Posts Tagged by character creation
| July 20, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I made a mistake and it killed a campaign. It was avoidable, and had I been more patient when I started the campaign, I may have avoided it; but I didn’t. In hindsight it seems so obvious what I did and why it lead to the premature end of the campaign. I forgot an essential element of the game: character formation. The Quick Story Ok. Enough being mysterious. Here is what I was trying to do… I wanted to run a Corporation game using the Japanese…
| May 9, 2012 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Characters and Depth No matter what game you play, a constant is characters. Players have characters that they can lavish attention and development on, while the GM often has numerous characters, great and small, to juggle. Whether you’re new to roleplaying, an experienced GM creating a monster who gets a few lines and expresses personality before the hacking begins, a player looking for tricks to get inside her character’s head, or anyone else looking to add some pizazz to their humble fighter, I have some…
| January 17, 2012 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
What do Data, Odo, and the Pathfinder Gunslinger class have in common? Why is it that playing Amber with new players is so much better than with players who have played before? Why is it that splat books almost always dilute, if not ruin, the games they are made for? What the hell is the Weirdo Card? Want some answers? Lets get started. Note: I am going to make some sweeping generalizations. Take them with a grain of salt. Its done mostly to make my point.…
| October 4, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
"Well it says I have blue, but I decided I wanted grey eyes…" The Situation We’ve All Been In I’ve recently found myself running a new game. It is only a few sessions old, but one of the players sheepishly approached me asking if he could change some stuff about his character. The character was cool, but it wasn’t fitting in with what the game became. Despite a good backstory, fun powers, and some great hooks that would come into play later in the…
| January 3, 2011 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Back in January, I wrote about using PC backgrounds as a campaign roadmap, and I’ve been putting a version of that concept into practice in my current Star Trek game. It’s been fun and it’s saved me time, so I thought it might be useful to you. Specifically, I used a version of the Three Things approach created by the Stew’s own Don Mappin: I asked my players for three things they want to see or do in the game, plus three NPCs I can…
| June 15, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
In a previous article on running a game with minimal prep I mentioned that “Players build their character’s classes, skills, and special powers based on what they want to do in the game.” and Rafe pointed out in the comments that this was one of the most fundamentally important things that a Game Master can realize. I hadn’t really thought about that sentence as that major of a concept until Rafe pointed it out. It seemed like something that was just there; part of the…
| May 21, 2010 | Posted by Matthew J. Neagley |
Reading the fantastic web comic Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic in which a recent story arc features a god-touched mute half-orc girl named Jone and her mouthy kobold sidekick, a seer from a family where every 5th female generation is gifted with prophecy, I was reminded of the fairy tales of my youth with whole menageries of characters touched by the spark of destiny, with strange magic artifacts, mentors and companions, and other elements that are far too rare in today’s role playing games. After…
