end up being redundant but, I'd be interested in seeing how much of a life story we can get before level 1.
I'd also appreciate if you could point out if any of the tables outcomes have mechanical effects on the character. (I suspect wildemount has the most of these sorts of results)

In the event you get... a character that survives... if you need a background written up based on whatever... things determine their life path... check my signature. I have a thread where I write character backgrounds for folks. I have like 5 in the can to write at the moment, but always willing to take on more.

[iTreeby]

In the event you get... a character that survives... if you need a background written up based on whatever... things determine their life path... check my signature. I have a thread where I write character backgrounds for folks. I have like 5 in the can to write at the moment, but always willing to take on more.

Thanks! Doubt I will subject you to that, but someone probably will!

Edit to avoid double posting : wayfinder's guide to eberron has a debt table and several racial quirk tables as well as different background detail tables! Are you all holding out on me?

[Boci]

If you take too many risks and die you lose all the experiences/contacts, XP, and magic items you gained during solo play (character generation) and have to start over.

You are level 6 and 19 years old, with 18000 XP and 1800 gold and Ancestral longsword +2

Save the king from doppelganger kidnapping

Repel small orcish invasion

Negotiate peace treat with space-elves

Took me all of 1 minute, 3 if you count the characters I played before who died. I just kept clicking "new character" then immediatly went on "epic and deadly adventure", and kept cycling that until I survived, then I double went on a difficult adventure.

Like, I dunno, doesn't feel like dying is a big deal when I've spent all of 15 seconds with the character.

My advice for making me care more about my character would be to tell what each adventure is before I go on it. That will let me roleplay better if I can see what my options are beyond just "easy, difficult, deadly". Maybe some different approaches within a mission, though this would be hardly to code. But say repel the orc invasion, maybe give some different approaches for how I can try that.

[HappyDaze]

Not really, to be honest.

Let's say I have a character I want to try. I roll a couple of times on the Adventure-tron 3000 and he immediately gets killed. It's not a fun or interesting death because it accomplished bugger-all and I was given zero opportunity to prevent said death short of not playing the game, but I digress. So now the character I wanted to play has died before the adventure even started. I guess I have two options:

1) Play the clone/identical twin of said character and basically just keep rolling until one of them is permitted to survive to play the sodding game. What does this add, exactly?

2) Alternatively, I can just keep rolling different characters until one of them survives. In this case, I have demonstrably less attachment to my character than I had to my initial one because I know I'm playing my second (or third or forth or fifth . . .) choice, and not the character I actually started out wanting to play.

But even if I went with option 1, I fail to see how this would possibly make me more attached to my character. If anything, it encourages me to see my characters as nothing but disposable clones, no different to the nameless mooks in a Star Wars Battlefront game.

I know personal taste is a thing but I'm just not understanding the logic here. :smallconfused:
This is D&D. The option you haven't look at is, the character died but "got better" thanks to magic. Unfortunately, your family went horribly into debt paying for that diamond and so, off to a life of adventuring you go.

[KorvinStarmast]

I want a system where you can die during character creation.
Traveller, the original, had that.

This is D&D. The option you haven't look at is, the character died but "got better" thanks to magic. Unfortunately, your family went horribly into debt paying for that diamond and so, off to a life of adventuring you go.
That's a fine back story. :smallsmile:

[WaroftheCrans]

Out of curiosity... I'm a long way from having the full game done, but if the simulator upthread had four simple changes as follows, would that make it fun enough to play?

1.) You get a meaningful roleplaying decision before any fight that could actually kill you. E.g. "abandon the civilians and save yourself, or fight the Vampire?"

2.) You get to play out fights that could kill you with HP, damage rolls, Theater of the Mind, etc., but only as a restricted set of classes (e.g. Samurai, Champion, Thief, Elemental Monk).

3.) You accumulate relationships as well as possessions, e.g. a Moderately Attractive but Very Gentle and Very Thoughtful wife, whom you once rescued from zombies, and your four children. WarOfTheCrans could have his dragon wyrmling buddy Bill.

4.) If you die you can choose to take over one of the NPCs from Relationships instead of starting fresh. (Bill wouldn't gain XP though because he's a dragon. He'd only gain relationships and treasure.)

I'm a long way from having a full game ready but I could crank out the fixes above relatively quickly. Should I?

IMO, if you are willing, it would be a great improvement. For the changes

1) Yeah, even a True/False scenario with two different outcomes would be good. Some time ago, I played this flash game called "Sort the Court," where the entire premise is you respond to requests with yes or no, and that in turn shapes how the kingdom develops. It's surprisingly complex for such a simple concept.

2) This can clear up some of the issues that it has with being all together too fast. If 3 adventures take you a minute, rather than a second, the Chargen gains some more meaning and value.

3) So long as it doesn't turn into a dating simulator :smallwink:. Jokes aside, couldn't this get a tad bit complicated after you fall in love with a heiress for the 6th time?

4) This should alleviate some of the concerns that all the PC's are just carbon copies of each other. Taking on the perspective of someone else in the original's life can give life to a character.

And my #5
Giving an option of 3 choices for an adventure might also improve this. Steps 1-4 will take it out of being merely a crude/simplistic generator.

[MaxWilson]

3) So long as it doesn't turn into a dating simulator :smallwink:. Jokes aside, couldn't this get a tad bit complicated after you fall in love with a heiress for the 6th time?

It can just skip that "adventure" if you're already married.


And my #5
Giving an option of 3 choices for an adventure might also improve this. Steps 1-4 will take it out of being merely a crude/simplistic generator.

Yeah, I like that. Maybe you still choose the tier of adventure, and it presents you with 3 hooks: e.g. follow the treasure map you stole from pirates, join up with the pirates, or follow the pirates back to their base and exterminate them?

Would appreciate any adventure ideas people have along these lines. It's not easy coming up with dozens and dozens of one-line adventure seeds.

[Jathaan]

said stuff

Points #1 and #3 are exactly correct, spot-on. I've found that low-level characters can adventure with high-level characters okay, but there are limits, and you wouldn't want a high-level character trivializing a low-level adventure. To integrate solo play into a multiplayer campaign you'd want to restrict which characters are allowed on a given multiplayer adventure ("four to six PCs of levels 1-8, level 5+ strongly advised") and you'd also want to keep track of time ("you can't bring Hrothgar to this week's adventure, he's still on the solo play Viking expedition until November 462"). Integrating solo play and group play is a nontrivial amount of work. I think it sounds fun and I have ambitions to do it, but there's a lot of work that needs to happen first.

Points #2 and #2a are also spot on. Solo play needs to be interesting, and while the crude app I linked to sort of gives the basic *idea* of chargen as a game, frankly that game stinks. It's a proof-of-concept that I spent an evening making once, a few years ago, but it's not a good game. You're right that it's boring, and exploitable. This is one of the things that needs to be worked on, see above, but I spent this weekend working on saving throws analysis instead.

Hopefully that makes it clear (1) why I want a game where you can die during character creation (or between adventures), and (2) why I am not already running such a game. It is not ready yet.

Right, that makes a lot more sense. Fair enough. Could be a really interesting way for players who have difficulty working up a backstory for their character to build a "lived-in" character, or for people without access to a playing group to play solo, once you've had a chance to re-work the app.