Making Characters: The Other Side of the Equation

So I walked you through the procedure for how this project will work a few weeks ago.

The next week, we posted her first character and questionnaire. I learned a bunch in the process (and tweaked the questionnaire slightly by adding a few questions).

In discussion with Stephanie between the two posts, however, I realized that I had left out one essential part of the project:

When Stephanie is done with a game, I will use her concept and generate a character of my own with the same system. Once I've done my character, I'll post the sheet (and include a link to the original post), and discuss the differences and why I made different choices.

Now, there will be games where this isn't feasible - generally for games with a significant degree of randomness - but by and large, this should provide some interesting contrast, and hopefully it won't bore you to death in the process.

The restrictions I'm placing on myself are as follows:

1) I must use the same method of generation as Stephanie does.
2) I must use the same basic concept as Stephanie does.
3) I must create a character I would allow as GM.
4) I must create a character I'd be willing to play.

Then I'll talk a bit about the game and what I liked and disliked about it.  In some cases, this will be longer than the character differences overview.

Now, I won't do all of this for all of the characters she makes, but I will discuss the games a month or so after her posts go up.

I hope you find this part as interesting as you find Stephanie's part of the project.

Timing Expansions

I think I've mentioned several times that it's a good thing I don't run a publishing company.

This week, I discovered another reason why that is: Timing expansions.

Over the last decade or so, expansions have become a more and more common an expected aspect of gaming, but each one comes with questions unrelated to game balance.

Claustrophobia is an excellent game. I have a hunch CROC has one or more expansions ready to go, but they wanted to make sure sales justified the expense of an expansion before they started work on it. Here in the US, it was a slow starter sales-wise, but those sales have started to pick up. Has it earned an expansion, yet? At what point has it earned that expansion? Is it too late to publish one? Too early?

Keep in mind: I don't have inside information on sales here. All I have is what CROC and others have said on BoardGameGeek and elsewhere.

If you release an expansion too soon, you run the risk of publishing an expansion for an unpopular game. You also run the risk of repulsing late buyers - "Am I going to have to buy expansions to play this, too?" Or of alienating completists who see it as just a money grab.

On the other hand, if you wait too long you run the risk of people moving on to other games. Three Dragon Ante went five years before its standalone expansion made it to market. I have personally seen people pick it up, see the word 'expansion,' and then put it down because they can't find the base game anywhere (it's out of print). Wizards of the Coast cost themselves sales by doing that - I had to find my copy of the base game before I was willing to spend money on the expansion (even though I could see that it was a standalone).

The best counter-example to this is, Nuclear War has been around since 1965. Nuclear Escalation hit nearly twenty years later, and did well enough that Nuclear Proliferation hit a decade after that ...

Dungeon Twister had a lot of expansions in a short time - and it was good at first, but sales apparently trailed off over time. Because putting out more and more expansions means people will start to get pickier about which expansion(s) they pick up and you'll start to see "recommend an expansion" threads on Boardgamegeek (and elsewhere).

You also need to keep in mind the designer's timing - Christophe Boelinger put out Dungeon Twister: Prison, and then moved on to other projects with Ludically (including the upcoming Earth Reborn). Has he abandoned Dungeon Twister? Has he forgotton about us? No. He'll get there.

While I'm briefly on the subject of DT, there is a poll on BoardGameGeek that I'd like you to take (if you haven't already).

It's a tricky juggling act, publishing games. It's a bit like running a store - you need to be passionate about gaming. You need to love games and gamers. But you can't lose sight of the fact that it's a business. You need to make money.

And that, my friends, is where I would fail.

GenCon

As you read this post, I am at GenCon (which coincides with my annual meal at Chic-Fil-A). As I write this, we have about a month to go and I don't know who will be in the booth or what games we'll be focusing on.

I can, however, make a few guesses based (in part) on these photos from Origins 2010 and what I've seen rules-wise.

Dixit and Dixit 2 will be be prominently displayed due - in part - to the recent Spiel des Jahres win.

Okko has a fresh expansion. Two of them, in fact. And the Cycle of Earth has hit print since the last GenCon. I suspect this will be the game I spend the most time playing, because I'll be the player who is most familiar with it.

Claustrophobia will be there as well - and CROC will be there.  I really like Claustrophobia, but I don't have as much time to play two-player games as I would like, so this hasn't hit the table as often as I would like.

Jungle Speed, of course, is a continual GenCon favorite, as is Werewolves of Miller's Hollow (which ALSO has a new expansion). And I think I saw the Jungle Speed expansion pictured in one shot (but, having only recently seen the rules, I don't know if it'll be available or not).

Cyclades is, I think, my favorite new game of the past year. I was invited to play a prototype at GenCon last year, and knew it was going to be a winner for me.;l

7 Wonders might unseat Cyclades, however. And there will be a pre-release copy at GenCon for play. Odds are good that I'll be teaching this one - and I'm really looking forward to it.

