GS: TTRPG - Character Creation!!! The Process.

The thing you’ve all been waiting for, character creation! I wish I could tell you this was an easy, three-step process, but it’s not. Given my propensity to emphasize the player character in all game mechanics, they’re where all the game’s complexity lies. So it’s a ten (optionally 11) step process, but hopefully I’ve streamlined it pretty well so it’s not a grueling one. This is probably going to be a long post, so I’ll just get right into it!

(Using the old Riley sheet as a visual example up there cuz I need to go run some errands, but there is a better version of the character sheet WIP)

Step 1: Character Concept

Come up with a character concept! I shouldn’t need to explain this, you’ve all done this before I’m sure. I do have about half a page of examples though written up, since this system is hopefully playable by everyone, regardless how much they know about Kuserra, and certain archetypes probably wouldn’t work too well in the furry post-apocalypse. Like… how many paladins might you expect to see in Kuserra? How many farmers? Not many, I’d wager.

Step 2: Roll for Godhood

The fairest way I can think of to handle this is to make players roll to determine if they are gods or not. Roll 1d20 (in secret but under GM supervision), and on a 1 or a 2, your character is a god, whether you want to be or not. (As a side-note, this is often the same tactic I use to determine whether side-characters in my comic are gods). Gods tend to be OP by their very nature, except when they’re dead. Sure, I’ve written mechanics to try and balance it out, and in theory, the GM and their NPCs will be watching your character like a hawk, waiting for you to fuck up so a Hunter can end you instantly with a single well-placed shot, but in practice? Ehhhh, I’m not sure it’d really work that way for most groups. Players grow emotionally attached to their characters and don’t want them to die, GMs don’t want tohurt their friends by one-shotting their beloved characters, I get all of that. So leaving it to random chance puts the blame for the outcome on the dice, which hopefully will guard the people involved against any contention that might arise from roughly 10% of players being allowed to have kinda OP characters. And rolling this in secret also keeps other players at the table guessing, which might lead to some emergent imposter gameplay.

This is the recommended rule largely because I’ve already seen how many people want their characters to be gods. There’s a cool power fantasy there, and I absolutely understand the desire to indulge in it. Like all my rules, however, this is a guideline. I’ll not stop GMs from letting certain players be gods if they have a great idea for integrating them into their campaign’s narrative. And a GM can run an all-god group if they want to, that might also be interesting. As might an all-Hunter group with one god secretly in their midst. But for most groups? A 10% chance of being a god seems fair to me. If you do roll a god, better make a backup character too, just in case.

Gods have special rules governing the creation and usage of their Vim, as well as its side-effects. I’ll blather on about this some other time.

Step 3: Choose a Species Template

Pick your Species Template, which is your starting point for building your array of Adaptations. I already covered this in great detail in a different post, so SKIP.

SEE THIS POST FOR TEH DEETZ

Step 4: Spend Adaptation Points

Each Species Template offers a number of Adaptation Points you can spend to buy your remaining Adaptations. You’ll generally have 1-9 points to spend, depending on your Template, and there’s a big list, and they cost 1-5 points each. And with GM approval, you can make up your own because there’s absolutely no way I can think of everything. But never fear, I wrote rules for that too! eye twitch

Step 5: Determine Core Attributes

For now, characters set their five attribute Totals to 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 in whatever order you choose. So your highest Total will be 7, and your lowest will be 3, and then you split those totals between the Active and Passive sides. This is, of course, subject to change after testing, I know these values are pretty low to start with, but for starting character it might be fine? It also might be too low. It also might be too high! Who knows. We’ll have to see how it feels.

So, for example, a starting character might have the following Attribute distribution:

(I'm sure this formatting will get all fucked up on some devices, but I did my best. Why doesn't Patreon allow me to paste tables?)

                     Active - Total - Passive

Brawn: 2 - 4  - 2

Grace: 4 - 7  - 3

Wits: 4 - 6  - 2

Empathy: 0 - 3  - 3

Instinct: 1 - 5  - 4

I *think it’s okay to let players choose zero for one side of their attributes. It’s probably not advisable, because that first point gives the fattest chunk of success chance, (+9.5%) in this system, but I don’t necessarily see any reason to prohibit it.

