Massive Chart Chargen

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Username17
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Massive Chart Chargen

Post by Username17 »

So I was working on Sentai Fhtagn today, and that got me to think about the ramifications of big chart character generation. First off, I think we can all understand the payoffs and limitations of random chargen versus point buy. And I think we can equally agree at this point that point buy is the winner when players are expected to come to the table with a backstory pre-written - if you can write a five paragraph essay about why you character wants to overthrow the political order of Houston, you can spend your own damn skill points. But equally, I think it is non-controversial that the advantages of randomizers are clearly ahead when characters are introduced to the story before any of the players have elected to care about them.

Most RPGs that fit into that last criteria do so because of a high fatality rate of characters. If you have to put together a new character in five minutes or leave the game table because your last character died - the ability to literally "roll one up" becomes very attractive. And if this is happening to one or more players every session, that quick and dirty random generation is mandatory. Sentai Fhtagn doesn't necessarily have to be a high fatality game, but because of the Agency, the players will have the potential to promote characters from being background characters or even just names on a list to point of view characters at a moment's notice.

Which brings us around to the advantages and limitations of rolling on big charts. The advantage obviously is that it is done quickly and doesn't require you to come into the character generation with inspiration. The dice provide a prompt rather than a palette. The big chart also provides a lot of potential outcomes. But rolling on big charts is basically incompatible with the fixed skill systems that a lot of modern games use. Whether you're talking about After Sundown, Shadowrun or Vampire, the usual way of doing things is to try to make actions the unambiguous domain of one skill - that cannot work with a big chart.

While the big chart gives you a lot of potential outcomes, it gives you almost as many outcomes that you don't get. So if you have tasks that can only be performed by a single skill, the vast majority of characters will not be able to do those actions. This mean that the fundamental means of performing an action can't be the 3rd edition D&D system of having the DM tell you which skill to roll to complete an action, it has to have the cooperative narration at a different level - one where the player says which skill they are going to use for the current action and the MC deciding how relevant it is. In short, something a lot more like the Secondary Skills of 2nd edition AD&D than the NWPs of that same game.

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Post by mlangsdorf »

You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together.

I don't see what the difference is between deciding to play an Investigator agent with Diplomacy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills (which leaves me out of magical investigation and mecha piloting minigames) and rolling on a big chart that my character's profession is Investigator and he has the Diplomancy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills.
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Post by hyzmarca »

mlangsdorf wrote:You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together.

I don't see what the difference is between deciding to play an Investigator agent with Diplomacy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills (which leaves me out of magical investigation and mecha piloting minigames) and rolling on a big chart that my character's profession is Investigator and he has the Diplomancy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills.

The issue is that you'll eventually roll on a big chart an investigator with Craft:Wicker, Perform:Interpretive Dance, Perform: Synchronized Swimming, and Knowledge: Obscure 16th Century Plays.
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Post by rampaging-poet »

So bundle several important skills together per profession, roll on a chart of bundles, and then take a separate roll or two from the big skill list to pad them out. That way your investigators always have a few skills useful to actual investigations and some random stuff too.
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Post by Mord »

The skill list for any campaign should be somewhat dynamic - if the MC knows that Craft:Wicker isn't going to have an opportunity to play an important role in the story, he should take Craft:Wicker out of the big chart. On the other hand, if your campaign is "Wiccan: The Wickering," maybe more entries on the big chart need to have Craft:Wicker in them. Some kind of multi-table reference scheme seems like the only way to accomplish this without computer assistance, though.
Last edited by Mord on Tue Jun 07, 2016 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hyzmarca »