Dice Town will probably be around - it's light, it's fast, and it's fun.

And there may be a surprise or two as well. I'll update this post as I learn what to expect.

UPDATE: Christophe E-mailed me. Stephanie and I will be focusing on Claustrophobia, Cyclades, Buzz It, Dixit, Jungle Speed, and Identik

If you are attending GenCon, please drop by Booth 1901 to say hi.

octaNe

So I had an opportunity recently to play a game of octaNe. You see, I bought a copy for my friend Wade a while back, as its theme seemed to be the sort of thing that would spark his imagination. And it was.

Within seconds of touching the book, he had an idea for a game that he'd like to run: "The War Zeppelin of the Iron Man." (WZotIM) This game ignores the setting that octaNe includes, and takes place in the mind of a teenage metalhead named Todd in the 1980's. Plot Points were replaced with Rock Points, and we achieved them not only for good rolls (as in the basic game), but also for performing actions that were awesome enough for the GM to throw the horns.

Five years later, he got around to running the game. It was the usual one-shot group with two of Wade's old friends added to the mix. The character list is in this post on his blog (which, by the way, you should be reading if you aren't already).

Before play, he also took the time to express his fears, too.

While I understand his pre-game jitters, they didn't show (much) once he arrived. The prologue had some rough spots while we figured out what we could do with complete control over the story (answer: anything that rocked), but once we got through the prologue, it ran smoothly. Every character had a 'snapshot' moment or two. "That," someone would say, "would totally be the album cover."

There were a few rules tweaks that - for the variant setting - served to make the game more awesome. The most significant rules tweak was how players spent Rock Points - as written in the basic game, you spend Plot Points to (basically) add detail to the setting to tip things in your favor. The restriction on spending points is that you can't overwrite someone else's details or add a detail that wouldn't make sense (the example in the rulebook is having cars kicking up dust in a rainstorm). For WZotIM, we could spend Rock Points (I keep wanting to call them RAWK Points) any time we could make the scene more AWESOME!

Since you gain points when you roll a five or a six, it reached the point where I spent all of my points every roll - if you're rolling six or seven dice, you're going to roll a fair number of fives and sixes, which immediately gives you those points back. It means that Plot Points flowed like water in the game, and it got more and more awesome as the game went on.

To give you an idea how much fun we had, here were a few of the snapshot moments:

1) A one-armed ninja standing on a fire-breathing devil-bat, nunchucks in hand.
2) A Demon Biker driving his bat-winged bike along the top of an exploding zeppelin, jumping off of the end of the zeppelin just as the last bit explodes.
3) An ancient superweapon that is basically a super-advanced fighter jet firing its afterburners and flying through a portal to Hell.

As my wife said the next morning, "A+. Would game again."

Character Generation Project: Fvlminata

To the right, you can see the first character Stephanie created for our character generation project.  I'm not entirely sure why, but she chose Fvlminata as her first public foray into character-making.  Okay.  That's a lie.  Check the questionnaire below and she'll tell you why this was her first choice.

The scan you see is actually a second scan - the first one was done in pencil, and didn't scan very well so she recopied it in pen.  For the record: I think that recopying in pen made both of us a bit twitchy.

I don't think I've ever done a character in pen - it's generally not a good idea - I can see writing new skill names in pen, but ratings do change with time and experience, so I would never put any numbers on a character sheet in pen. And I don't think I'm alone in that.

If you can't read the sheet, by the way, clicking it will take you to the image's page on my Flickr photo stream.  We will likely refine a few things which are project-related as we go along.

As promised, here are her answers to the questionnaire:

Which game is this for?
Fvlminata

How long did it take you to make the character?
About 90 minutes.

What was your character concept going into generation?
A merchant who is able to defend herself, but does not actively look for trouble.

Did you feel like character generation captured the flavor of the setting? Did this influence your decision-making process during character generation?
Yes and no - I didn't feel that this was particularly different from historical Rome, other than giving me a bit more freedom as a female character than I would have had in a strictly historical setting.

How much control did you feel like you had during character generation?
Quite a bit

Did the game help you make the character you wanted, or did it feel like you were fighting the game?
The game helped guide my character in a way I didn't expect, but I don't feel like it wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do.

Do you like the character you ended up with?
I do - it wasn't entirely what I started out with, but I liked what it turned into.

Do you think your character fits your initial concept?
Yes

Do you feel like your character would be effective and/or useful in a game?
I think she would probably be good for reconnaissance and information-gathering, but would not be the best in a fight unless she was cornered.

Was there anything in particular that you struggled with mechanically?
It took a little while to wrap my head around the humors and the temperaments were a bit difficult to understand. I also wasn't sure, with the skills, whether it would preferable to be reasonably good at a lot of things or to be really good at only a few things.