Then you just have to determine your Pain Tolerance, which begins at 5+Total Brawn+Total Wits. (15, in the example above)
And your Stress Tolerance, which is 5+Total Wits+Total Empathy. (14, in the example above)

On your character sheet, in the Pain and Stress sections, just make a mark after this point to designate where your character's tolerance is. For both of these, you can suffer Pain and/or Stress UP TO this threshold without any consequences.

These values begin at these levels, but they increase independently of your attributes after character creation.

And you know what, fuck it, sure I’ll explain my reasoning for why the point totals are so low to begin with. So this system is weighted in the player’s favor, with average Threat from the 2d20 being 7. A character that can pay down 10 Threat in any given check is already quite powerful, having attained a 77.5% chance to succeed at that check. And when you start stacking in things like Expertise and Natural Gifts, it’s actually pretty easy with these values to attain a score of 10 in a narrow band of things at character creation. And given that having small amounts of Threat leftover means the player could still accomplish a Partial Success, given that there's an Exertion system to trade Stress or Pain for success, and that players can assist one another to improve their chances as well, from a design perspective I do have some anxiety over making the game too easy. Granted, once attaining the ability to pay down 10 Threat, getting yet more powerful than that becomes quite challenging due to the diminishing returns. So… idk! These will also be the primary way your characters level up, growing more powerful over time by increasing your Attributes.

I’m keeping an open mind. These values might be too low. I know from some games that a 40 or 50% chance to succeed usually feels awful, so players might prefer having a 60-70% chance to succeed from the start of the game, at least in some places. However, most other games also lack options for improving that, and a failure is a failure because the dice say so. The GM does also have options in this system for making the later game harder, such as embiggening the dice or requiring progressive or consecutive successes. It also gets more complicated when you consider that some players might choose to distribute their points more broadly, which I’d prefer, versus players that cram all their points into one thing, which… might still also be okay because they’d be screwed on everything else? I don’t want one style to feel better or worse than the other, and I also don’t want there to be one CORRECT way to play, but I think the system does kind of gently nudge players in the direction of spreading their points out more, simply because those first few points in any attribute grant such huge bonuses to success chance. But GODS is that a difficult balance to strike. ANYHOO. Nobody ever said game design was easy. While math and statistics can help us settle on a starting point for the prototype, the correct answer is always whatever people think is more fun.

Step 6: Choose Expertise and Mastery

You start the game with one Expertise at level 1, and you can choose your Mastery right away. You can always change these later, but it normally takes some in-game time to do so (ala training montage). Gotta retrain that brain.

Step 7: Name, Height and Weight, Background, final flavor details

I put this stuff down here, rather than putting it near the top because I find some of it is a lot easier to come up with once you have your character defined a bit better, once you know what they're made of, and how smart or beefy they are. And names are hard to come up with. Rarely have I seen a player decide their character’s name early in this process, so I put it down here at Step 7.

Step 8: Define Contacts

Characters start with a number of Contacts of an appropriate type equal to their Total Empathy score.

I thought I explained Contacts somewhere in another post, but I can’t find it now. I’ve written so many blurbs about it so many times… I guess I’ll just explain it here!

Contacts are an abstraction of a social network. They work like tokens you can spend to turn an NPC you meet into a real Friend. This is in lieu of defining a bunch of NPC friends up front that may or may not ever come up again in the campaign. Contacts will have a specified Type, and a quantity. So, for example, you might have 3 Redtail Contacts. We don’t know who they are now, but later on, when your character meets a Redtail, you might recognize them and choose to spend one of your Contact tokens to remind them that they also know you!

Spending a token creates a sort of moment like, “oh hey, remember me?” At which point the NPC realizes that yes, they do remember you, and they remember you had friendly dealings in the past. This might mean that you can write them down as a friend right away. Friends are allies, they’re willing to help you out, do favors for you, with the unspoken expectation that you’d do the same for them should they ever be in need.

Spending a Contact point doesn’t immediately wipe the slate clean, however, if you’ve been a jerk to that NPC recently, before choosing to spend your Contact Point, they’ll still remember it. They might remember you fondly, but they’ll still wonder why you’re such a jerk now. You can also spend Contact Points in combat, and if an NPC is hostile to you, trying to kill you, using a Contact Point means they’ll have to decide whether or not they care enough about you to cease hostilities or if it’s more important to continue pursuing their original goal, with or without your help. If they decide fighting you is the better choice for them, they might choose to leave you alive if they beat you, however. For old times sake.