rampaging-poet wrote:So bundle several important skills together per profession, roll on a chart of bundles, and then take a separate roll or two from the big skill list to pad them out. That way your investigators always have a few skills useful to actual investigations and some random stuff too.
The other issue is that your random rolls could create a party of 4 investigators with Search, Diplomacy, Interrogation, and Pistols. In which case you're screwed if you have to do anything that doesn't involve those skills. If you absolutely need a nuclear physicist in your party but no one rolls up the Nuclear Physics skill, then you're screwed.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Tue Jun 07, 2016 2:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Let's say there's an Investigation skill like we were playing Vampire. Obviously, someone on your team is going to need to have that. If the chart has a reasonable chance of spitting that out after three to six characters, then the chart isn't particularly massive. So you can't have big mandatory skills and massive charts at the same time. You could have big mandatory skills and tiny charts. Or you could have replaceable skills and big charts.

Now one thing that Sentai Fhtagn is going to do is have Profession Skills. That is, if you recruit a Hard Trooper, they definitely have combat skills. And if they become POV characters you roll up additional traits.

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Post by Kaelik »

FrankTrollman wrote:Now one thing that Sentai Fhtagn is going to do is have Profession Skills. That is, if you recruit a Hard Trooper, they definitely have combat skills. And if they become POV characters you roll up additional traits.

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Does this mean something like uhhh, I forgot the name, but the "Other" skills in Aftersundown, where you have a Profession, and when something comes up, you Relate it back to your profession, and then you roll on your profession as the main skill system? Like, Oh, well this is a Cult thing, so my Anthropologist gets to roll on it with no penalty, because obviously he knows about cults. Whereas Soldier is going to just have to not roll or roll with severe penalty?
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

It's probably not a great design choice, but you could totally do a hybrid system:

You pick a tag for a character, and the character gets a package of "Career Skills" related to that tag. For example: he's in the group because he's your Detective - so he has the skill package of "Find Clues, Have Police Contacts, and Interrogate Suspect" that all Detectives get - because you wouldn't hire a Detective without those. Thus the essential role of the character is selected rather than rolled.

But to differentiate characters with the same Career Skills, you then have random rolls some other large charts. For the purposes of this quick example, I'll posit just three: the character background, education, and hobbies charts.

So you could end up with a Detective who is gets the "mean streets" background, the "personal mentor" education and the hobby of "model airplanes". His street background gives him Politics, Stealth and Knowledge: Gangs. His mentor education gives him additional contacts and a way to reroll failures on Career skills after talking to his mentor and his hobby of building toy planes gives him minor knowledge of aeronautical engineering. This guy is probably a rumpled, hands-on PI type Detective.

Or you could end up with a Detective who got the "influential family" background the "self-taught hacker" education and the "raises rare insects" hobby. His family background gives him posh contacts and lets him name-drop to cut red tape. His hacker background gives him Jury-Rigging, Cryptography and Scientific Analysis. And his hobby has fringe relevance to toxicology and maybe xeno-biology. This guy is an unorthodox whiz kid who does Detective stuff by tailing with drones and enhancing images.

Or you could end up with a Detective who got the "comfortable working class" background, the "military academy" education and the "deep sea fishing" hobby. His background gives him bonuses to "empathy" and "common knowledge" skills his education gives him skills relating to logistics and deployment tactics and his hobby gives him oceanography and boat piloting skills. This guy is a quiet careerist who fits comfortably into middle management.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Tue Jun 07, 2016 7:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Ice9 »

Something that came to mind from the Pathfinder thread - random chargen to start, then customize over time? So the time invested in the mechanics of the character roughly keeps pace with the lastingness and RP importance of said character.

For example, in addition to whatever advancement exists, the player could swap X skills / X points after the end of each session.

Pro:
* Not stuck playing a character you dislike mechanically.
* Solves the "required skills" issue - even if you roll a team with all the same skills and no Investigation, then that'll be solved after one session, and the characters fairly differentiated after another couple.
* Lets you have something to fiddle with between games even when advancement is slow.

Con:
* Character's background inherently mutable, at least for the first several sessions.
* Unlike pure random, you can't slack off on balance; if some skills are just better, characters will shift into them over time.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

hyzmarca wrote:
mlangsdorf wrote:You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together.

