“Create yourself” rules - Multiverser, others

[Quertus]

In my Isekai RPG thread, Multiverser was mentioned. Although the reviews I could find were terrible, a few things stuck with me. Among them, the fact that the system *requires* that you play as yourself. Which led me to wonder, what does character creation look like? What stats does it use? This kind of information seems useful, even if I have to go about converting some other system for my purposes.

More generally, what systems have rules in place for statting out “yourself” in the system? What does that process look like?

[SimonMoon6]

I will mention that I have played in a couple of such games briefly and run a few such games (one lasting for quite a few years), though I've never encountered any specific rules for creating stats for the PCs.

I will mention a few guidelines though:

(1) It helps if all the PCs are built on the same number of "points" for games that use points. For example, in a D&D game with a "point system" for ability scores, you would want to use the same number of points for every PC. This can cause some unusual results.

For example, in one game, there was Player A (not his real name). Player A had nothing going for him. He was not in good physical shape. He was not clever or wise. He had no particular skills. He was an English major (so no useful skills represented there). To be 100% accurate, he would have low stats across the board.

On the other hand, there was Player J (not his real name). Player J was a large guy with an keen intellect. He was a Chemistry major. So, to be 100% accurate, he would have decent physical stats (but not DEX... we always joked about his low DEX) but also a high INT.

The problem is that those two would be built on a different amount of points. Which is unfair to player A (because regardless of all else, this is still a game and it needs to be fair).

So, the solution ended up being that Player A got a much higher INT than he deserved, an INT that was on par with or slightly higher than Player J, even though it definitely should not have been that high.

I have many other examples. In one game, I was a player and the GM assigned me my stats which were naturally low (since the only thing I've got going for me is INT). However, Player M (not his real name) was allowed to roll his stats randomly and got above average stats across the board. I complained about it and got to roll my stats (giving me some totally inaccurate but pleasing physical stats).

In another game, Player B (not his real name) was being represented in a superhero RPG. All the PCs were being built on the same number of points before they got powers. This was a problem because player B had an incredible number of real-life skills (which are paid for with points in a superhero RPG) and thus his stats (physical and mental) had to suffer a bit so that he could afford all of those skills.

Okay, so I've presented a number of ways in which giving everyone the same number of points for those characters can be problematic. You lose a bit of accuracy in representation. But I still think it's worth it because the only other option is to have some PCs be less powerful in the game than others just because the players are less useful in reality. That can only cause hurt feelings.

(2) Allow the players to either make their characters or have some input into their character design.

You can just say, "make yourself with 24 points" and let the players give you what they think they should have. That's an easy way to do it. Allow them to become their ideal version of themselves or at least as much of an ideal as they can afford with those points. You can always edit things if they come back with a character with two 18's and four 3's but most people won't do that.

I would say any "self insert" game should allow the PCs to be slightly idealized versions of themselves (when there is more than one PC). Obviously, a lot of the isekai genre is about one character going into an RPG world, so in those settings, you don't have to be fair or nice to the PC, but with two or more, it becomes more important.

On the other hand, you can just assign the stats as you feel appropriate but watch out for potential hurt feelings. For example, in one game I was running, Player L (not his real name) was disappointed by the low wisdom stat that I had assigned him. It was totally appropriate because he was well known for his unwise choices (and his lack of perception, which wisdom has become ever since 3rd edition). However, he wanted to be a paladin and a low wisdom conflicted with that desire, so he quit the game (or decided not to play in the first place, I forget which).

So, ignoring the fact that players have feelings about how they are seen and represented is a huge danger.

(3) Here's an alternative option that would really only apply to a superhero-type game. I have not tried this out but I think it might be interesting:

Offer the players to make themselves using *up to* a certain amount of points. This is for their "pre-superpowers" version of themselves. Any points left over are doubled and added to the points they get when they get superpowers. So, there would be a reason for people to make themselves with accurately low ability scores and skills because they would then get more powerful superpowers, and yet it would still be a disadvantage in all of those situations where the PCs lose their powers and have to rely on their original stats.

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Or you can use this:
http://www.kevinhaw.com/add_quiz.php
Or this:
http://easydamus.com/character.html

But those sorts of things are usually pretty heavily flawed.

[Thane of Fife]

Time Lord is a Doctor Who themed RPG where one person plays the Doctor and other players may potentially play themselves (though I think the game really intends that everyone plays characters from the show).

It uses pretty broad ability score bands, which makes it easier, but it is largely "the GM decides, taking into account this advice." This includes useful stuff like most humans being Control 3, except for people who play lots of sports (4) or are professional athletes (5). It includes less helpful stuff like most humans being Determination 3 except for notable cowards (2) and people with very risky jobs (4). It also includes weird stuff like rate your own strength score, then arm-wrestle the player and use who wins and how easily to define their value.

