The Incredibly Irregular A Wilder World Update

[alexandraerin]

I'm continuing my "backburner development" of this project, by which I mean that I spend odd bits of time when I'm lying awake or taking a bath or whatever thinking about it and occasionally jot down some of the ideas. This is actually a fairly decent one-person brainstorming method, as it allows me to figure out which of the ideas are actually important. The game mechanics tend to get more complicated when I'm actively working on it, and then as I contemplate it in a more leisurely way I end up questioning what all the more complicated nuances actually would contribute to the experience of gameplay.

I've got the game mechanics (in combat and out of it) at their most streamlined yet, but I'm still playing around with different methods of accomplishing my goals for character creation. I'm currently looking at a way of breaking down characters so that your basic character "sheet" consists of six pieces, which would be on slightly oversized cards that can be arranged to take up the same amount of space as a standard letter sized paper... or, alternately, you could print out a sheet of that size.

The first card is divided into two sections. The top section has spaces for your character's name, Character Strengths (occupying much of the same space as ability modifiers in D&D, but without any direct impact on combat and less fiddly... you don't buy a Strength of 16 and then figure out that this gives you a +3, you just skip to the +3), HP, and other standard character information. The bottom half is your race, with any abilities and modifiers that gives you.

(Obviously you would pick your race first and then fill out the top half, but it makes more sense to me to have the personalized part first.)

The next two cards are your Major Traits. These are usually the most broadly character-defining choices you make, and the last three are your Minor Traits. When I first started playing with the card-based idea, I had decided to throw out any concept of "tiering" or "prioritizing" these because flattening things made them simpler and more freeform, but as I started thinking about how to put characters together out of 4-6 Traits I realized that some of them kind of required more complexity than others and I thought an upper limit on complexity would be helpful. Major Traits tend to be more complex (in terms of the number of distinct effects they have on gameplay) than Minor Traits, but nobody has more than two of them.

This creates an easy to follow "path" through character creation:

1. Pick Race
2. Pick Two Major Traits.
3. Pick Three Minor Traits.

You don't have to do them in that order, but if you know you want to play as an Elven thief or a Human necromancer or a Dwarven alchemist or whatever... well, step 1 is easy. Step 2 might take a little more thought, but the Major Traits are meant to be very evocative for character-defining purposes. So you might pick one that's called Thief or Necromancer or Alchemist, and then pick another one that helps define what kind of thief you mean to be or what you think a necromancer should be (i.e., Spiritual Medium if you want to be speaking with the dead and commanding spirits as a matter of course, Battlemage if you think a Necromancer should be loaded for bugbear when it comes to offensive magic, Towering Intellect if you think a Necromancer should be some kind of mental giant), and then use your Minor Traits to fill in the gaps (give your scholarly Necromancer/Towering Intellect some offensive magic, for instance).

If you want to be less paint-by-numbers, you can take Thief and Necromancer to get a perfectly valid base set of abilities in those areas and then fill your Minor Talents up with a mix of things suited to each pursuit, or something completely different (like fighterish stuff). Major Talents can be complemented by Minor Talents, but Minor Talents don't require particular Major Talents as prerequisites and a Major Talent doesn't need the right Minor Talents to be useful.

And if you have no idea what kind of character you want to make... well, the three steps above would still help. Flip through the races until you find one that appeals to you. Flip through the Major Talents until you find one that appeals to you and one that you think goes with it. Then you have some idea of what kind of character you're making and the three Minor Talents should be easier. You work from the step with the fewest decision points to the most, because the assumption is that you have a better handle on your character as you go along.

The above steps aren't the whole of character creation, but they give you your "sheet", and the core of your character. The next three steps are:

4. Fill Your Hand
5. Assign Character Strengths
6. Finishing Touches

The next three steps follow the same sort of progression, with 4 things, 5 things (actually dividing a number of points among some or all of the five Character Strengths), and 6 things. Your "Hand" actually consists of 6 cards that represent special techniques you know, tricks/stunts you can do, spells, alchemical gimmicks, etc. You pick 4 because two of them come from your Major Traits. I kept finding myself having reasons to attach a "once per scene" active ability to a lot of Major Traits and since that's what goes in the Hand, I decided there was no reason to keep them separate.

Finishing Touches are cards with small static modifiers that somehow augment a Trait, or are free-floating bonuses that aren't worth being a Trait in and of themselves. Small, highly specific bonuses ("+2 to climbing") live here. Background color advantages (knowing an extra language, having a smidgen of Dwarven blood) live here. Finishing Touches is the step with the most decision points... 6... but by this point you should have a decent idea of what your character needs to be, well, finished.

And those six steps are the whole of character creation. You might notice there's no "starting wealth" and no "buy items" step. If your character has some fabulous legendary/hereditary/magical item that is a major part of what defines their abilities and who they are in the world, that's a Major or Minor Trait depending on just how fabulous it is. If your character carries around single-use items like healing herbs or vials of acid or throwing knives, those go in your Hand. Regular everyday armor and weapons and tools are part of Finishing Touches. This also helps make Finishing Touches easier, since most characters will at least want a weapon.

So, six steps that give you a total of 18 cards making up the total of your character. I have a feeling that like most of my explanations I've managed to make it sound more complicated than it actually would be in practice. The first three steps give you a solid core to your character. The last three let you fill in the blanks a little bit more.