Pregen Characters for your home games

Most folks are familiar with using pregen characters for conventions, but I’m becoming more convinced that they have a value in home games as well.

First off, I think pregens are valuable if you’re playing any game where character generation is going to take more than 10-15 minutes for a new player. Second, you use them for a short run of 1-6 sessions, not for a 6 month campaign – the point is to get players playing right away AND give them a chance to see HOW the mechanics work for the character stats, etc. This way when they do go to build their characters they’re not stuck having to blindly guess what stats mean what, or how it will look in play, they’ll have had a chance to see it and mess with it first hand.

What this does is:

a) lets players experiment without having to be overly attached/protective of the characters
b) avoids players having to experience “character build regret” where they’re stuck with bad choices for a whole campaign because they didn’t know how the mechanics actually worked
c) lets everyone get to playing right away.
d) makes sure the group of characters are appropriately built stat-wise for the scenario – no character is left missing vital skills or powers

While I’ve seen several games include pregens (or 90% done pregens) (Feng Shui, Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowrun, Mouse Guard, D&D4E) it never seems to catch on other than “Oh Joe showed up late and he’s not good with mechanics, give him one of these” kind of thing.

Pregen Considerations

1. Archetypes are good

While it can be tempting to try to make some tricked out mechanical build, or an “against the grain” fiction type, it’s easier to do pregens with clear archetypes and situations. Assuming this is a new game for the players, you want to reduce the amount of things which require questions – there’s going to be enough questions to answer as it is.

2. Good builds not perfect builds

Aside from the fact that you reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of time spent vs. value in play, the other fact is that some of the players have fun in tweaking character stats – when they make their own characters they’ll want to find the optimal builds. If you’ve already built it, it cuts out their sense of discovery.

Of course, if you’re not that crunch inclined and your players are they’ll come up with something better no matter your best attempt. Just focus on making something solid that reliably does what it’s supposed to do.

3. Avoid Bunk choices

Unfortunately, most mechanically crunchy games have bunk choices included – powers no one uses, etc. Avoid these because all they serve to do is clutter the player’s character sheet and act as a “trap” – one that keeps punishing the player for using it until they figure it out. And since you picked it for them instead of picking it themselves it feels cheap.

Also try to avoid overly specific power types. If a player has a power they never use because the situations where it’d be useful are so rare, it’s a waste of space.

4. Build with your scenario in mind

You’re doing a short run, so you know what kind of conflicts you’re looking at – both in the fiction and in mechanics. Build the characters to be able to competently meet those challenges. If the heroes will have to talk to the king, you probably shouldn’t make them homeless vagabonds. If the game calls for political negotiation, you better make sure they all have some skill or influence to deal with it.

5. Include a short description and advice

For each character, give a paragraph of who they are and what they’re good at, then include some specific advice about general strategies for using their abilities/skills/powers.

Remember, if the players are new to the game, they have no ideas what a power does necessarily, what stats mean, etc. So including, “The knight class gives this character really good defense, and you work best as a blocker, getting in the face of the enemies and holding them off.” gives a player a sense of what to do and whether they want to pick this pregen or not.

D&D and the size of the party

I had a conversation with a friend of my roommate who’s from another country after finding out he was into D&D. We ended up talking about the game, and the game design of it, and I brought up the fact that most of the issues D&D has wrestled with mostly come out of the shift from very early D&D where each player had multiple characters to the idea of each player controlling just one.

I remember really considering this idea first after reading “Races of War”

In its origins, D&D was a wargame like Warmachine or Warhammer. You had a field filled with tiny men, and they fought each other with swords and bows. Eventually, someone got really lazy, and wanted to replace a large number of fighting men with heroic fighting men who would be easier to paint because there were much less of them. And that, right there, is the origins of DnD. The smaller number of better Fighting Men would be your “army” and eventually people started playing magical teaparty with their fighting men, and it turned into a roleplaying game. So it isn’t surprising that at first you “roleplayed” a small group of heroic fighting men.

When the new classes (such as “Magic User” and eventually “Thief” and “Cleric”) were introduced, they were intended to be better than the Fighting Men. And, well, they totally were. Indeed, players still controlled lots of characters, and it was deemed impractical for more than one or two of those characters to be any good or in any fashion important. So you rolled up stats for each guy, and if you rolled well enough on a guy he could be something other than a Fighting Man, and the rest of your guys were basically just speed bumps whose lot in life was to stand between the monsters and the Magic Users so that the real characters could survive to another day.