Then it lists how much training is needed for different skill ranks, and wraps up by saying that anyone whose stats stand out as poor should be given a few extra points to buy special abilities.

But I'll also agree with SimonMoon6 that this sort of thing can be quite fraught. Not only do you risk offending someone with poor stats, but things like getting killed, being successful, finding love, etc can all be very different when the character you're playing is yourself.

[SimonMoon6]

things like getting killed, being successful, finding love, etc can all be very different when the character you're playing is yourself.

I would say that that's actually the *benefit* of playing these sorts of games. When I've run these sorts of games, the players have *really* enjoyed getting to be themselves, getting to do all sorts of things that they would never have gotten to do in real life. When playing yourself rather than some generic Aragonk or Gandalfini, the high points of the game are much higher. Of course, it helps to play in games where death is either rare or easily reversible.

[False God]

In my Isekai RPG thread, Multiverser was mentioned. Although the reviews I could find were terrible, a few things stuck with me. Among them, the fact that the system *requires* that you play as yourself. Which led me to wonder, what does character creation look like? What stats does it use? This kind of information seems useful, even if I have to go about converting some other system for my purposes.

More generally, what systems have rules in place for statting out “yourself” in the system? What does that process look like?

I run a lot of isekai in various systems, I can't quote one that specifically calls out "stating out yourself". In that regard, my experience has been that regardless of system, the big issue is getting players to be honest about their abilities, and there is sometimes disagreement on how an individual defines "good" or "bad" at a skill. Players with low self-worth may undervalue their skills, even where they actually excel, while a person with high self-worth may overvalue them.

It can be quite difficult to be honest with yourself.

As SimonMoon6 points out, there is equally issue with other people (usually the DM) assigning what they think a person has skill in, or what that skill could be, and relies heavily on a solid knowledge of the person.

It can likewise be quite difficult to be honest about another.

[animorte]

Self-awareness goes a long way, as well as being open to the perception of your peers. You ever see a quiz that asks, "Which word would your friends use to describe you?" Then you just put in what you think they would say, which may well not be true.

I've been a part of several instances that we had a full group discussion to determine where everybody's stats would rest. It's quite a fun experiment if you're honest and have enough of open mind.

I don't know of any systems that effectively attempt to address how to approach it though.

[Rynjin]

I think systems like this might work better as skill-based ones, not stat-based ones.

Nobody wants to hear their friends talk about how they're weak, dumb, and a pushover or whatever, but everyone has a marketable skill of some sort that could be "transformed" in a fantasy world. The English major might be useless IRL, but in a world where casting magic works on the paradigm of "tell the universe a compelling enough story, and often it will listen".

[Anonymouswizard]

If the group has a lot of trust and can accept some unpleasant truths about themselves 'stat up somebody else for them to play' can work. Hell, I've got plans to do it with original characters as a trial run, start with 'what would X like to play' before potentially moving onto a planned Chronicles of Darkness game where the players stat up each other, investigate a shadowy conspiracy for a few sessions, then get captured and after a two month time skip get their new Deviant sheets with GM-chosen powers.

The other potential issue is ending up with groups with very little variance. Almost everybody I played with at Uni would have high Intelligence, good Science and Technology skills, and a similar set of social disadvantages. There was variation, as the only one who'd done combat sport I'd have been the party warrior (with 6-8 DEX...), but it was relatively minor. It would have ended up with a lot of exaggerated hobbies to give people some kind of role.

[Glimbur]

Best Friends has a fun take on this. Each character secretly determines who they resent for being smarter, more athletic, more popular, etc. The more people say you are better than them at X the better you are. I ended up topping the charts on athleticism, which was a little useful.

There is also a 'bennies' system where you have to give a chip to your envy target to be good at that field. Helps share the spotlight, but we did not end up limited by it in the one shot I played.

[Jay R]

I once played an extremely fun GURPS campaign of that sort. The GM set up our characters, and he thought much more highly of my fencing, diplomacy, and performing skills than I do.

An early issue of The Dragon (or The Strategic Review) had a system for testing yourself for the six abilities. Some were nonsense. Your strength was determined by doing chin-ups. By that measure, a jockey would have higher strength than a sumo wrestler.

But the highlight of the article was the measurement for Wisdom. It was 20 minus the number of hours a week you spent on D&D. [My Wisdom came to about -10 by that measure — and I can't argue it.]

But generally, this kind of game cannot work unless everybody can be brutally honest about themselves and their weaknesses. (Or, as above, when the GM thinks more highly of the players than they do.) The Dunning-Kruger effect is the bane of this game. [Great people know their own weaknesses, and rate themselves lower than marginal people, who don't really know their own limits, and rate themselves much higher than the truth.]

