Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Character Generation Project: Spirit of the Century

Those of you who are new to the blog can find an overview of what's going on here. Stephanie's overview of her normal approach to character generation is found here.

This particular character is a bit different, as it's from Spirit of the Century, a game for which you cannot generate a character alone (one step in character generation involves "Guest-Starring" in another character's pulp novel). Thankfully, our friend Wade has been planning to run a one-shot for it, and wanted us to generate our own characters rather than providing pre-gens. We had originally had the Dresden Files RPG on the list of games to do, but the cooperative nature of character generation made it tricky at best. When Wade mentioned that he was interested in doing a Spirit of the Century one-shot, we jumped on the opportunity (thank you, Wade!).

As always, the questions below are bolded and my comments (if any) are appended in italics after Stephanie's answer.

Spirit of the Century
To see this sheet a bit larger, click here.
There is also a scan of the character workshet,
but it's less legible, due to the purple ink.
Which game is this for? 
Spirit of the Century

How long did it take you to generate the character? 
3ish hours
Part of this time was discussion. The fact that you need to come up with a pulp novel and then insert yourself as a guest star in someone else's novel requires a great deal of discussion with the other players.

What was your character concept going into generation? 
Agatha from Girl Genius

Did you feel like character generation captured the flavor of the setting? Did this influence your decision-making process during character generation?
Absolutely - knowing the pulp setting definitely changed how I chose to move forward.

How much control did you feel like you had during character generation? 
Quite a bit - being able to create my own Aspects was great to help me control my character.
There was a lot of "I want an Aspect that does X - any ideas on how best to phrase it?" from the entire party. Even though we all wound up with characters that are uniquely our own, the ideas contained therein all have input from the other players.

Did the game help you make the character you wanted, or did it feel like you were fighting the game?
I didn't feel like I was fighting the game at all.

Do you like the character you ended up with? 
Definitely.

Do you think your character fits your concept?
Yes.

Do you feel like your character would be effective and/or useful in a game?
I hope so!

Was there anything in particular that you struggled with mechanically? 
Not really - it helped that we did this as a group to take care of the "guest star" aspects.

Did anything run more smoothly than you had expected? 
All of it - the book made it seem a bit more complicated than it was.

What changes would you have made to the character generation process? 
It would be nice to be able to do this without the group, though the quick generation rules may cover that.

Did anything leap out at you as obviously broken or unbalanced?
Not really - I think GM may need to put some limits on how much freedom he gives the players regarding the Aspects.

What led you to choose this game as the next one to make a character for?
We plan to play a one-shot with friends soon.
And we asked Wade's permission to use his one-shot as part of the project - thanks again, Wade!

How would you compare your experience with this game to your experience with other games?
It was a ton of fun, especially since so much of it was collaborative.

Is this a character you would be willing to play in a campaign?
Absolutely.

Does this character make you want to play this game? 
Yes.

Do you have any other questions, comments, etc.? 
I can't wait to play this character!

Have you given any thought to what game you'd like to do next? 
Not yet.

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