What you’ll notice happens when players have multiple characters the problems that people often have talked about with D&D over the years disappears instantly:

- High lethality? If you’ve got 10-20 characters, you can lose some and you’re not left out of play
- Class balancing? Every player is going to have a few of most types – so it’s not like one player is going to overshadow the others with their awesome wizard at high levels – everyone is going to have their own awesome wizard or two.
- Charisma as a dump stat? You’ve got a war band of several folks and you can also get hirelings to help. Those extra hands are going to be real useful because someone’s got to carry the food and torches…
- Random stats? – Everyone is going to have a good selection of character stats by averages – no one is going to be stuck only playing the character with low wack stats for the whole campaign.
- Out of spells? You’ve got several other characters who aren’t spell casters, so you’re not left being useless and not able to do anything in play.

You’ll also start to see other artifacts like the random number of monsters encountered and the pretty high numbers or the vast treasure pulls you get sometimes. All of this makes perfect sense when you have basically a company of adventurers going into the dungeon and not a band of 4-6.

Anyway, I figured I’d toss this here for later referral for folks on D&D stuff.

Mekton Zero Kickstarter

I’ve always found R. Talsorian games to be amongst the best games of their time – they usually found a good balance between the the cruft of point building of the 80′s and simplified mechanics with at least having been one of the companies that typically went with unified mechanics of the time. Plus, they really did the anime thing long before anyone else.

Mekton was the giant mecha game, which I followed through it’s various editions. Now it’s getting a kickstarter for a new version and it sounds like Mike Pondsmith isn’t just doing a simple update, but rather taking good lessons from actual play and revamping based on that:

Mekton takes a lot to set up. I mean, I like making giant robots, but I wasn’t seriously expecting a bunch of preteens to get off on juggling calculus to create the optimal mecha suit. So I knew some adaptations were in order….

I started out by just making the mecha for them. Seems like a plan, right? But pretty soon, I realized that keeping track of the bookkeeping needed in a full-on mecha fight was putting a bunch of hyperactive preteens off in a big way. In fact, it was putting ME off after a while (since I had to do all the math). So I ended up simplifying the Mekton combat systems so that they reflected the intricacies of the core game, but in an easier to use way (like using hit location dice instead of tables). I also structured the combat system to better reflect the kind of combat they were used to seeing on the small screen; a style that was less about who hit whom, but rather how they hit each other (while screaming out the name of the attack no less).

Anyway, one of my favorite designers, a creator of color and someone who GETS anime. Go check it out!

Potentially long health hiatus

Beginning of April I was admitted to the ER when I passed out suddenly in the street. I’ve been diagnosed with one of those weird sub-sub-types of cancer, which is bad. It was basically rare enough they hadn’t come up with any kind of standard treatment plan.

It’s also fast growing, the oncologist assumes I must have gotten it started Thanksgiving or so, and now it is occupying a major portion of my chest trying to directly strangle my aorta, superior vena cava, and press in on several nerve endings I use for stuff like eating and talking.

Through the greatest Mercy of God, I must have rolled some exploding luck die on a saving throw, because, 2 weeks ago a combined study was released on the New England Journal of Medicine which gives a 97% cure rate with this particular chemo mix. If they had caught it earlier and tried to treat, I’d be facing a much harder path with complications and less guarantees, and well, if it got caught later I’d be dead. I like to imagine I’ve spent every single Fate point, Luck point, or dropped 100 points in character creation to “Flip off Cancer once in your lifetime” advantage.

Mind you, the chemo cure is still 6-8 months of hard chemo, being in the hospital 1 week of every month, and I’ll probably be on oxygen for a couple of months until the mass gets off those arterial veins I use to feed by body the precious oxygen.

But I’ll be alive.

At some point, some friends will be organizing a donation site for my expenses. I’ll post when it comes to that, which right now is us mostly navigating the medical system and legal stuff. I’m just going to focus on getting through this chemo and living day to day.

Obviously, if I’m not playing games, I’m probably not going to be writing about them much for a while.

Peruse the archives, follow some links. Play some games!

Good wishes are appreciated!

Golden Sky Stories Kickstarter

Kickstarter here.

I’ve been so waiting for this game.  You play animal spirits who help people out in cute ways.  If you want something lighthearted, where the power of friendship is everything, this game is it.

In the demo I played, I was a cat-boy who was trying to help a young boy find his homework that he lost while at school.  Since he found it before I could find it, I used my magic powers to steal it so I could give it back to him (“How can I help him if he helps himself first? No fair!”).

