Wealth of Knowledge
Based largely on actual events.
Well, maybe not the whoring under bridges part but I have seen (and experienced) the sting of shitty starting gold rolls and let me tell you, it makes life interesting at 1st-level. It’s great role-playing fodder too.
Speaking of, folks from Twitter asked about the short character questionnaire I give players at the beginning of a new campaign. I’ve used the questionnaire approach for years but my exposure to the Dread RPG last year greatly influenced the questions and how I present them. With my new group beginning the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, I emailed the following questions to the players:
- Who do you love/have loved?
- Where did you grow up? (answer may be as broad as “in poverty” or as specific as a town/local mentioned in the Rise of the Runelords player primer provided to you)
- An elder family member or your mentor gave you a piece of advice on their deathbed. What was it?
- Why have you come to the town of Sandpoint?
- Choose one: A proud eagle. A wounded bear. A noble lion
The questions may seem innocuous enough but they are a good way to get players thinking about their new characters and in the first sessions of a new campaign, familiarity is huge. I switch up the questions depending on the campaign so your miles may vary. I try to keep it general for three questions, campaign specific for one question, and then something like the fifth question that is a measure of a characters personality.
I hope you find it useful!
COMMENTERS: How do you begin a new campaign? Do you have any methods not described in the rulebooks for developing characters?
This is going to end badly.
And can anyone afford any masterwork items at level 1? Those things re 300+ gp! That’s expensive!
Masterwork Rat-Flail?
Masterwork butter knife!
I wouldn’t over think it too much. 🙂
Well since I was one of the twitter askers I figured I should comment (Thanks for posting the info by the way). If I can with a new campaign I try to get some back story for the characters. Back in college the first session would be character creation and the back and forth between players really helped. Now it’s a lot harder so I try to work one on one with folks and their characters. Some of the cool starting campaigns I have either run or been in have done a few of the following things.
1. Had an in-game question interview process for the local guard where the answers you gave determined your job and as such starting gold/equipment.
2. Had the players role play their characters as children without classes (this actually resulted in a player changing their class and laid the ground work for some heavy campaign twists. In addition the players had to give a role-playing and mechanic defect for their character for a different bonus.
I am going to be trying to start a new campaign so I will be watching the comments closely for ideas… so thanks in advance folks.
i always thought the questions from babylon 5 were a good start
WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT DO YOU WANT?
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
WHO DO YOU SERVE?
AND WHO DO YOU TRUST?
Eeeeeeeexcellent.
I love asking those questions as well.
….. Aaaaaaand pasted into Evernote for my next campaign. Top banana
Love the questionaire (and the B5 questions). I started the first session of my Endland campaign with putting the characters right in the middle of a situation and asking the characters how they got there. For example: you are standing in the middle of the market place and you are holding a screaming child. Now tell me why. That worked great because it told me a lot about the characters, ot got the action going at once and the players immediately went in-character.
I LOVE sessions that begin that way. I try to keep things episodic and when you have a group who is cool with and embraces the idea of starting mid-encounter or setting a scene, it is awesome.
I don’t get what the Q5 is asking, but I might use that if I ever find another gaming group.
I tend to ask Where they grew up, who brought them up/ trained them, when they left home, why they left home, what plans they have for a future.
Last time I had to get a games designer to rewrite his 2 or 3 times as it failed on all those questions.
Question #5 is a bit of an oddball but I try to include one every time. It’s more of a gauge of the characters personality in the vein of “if you could describe yourself as one of the following”. You’d be surprised at the ideas/responses a question like that generates. I have two players who redefined their characters based on their answers to #5.
Oh ok, I get it now. It does make you think, even I’ve been trying to work out what I’d choose and why.
Q5 drives me crazy. Choose one for what? A familiar? An enemy? A heraldic device? A sex toy? I’ve come across this before, and I always have to engage with the question long before I can answer it. Which, of course, destroys most of the psychological impact of the question.
Q3 is great. I’ll have to remember that one. I have a similar one that is “You carry a fortune cookie slip around in your wallet. What does it say?”
I don’t like the Bab 5 questions. Honestly, they don’t give any spark for thought. They just give a framework for normal background questions. I mean, if you need that kind of checklist for putting together a character, I guess it’s handy. For me, I’m much more interested in questions that add a really unusual dimension. “You really, really hate one particular popular song. What is it, and why?” (Yes, I saw Silver Linings Playbook this weekend.) It’s the kind of detail that I find harder to think of than “My parents divorced when I was 8. I have a brother and sister. My sister died of a really severe case of acne. I’ve sworn vengeance on Noxzema for not helping her.”
“Q5 drives me crazy.”
My work here is done.
Panel 2 may need to be expanded on….what magical disease turns an adventurer’s wang into a glowing, self-aware eel? Inquiring minds need to know!
Fantasy STIs…
Well, there’s Troll Warts, Ogre’s Clap, DIV (Demihuman Immunodeficiency Virus), Dire Pubic Lice, Advanced Fiendish Herpes, Chimerydia, Celestial Syphilis, Hepatitis Type 1d100, and Bigby’s Crushing Gonorrhea,
“Bigby’s Crushing Gonorrhea”
That broke me. HAHAHAHAHA
It was Dire Pubic Lice that did me in.