Spending a Contact point also doesn’t guarantee that the NPC won’t betray you. If all your Contacts are Criminals, don’t be surprised when your alleged “friend” chooses to screw you over for their own personal gain rather than following through on their end of the bargain. Ergo, spending a Contact Point cannot be undone. Pick your friends carefully.

The Contacts you gain at character creation will generally be of a type appropriate to your Expertise, concept, or background. So if you’re a Trader, your Contacts could be Customers or Suppliers, maybe a Redtail or two. If you’re a bandit, you might have a full array of Criminal Contacts, or you might have some favorable dealings with some Traders you cut deals with. If you’re from an obscure cult, you might have some Contacts pertaining to your background, Cultists from the same religion, maybe even the Cult Leader. If you’re from a Feral Tribe, members of your Tribe will probably fill your Contact list, unless you had some Prey you let go with the expectation that they’d return the favor some day. Remember you aren’t defining detailed NPCs at this point, just creating a list of categories of potential friends your character probably has, and may meet again in the future.

Step 9: Choose a starting Equipment Kit

They’re not done yet, but the plan is to give players a number of options for some basic starting supplies, grouped into kits for ease of creation flow. You’ll be able to just grab a kit and move on, or customize your own if you want to. Each kit will contain, like, a weapon, a bag, some low-grade armor/protection, maybe some medical supplies or other utility items. They’ll be somewhat generous, at the start, since most of them will be difficult to upgrade or replace. Items will break and supplies will get used up. No food though. Nobody starts with any food!

Somewhere in here you also get some starting watts. A few. Originally my thinking was 3d10, but given my shift to only requiring 2d20 for this system despite knowing that most of us nerds have a fat pile of dice right here on their desk like this one, I don’t really want to surprise anyone in the middle of the book with a “oh yeah you also need more dice” kinda thing. So maybe it’ll just be 1d20 watts. Or could just be Threat watts if I want players to start poor.

Step 10: Roll Threat and set Vitals

All players roll to see what state they’re in at the start of the campaign. You roll Threat and for this one time, you pay down the total using your Vitals, increasing your Hunger, Thirst, Rest, Sickness, Pain and Stress until you’ve met the Threat Value. I’ve done the math, and even though a 19 is EXCEEDINGLY RARE (0.5% chance), you can still distribute your vitals broadly enough to avoid any serious penalties at character creation (Pain is basically free, since it mostly goes away when you Rest, but you’ll have to endure being pretty fragile for that first session, most likely). They’ll be in very rough shape, but they’ll be playable still. There may be a better way to handle this, but the purpose is I want players to start at less than perfect condition, because this is Kuserra.

As a designer I often worry this system is more forgiving than it seems as well… since you can go five full days without food before you gain Sickness, and Sickness doesn’t even do anything until it reaches 11 (though many things do contribute to Sickness and it recovers slowly, so it can kill you quick, I digress)… so while I don’t want to make it too punishing either, I’m not too scared about giving players a lot to worry about, right from the start of the game. Worrying can lead to engagement, after all. Rolling for your Vitals also serves as a bit of a system tutorial, since players will be rolling Threat a lot, and for many players, I wager they’ll be experiencing this dice system for the first time.

Step 11: Mutations (Optional)

Totally optional step, you can have your character start with a random array of mutations if you want to. You can choose to roll on the Mutation table 1-5 times, and you’re stuck with whatever you get.

Normally, to get mutations, you accumulate Mutation Points, and when you roll on the table, it costs a number of points to mutate properly. This is to avoid mutating anything extreme from trivial amounts of exposure. At character creation though, we're handing them out for free.

The Mutation table is still WIP, but I like the direction it’s heading in. Effectively, starting mutations are pretty benign, in both positive and negative ways, but the more exposed you get, the further down the table you go, and the plan is that the more powerful/more horrible the mutations get. I did this largely to protect my own beloved characters from becoming horrible monstrosities after a quick splash in a tainted pond. Once or twice might result in little things like a snaggletooth or bioluminescent fur, but prolonged, or extreme exposure is where the true body horror lies. GMs and Players are free to indulge in this system as much or as little as they choose though, but beware reaching the end of the table…

All DONE!

And... um... that's all there is to it! You made a character! Great! How was it? I know I rambled a lot in some of the sections up there, so this might seem a little clunkier than if you just went through the process once fast, already knowing everything you needed to know... but after running through it a couple times, trying to build a couple different lil beans, I'd love to be hit with your feedback!