Did anything run more smoothly than you had expected?
There was a little bit of a stumble with the humors, but otherwise it went smoothly.

What changes would you have made to the character generation process?
I think the combination of occupation and rank could be better explained, but other that, it seemed to fit the system.

Did anything leap out at you as obviously broken or unbalanced?
It would be easy to make an overpowered fighter, with the skills and attribute point-buys, but I think it would end up coming down to GM discretion to prevent that.

What led you to choose this game as the next one to make a character for?
The concept caught my attention, and I was curious about how it was implemented.

How would you compare your experience with this game to your experience with other games?
It struck me as odd that I could theoretically create a character who would have no ability in combat or magic, and would be basically useless - other games I've played have made it pretty near impossible to create a truly useless character.

[Eric's Note: Prior to this, Stephanie's experience consists of D&D and pre-generated characters for one-shot games]

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

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

Do you have any other questions, comments, etc.?
I would have appreciated a better overview of the system before going straight into the character generation portion of the book - while I appreciated the charts that indicated what was average, above-average and extraordinary in terms of the skills and attributes, a brief intro into what one would be rolling before setting those numbers down would have been nice. The book goes straight into character generation, however, and I didn't really delve into the mechanics of the game much as I would going through "by the book", as it were, and working my way through based on what came next in the book.

Did you consider creating a magic-using character?
Not really, no.  I didn't even look too much at the magic system.


Were you afraid that a magic-user would be too complex for someone new to the game?
For some reason, the idea of magic and Ancient Rome just didn't click.

Did the availability of gunpowder in an otherwise mostly historical setting impact your character generation at all?
Nope.  It just didn't seem to come up, other than as a possible skill choice that didn't fit the kind of character I was creating.

Character Generation Project: How I Make People

So, I know Eric's been talking about this character generation project for a bit, and I thought I might jump in here for a minute and discuss my approach to the project before my first character goes live.

I haven't made a ton of characters - as has been mentioned before, my role-playing experience has been primarily D&D and one-shots with pre-generated characters - but I do tend to go about creating them the same way. I'll look at the core book for a basic idea of how the system works, if I'm not familiar, and then I'll start working my way through the book. I'll start with some basic idea for the character - can beat things up, is more of a thinker than a fighter, that sort of thing - but I don't usually have many details in mind beforehand. I let the character generation process guide how the character develops.

Something that I don't do much, and maybe should start doing, is read through the entire core book before creating the character. I don't learn everything about a system before I start, but rather try to find out enough to know what numbers are considered "good" or "average", and go from there. It means that I don't always create the most effective character, but my characters can be a lot more interesting.

Making Characters: The Procedure

So a few weeks ago, I mentioned that my wife and I were starting a character generation project in part as an experiment and in part because it may be useful to me if and when I get my own game off the ground.

Over the last few weeks, I have assembled a long list of games that I own that I'd like to include in the project. I also put the games into a number of groups based on the theme, including a "miscellaneous" group for games that like anything else. I also picked games that Stephanie has not played (which really only eliminated d20 games, 4E, and a small handful of one-shot games we've played)

I won't share the list of games with you, as it's pretty long. And it keeps growing:

"Oh! Mutant City Blues! I'd forgotten I owned this one!"

 "Hey, sweetie, I just found World Action and Adventure at the used book store."

(Both true stories, BTW)

Either way, Stephanie will create a character using only the core book(s) for the game (with one or two exceptions, which I'll highlight in the appropriate post).

I also went through and created a questionnaire for her to fill in as she makes the characters. The questionnaire is pretty well set:

Which game is this for?

What was your character concept going into generation?

Did you feel like character generation captured the flavor of the setting? Did this influence your decision-making process during character generation?

How much control did you feel like you had during character generation?

Did the game help you make the character you wanted, or did it feel like you were fighting the game?

Do you like the character you ended up with?

Do you think your character fits your concept?

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

Was there anything in particular that you struggled with mechanically?

Did anything run more smoothly than you had expected?

What changes would you have made to the character generation process?

Did anything leap out at you as obviously broken or unbalanced?

What led you to choose this game as the next one to make a character for?

How would you compare your experience with this game to your experience with other games?

Would you be willing to play this character in a campaign?

Does this character make you want to play this game?

Do you have any other questions, comments, etc.?

Once she's done with a character, I'll scan the sheet and upload it to Flickr. I'll then go through the questionnaire, and will cut-and-paste her answers. I'll also ask any follow-up questions which occur to me at that time.

And then I'll post it here.

I hope it's a sufficiently interesting project for you. I'm really looking forward to this.

If you have any games you'd like to add to the list or questions you think I missed in the questionaire, please feel free to leave a comment here (or e-mail me).

By the way, she's chosen her first two games: Fvlminata and All Flesh Must Be Eaten. I'll let you know when she's done and will try to let you know what games are coming up.