Wait, is it too late to rephrase?
The two big B5 questions work best with follow-up.
“Who Are You?” is the question that leads to all introspection and knowledge of the self. It pushes you to move beyond simple answers and labels to what really defines you:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0610.html
But… with many starting PCs, labels are all they have. Very few PCs spring fully formed from the skull of their creator, so this question has less meaning.
“What Do You Want?” is the question that leads to all desire and ambition. While the follow-up to the first question is “what else ARE you?” this is followed-up by “And then what?”
It separates short term desires from long term ambitions. This can actually be handy for starting PCs. Most want xp and gold, but why do they want it? What are they going to do with the dragon’s hoard?
After some bad experiences in my gaming group, I’ve actually not taken the post of GM except on conventions for several years now. Still gaming two times practically every week though and a lot of campaigns have started since.
Usually I try to talk with the other players first. Determine what they are playing, what the background of their charas is (as far as they want to tell) and if our characters knew each other beforehand and how. My latest Exalted character for example is an ex-slave, bought than given freedom and started to work as man-servant for another character. A position my character kept even after awakening as a dragonblooded soon after the master became a solar exalted.
As for me, my creativity usually starts to run wild as soon as I’m finishing up my character and ready for the campaign anyway. Even if it originally was only a quick study of “I wonder if a combination like that would work in a character”. And I end up with two to three A4-pages worth of background info (family, birthplace, other connections, reasons for adventuring, goals, quirks, likes and like-nots). Often with optional hooks for the GM to implement in his campaign if he wants to. It’s basically the answers to the five questions above expanded to some degree, now that I think about it.
And as to the question raised in the comic itself: Personally I prefer either a mixture of a certain base amount with a few dice to determine the final starting purse or a point based system that allows you decide for yourself. At the expense of other things of course. I’ve played them all by now. Well equipped but rather weak characters, moderately well equipped and strong characters and the poor but either quite powerful or very flexible character (usually leaning towards the latter).
If I may give some advice from the flip side… I used to do forum based playing, where people would put up a game concept and others would apply; usually, not all characters were accepted. Someone once asked for some advice on crafting characters after I turned them down, and it could easily apply to making characters for the tabletop as well.
Give your character unresolved issues. This does a number of things. First, it gives your character more depth, because then you have to consider the impact of those issues on your character. This is true even if the GM doesn’t use those background elements in the game. Second, it gives the GM a hook they can use later on, and one that naturally gives your character some spotlight. Third, it enhances party cohesion. You have to ask your friends, and trust them, to help you resolve a personal issue. They get to know you better when you are at your worst. And fourth, it gives you an opportunity for character development. How do you handle it when the issue is finally resolved? What is the affect on your character?
Alternatively (or in addition to!) give your character a family. Your motivation for adventuring is their protection, and the money to give them a better life. Has many of the advantages above, plus helps bind the PC to a home town. You can never “resolve it” but on the other hand it can prove a hook more than once.
Such issues don’t necessarily need to be huge, world moving things. Maybe just some strange quirks and a few things your character ain’t good at or food he absolutely detests. But yeah, any character needs some. Without some rough edges and weaknesses, it’s not a character at all. Just some numbers on a sheet of paper.
I play at both sides of the table. First as a player I normally write such a details background with so many loose ends to stick myself to other players, if I haven’t done it already before the start. I often rewrite my stats to show the background of it.
As a GM I normally want some details from their past to have something for the future. I hate to question some critical points of player knowledge, but if I have to (new players or new to the game players), these are the basics:
1. Who are you?
2. Where are you from?
3. Describe your childhood (with family, friends, foes)
4. Describe your training/apprenticeship
5. Say why you are … (fill in some possible hooks from the adventure start – …against the Repubic? …a soldier for hire? …an outlaw in the woods? …in this city?)
6. Say something, noone should know about yourself (maybe even you don’t!).
That would help!
I still like L5R’s “How does your character envision himself dying?”
Great system anyway. And that question so wonderfully fits the culture your character is part of. 🙂
My personal favorite method of getting players to think about their characters is one I stole (with no guilt) from Spirit of the Century. Collaborative backstory writing. In the game it has your players get together and write a brief summary of adventures overlapping with other characters, so that each of them is tied together. It makes the players think not just of their characters foibles, but how they act in society.
So um… yeah…
Tonight our party ran into some Pirates and we kicked their butts so much that we became friends. A glass of magical absinthe later and I wake up with two pirate women. I don’t feel right so the pirate medic checks me out, critically fails his diagnosis roll and rushes me to an unlicensed clinic…
They knock me out and when I wake up my awesome Terrorist Werewolf Duke, is now a Duchess (I’m also so stunning that I received a +4 to my Charisma score no matter what form I’m in). Thankfully having had Magical Absinthe in my system, and a level 20 reattach limb (pinky) combined with being a shape shifter the “cure” didn’t stick 100%. I now have a 50% chance to gender swap every time I shift forms (human, half form, full werewolf).
A bunch of wild stuff happened, but I’m still trying to digest it all before writing the fiction for this session. Oh and if my camera worked it may have caught my screams of horror begging the DM to not do this (Some may have cried but I refused!).
Long story short, alwayse go for masterwork “armor”, you never know what might happen.