...rolling on a big chart that my character's profession is Investigator and he has the Diplomancy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills.
The issue is that you'll eventually roll on a big chart an investigator with Craft:Wicker, Perform:Interpretive Dance, Perform: Synchronized Swimming, and Knowledge: Obscure 16th Century Plays.
I assumed but didn't make as clear as I'd like that the thing you roll on the big chart is your profession and the skills come bundled with the profession.

Alternately, you could have a bunch of individual big charts for the various mini-games, so everyone gets an Investigate skill, a Vehicle skill, a combat skill suite and then you get a couple of random rolls to round out your character.

I'm not sure what the difficulty is in providing several medium sized charts (20-40 entries each) that give out profession (bundled with tag skills and basic gear), random secondary skills, random hobby skills, and random/flaws perks so that in 5-6 rolls you've generated a functional character from a pool of 20^5 options.
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Post by Grek »

For Sentai Fhtagn specifically, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't combine the two. You make the base character by rolling on random charts that give you whatever the chart has, then apply your point-buy based Agency Training Template that you made at the original Agency Design phase of chargen and which contains core investigative competencies like Investigate, Combat and Stealth. Rolling up a new character is still easy because there are no non-random selections to be made during that particular process - all of the choice was done previously, at the start of the campaign.
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Post by Username17 »

Kaelik wrote:Does this mean something like uhhh, I forgot the name, but the "Other" skills in Aftersundown, where you have a Profession, and when something comes up, you Relate it back to your profession, and then you roll on your profession as the main skill system? Like, Oh, well this is a Cult thing, so my Anthropologist gets to roll on it with no penalty, because obviously he knows about cults. Whereas Soldier is going to just have to not roll or roll with severe penalty?
It would be possible to do an After Sundown deal where there were mission critical skills and a potentially unlimited number of non-mission critical skills. And then players could get their access to mission critical skills by fiat or tiny charts and the non-mission critical skills by massive chart. But Sentai Fhtagn has tiers, which means that different characters live in eco systems where different skills are mission critical. So there are characters who are Senshi and have to be able to fight and defend themselves from psionic brain whips and shit, and there are characters who are technicians who... don't.

The goal is to have something that plays out like a Star Trek series. There are various unimportant characters who have names and titles and can be expected to do their damn jobs. Ensign Sito Jaxa can pilot things because when you purchased her for the Agency you purchased a Pilot. And then if she gets screen time and developes backstory she'll be able to do other stuff.

Structurally, when you buy characters they are generic and able to do their jobs - like Warhammer or Warmachine models. And when you hop into them to make them POV characters or they are for some reason important, you can roll up specifics for them. And that gives you a thing to hang your hat on in the cooperative storytelling aspect. And once you've started playing around and as a character you can buy additional specific backstory by spending Narrative Imperative.

The progression is thus: Gamepiece -> Prompted Role Play -> Player Created Narrative.

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Post by Dogbert »

mlangsdorf wrote:You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together.
And I dare you to provide evidence that habanero sauce and wedding cakes can't work together.

It's all about expectations and target demografics. If I'm invited to a game where I'm expected to give a flying fuck for the gaming world, your story, and my character, then you better don't tell me "3d6 in order" because I'm shoving your dice up where the sun doesn't shine and, by the same token, don't invite me to some beer&pretzels game only to waste the whole day in chargen.

You just asked us to disprove the same kind of fallacy as "the game that has something for everyone."
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Post by Orion »

When you promote minor characters, they presumably already have jobs. When you promote the mechanic who repairs your helicopter to a player character, they should be automatically assigned some kind of "mechanic" package that comes with the Repair and Sabotage skills that they need.

Instead of or in addition to that, you could allow the players to override any one roll during the rolling-up process to force a result that gave them something they needed, or something implied by existing backstory.
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