These Are Our Games Pay What You Want Sale

Ben Lehman’s done this before- put up all of his games for “Pay What You Will” – except this time, he’s going with the honor system – there’s a paypal link and a link at the bottom of every game page directly to the PDF – so you don’t have to wait at all.  TAO Games full list can be found here.

If nothing else, all of Ben’s games are vastly different in system and fictional tone – if you’re into trying out games that do a lot of different things, you should check them out.

Here’s some of my favorite games:

Polaris – Magical knights struggle to preserve their failing civilization as demons and apathy destroy it all.  The mechanics are all based on bargaining… with the demons in your heart.

Bliss Stage – Aliens have devastated humanity, and a few surviving teenagers find the technology to brain dive into the aliens’ dream world, fighting them with mecha built of their emotions. The relationship scenes you play in this game have made some of the best roleplaying moments I’ve ever seen.

Drifter’s Escape – A drifter rolls into town, just trying to get by, while The Man and The Devil each try to take his soul. An amazing game about power, evil, and the bargains we have to make to survive.

On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon – A silly game perfect for one shots and ridiculousness – crappy little dragons confused about the world try to “kidnap a princess”…and usually manage to only get themselves into trouble.

The Fiction Hurdle

(Some more thoughts, along the lines of The Concept Hurdle)

Most of the time, if we’re going to sit down and watch a movie, or read a book, we want a little bit of an idea of what it’s about – this is simply to decide if we’re in the mood for this thing.

Unfortunately, what we’ve had historically is games mislabeling these things (“This is a game of wonderous fantasy adventure!” “Actually you grime around in a dark dungeon hoping not to die”), giving a direction with no advice how to get there (“Be heroic!”), or having no direction at all, and the group either has to develop their own tools or flounder.

Fiction Hurdle

The Fiction Hurdle is how a group needs to know the answers to these questions for satisfying and functional play:

What kind of conflicts make sense for this game?

What kind of protagonists make sense for this game?

What kind of outcomes make sense for this game?

Typically, though, what we’ve seen happen is that many games leave this open without tools for negotiating it, and the default falls to a GM to establish these in play, with players who cannot pick up on the correct answers for the group (or refusing them) either being ejected from a group or grudgingly tolerated.

We’d also see that the usual fallbacks to solving this for traditional games were either to have an extensive set of fiction to establish the answers for these (“Read these 200 pages then you’ll get it!”) or to fall into a well established genre (“Golden Age Superheroes”, “Licensed-based game based on well known TV or book series”).

Knowing these is important regardless of whether you’re playing a player-input heavy game or a traditional “I control only my characters” kind of game – because even the players want to know what they’re getting into, and when games are significantly longer than movies, it’s a larger commitment of time and energy.

Design Standpoint

From a design standpoint, you want to either answer these completely and communicate it in your game, or, at least, answer it significantly and give tools for the group to finish the rest.   It certainly has to be more than “develop your play style” advice.

This stuff is communicated in: the tone throughout the book, the examples, play advice, example adventures/scenarios, example characters, fiction in the book, artwork and imagery.

(Small related note with regards to representation in games: under “What kind of protagonists make sense for this game?” if your game only presents white people, or men, in the artwork, that also says something… There’s a couple of games I point to where the text says “These are brown people” and the artwork only shows white people.  That’s pretty interesting in terms of what messages the game is presenting…)

Playing At the Table Standpoint

Part of what got me to thinking about this is that when a game is doing it’s job on this front, when I put together a quicksheet, it’s pretty much rules focused, but when a game is not doing it’s job, I have to lay out some of this in the quicksheet so the group can align in play.

Examples of the Hurdle

A few years back I was playtesting Dog Eat Dog – one of the players went into this elaborate description of building a cave hideout full of traps because it was clear he was thinking this game was some kind of survivalist thing when the game mechanics and structure, make such precautions useless, pointless, and counterproductive to the focus of play.   Basically, he didn’t know what kind of conflicts made sense for the game.

My first time running Dogs in the Vineyard, a player wanted to play an older, sinning Dog who basically broke all the rules all the time.   While this could be interesting at the edge of play, what it did was pull things off kilter – the player didn’t know what kind of protagonist made sense for the game.  (and, later, I’d see Vincent’s advice to simply play the game with the characters being simple Dogs – 19, fresh out of training, etc.).

For awhile, I played quite a few games of Falling Blossoms – a samurai game where the outcomes have a sort of back and forth bidding mechanic (“If X happens, then Y happens”).  The problem that would regularly occur is that we’d start sliding into gonzo territory (“Then the demons appear!”) which, in hindsight, made for a weaker game.  We didn’t know what kind of outcomes (or really, boundaries for outcomes) made sense for the game.