The game requires players with humility, utter fairness, the ability to back down graciously, unselfishness, and excellent judgment. This doesn't sound like the average gaming group as I have known them.

[Easy e]

There are a number of RPG games that uses no real numbered stats. I am thinking more narrative focused games.

Instead, you basically pick a past/present/Perk tag. You then get 5 skill tags to put beneath the Past/Present/Perk tag. So, a character may look like:

Past- Student
- College Education
Present- Corporate
- Computer skills, Public speaking,
Perk- Scholar
- Knows how to Research, Fast Reader

They then can pick Ties, Drives, and even a few Belongings. When one of these tags apply, add dice to a dice pool, or add Mods for TN, etc. so players are encouraged to creatively use their Tags to get more benefit.

A system like this works MUCH better for making characters based on actual people than a numbers based RPG.

[icefractal]

Ugh, "rate other people" sounds nerve-wracking. No thanks. "Rate yourself" ... it's fine for a solo game, could get very annoying for a group game if people use different metrics. And runs into the same awkward/insulting situation as rating other people if you try to reconcile the numbers.

"Huh, you rated your Charisma as 14? Ok then ... I'm just gonna change mine from 12 to 18."
"Really? What exactly are you saying about me?"

One particularly hilarious metric I saw was "Charisma = 8 + number of people you're currently hooking up with". Ok then, guess nobody monogamous could even reach average Charisma.

[Quertus]

Looks like there’s little in the way of variable metrics so far. So I’ll poke at some fun ones for now.


One particularly hilarious metric I saw was "Charisma = 8 + number of people you're currently hooking up with". Ok then, guess nobody monogamous could even reach average Charisma.

If it was “Charisma = 18 - number of people you're currently hooking up with”, that would make more sense: Charisma is your sense of self, and the more partners you need to fill the void, the less sense of self you have.


the highlight of the article was the measurement for Wisdom. It was 20 minus the number of hours a week you spent on D&D. [My Wisdom came to about -10 by that measure — and I can't argue it.]


Huh. Somewhere between 20 and -148, if my math hasn’t failed me. I guess, depending on the week, I could live just about anywhere in that range. I *might* actually have positive numbers this week!

[SimonMoon6]

I mean, obviously, almost any metric used to try to create game stats from a real world person is going to run into problems. (This is especially true when some of the game stats don't make a lot of sense in real world terms.)

Constitution is a hard one to measure for me. It represents several different things: how many times do you have to stab someone before they stop moving and how resistant are they to poisons and disease. It's obviously inhumane to try to measure the first criterion and for the second one, people like to look at diseases (since, again, testing poison on people is probably inhumane). But we can only see the results and not the difficulties faced by the individual. That is, if someone gets a disease that they survive, do they have a low constitution because they caught the disease in the first place... or do they have a high constitution because they survived? I've had cancer, so should I have a low CON? But I got over it, so maybe I have a high CON? Or did I just roll badly to get the cancer and roll high to survive, meaning I actually have an average CON? We can't tell from the evidence.

Charisma should be measured by how easily you get people to do what you want, whether that's getting them to leave you alone or convincing them to hook up with you. A lich can have a really high CHA but is probably not hooking up with anybody. But if he wants followers, he can have followers. He's probably a miserable curmudgeon though, so I... I mean, "he"... probably wants to be left alone. And that's no way to measure CHA.

And "wisdom" is really hard to measure. In D&D, it measures three different things: (1) Your awareness and perception of the world around you, (2) Your resistance to mental attacks, and (3) Your ability to get deities to give you more or less power. In the real world, we can't really measure (2) or (3). And while perception is something that we can almost sort of kind of measure in the real world, it doesn't feel like that's what the ability score should primarily be about. So, then one might dabble into thinking about whether someone takes "wise" actions. That quickly becomes insulting to most people, but ignoring that, it's still hard to measure. For example, one might consider people's political views to measure how wise or foolish they are, but that quickly becomes a possibly quite hostile arena in which to try to measure things.

It's just a problem. I do think that the two links I gave at the end of my first post in this thread are *reasonable* attempts (not perfect, but okay) if you are determined to have the sort of measurement used by those two links.

The first link gave me
STR:9 INT:17 WIS:15 DEX:13 CON:9 CHR:10

The second link gave me
Strength- 10 Dexterity- 13 Constitution- 12 Intelligence- 17 Wisdom- 17 Charisma- 12

Also, it said I was a TN (or NG) elf wizard.

Anyway, the two results aren't too dissimilar, so I could imagine averaging these results to get pretty close to someone's "true" stats. Or at least, close enough for a game.