So here’s the thing y’all: building your PC in whatever game your playing is cool! You get to assemble your little game-mechanical components into its own special, custom-built, one-of-a-kind trouble-maker, and show off just how well you know the system at the same time. Meanwhile, using random generation methods to discover a unique character, full of contradictions and happy accidents, and building the fiction around them to explain it all is also a super-fun part of our hobby And then, getting together with your buddies to see what everyone else brought to the game is another really fun part of the game. Well, what if you could do each of those different things at the same time?! I think I’ve figured out a way, and here it is:
You get yourself a stack of index cards or blank playing cards, and on each one you write a stat bonus, a piece of starting gear, a starting loot item, or a starting ability; label the different categories. Then, you get your players together, and you deal out cards equal to your number of players +1; that’s your “river”, as they say in cards. You’ll probably want to deal out one category at a time, but if you want to go full-on Captain Chaos, then you can mix it all up and see what happens. The players then get to choose from the river, or top of the deck. Round after round, cards are dealt and players choose, until the starting characters are complete. They are a little bit random, a little bit built, and also built in the presence of the other players, and probably negotiated between players. These characters may not be as clean as “one piece of starting loot, one ability, and four starting gear”, but that’s OK. And who knows? Maybe the process of building these characters together will probably get the players talking and bouncing ideas off one another, and they’ll make little entwined backstories and build cohesion as a group.
Let me know what you think of this idea below. I’ll probably try this out in a few months, after I move.
A-woo a-woo, a-woo a-woo