Character Creation

[Sardukhar]

We've played all incantations of D&D...except 4th Edition which we spit upon...in the early incantations you had THACO which was a little troublesome. In the newer verison of the game it's far more streamlined and balanced.

DnD..ugh. I know, I know, it's GM, not system, but still. I just can't anymore. It's like that first picture of a pretty girl you used to ah, "relax to" in your teens. You know, the one on the cover of your Dad's science fiction novel. Now you look at her and feel a weird mix of boredom and shame. That's DnD for me. Loved Dragonlance and Ravenloft when they first came out. And the DnD Sci Fi adventure with the spaceship. ToEE sucked.

Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020/Interlock Unlimited: The setting is more modern so easier for players to identify with and it's gritty.

My favourite. Requires the least modification to sate my sense of "the real" and is slick, simple and fast to boot. Really ahead of it's time. Flaw: tough to entice people into a setting and game that is so "real" to them. Lacks mystique. Often degenerates to a shoot-fest unless all rules applied mercilessly.

Twilight 2000: Now i played the original...fun game but LOADS of charts to keep track of.

It's been years. Lots of fun, only played the original, pretty much. Great for exploration and fun to play in the 80s when WW3 was a very real possibility.

Shadowrun: Wasn't a fan of the original pen and paper version of this game and it's most likely because the gm was a moron.

This is too bad. I've run and played several of the now-innumerable versions. Also lots of fun and you get to shoot Elves. Being an Apache Cyber Street Samurai is straight-out rocking. Check out Shadowrun Returns. We ever get some online PnP going, I might run a bit of this as a flavour-alt to CP2020.

Deadlands Classic: One of the more original and best games I've ever played. If you ever wanted to be a cowboy...check it out.

Think we played this..once? Pretty cool, but cowboys not my RP thing. Slick chargen and system, though.

Call of Cthulu: This game is deadly with a capital D. Palladium also had a version of it called Beyond the Supernatural. I never played delta green, and in fact only heard of it recently.

I found FNFF deadlier, actually. In the long run, CoC for insanity, but in the short run, a .22 is fatal in FNFF. Delta Green is excellent. BTS is also tons of fun, but isn't really CoC. It's kind of like Supernatural meets CoC meets Friday the 13th the TV series. Also fun.

Marvel Superheroes: Was a cool game....

Hard to beat throwing Thor's hammer at bad guys and watching them go splat. We also played DC Heroes. A friend of mine played Grendel. And he killed a guy at Bruce Wayne's mansion and KOed Alfred. Batman gave chase. Heh. This was years before the Batman/Grendel cross overs.

Battletech: Was never really into the whole robotech or battletech phenomenon, but it wasn't a bad game.

Mechwarrior and Robotech were pretty different. Robotech was really WW2 Pacific War Alien Invasion, complete with sub stories. Mechwarrior was a gritty sci-fi rpg occasionally involving giant robots.

Gurps: Wasn't a huge fan...

Same. Just too generic. Pity, really, since there area gajillion settings for it. Wild Cards was a favourite with Gurps for us.

Palladium: You spent hours making characters for this game...

The heroes system {Which you need a degree in astrophysics to create a character} I bought these books because a friend of mine was running this game. I needed help drawing up my character for the dark champions setting...and years later I tried to look it over again and still don't understand it. They turned everything from equipment to stats into a science project. You want to buy a gun? No you have to call it an obvious accessible focus...the weirdest crap i ever saw.

Ahh..you mean the Champions - "Hero System" system! Not Heroes Unlimited systems from Palladium. Very different. And confusingly close names. You had me wondering. Palladium was pretty simple - abilities and stats were all random rolls. Very fast.

Champions, by Hero Games, using the Hero System, ( unlike Palladium Games Heroes Unlimited, heh), was tons of fun to make characters in and yeah, they went in a weird way. They abstracted most things, including guns and wealth and superpowers. Like GURPS only much, much more detailed, you could use the Hero System to model nearly any setting. They had you buying gear with XP instead of money in the default system.

Champions did let you make pretty much any superhero you could imagine, though.

 

[onosendai7]

Some funny questions from Amber Diceless RPG to help fleshing out a character...
Of course, they need to be adapted to the CP setting.

http://stuff.mit.edu/~endeavor/Hydra/longest.html

 

[jacqsynn]

I liked the Hero System I started on Champians 3rd Edition and went to 5th before I stopped. I also was very fond of the Western Hero setting with the Weird West options that was back before weird west like Deadlands was around.

 

[guidokpd]

The first thing I usually ask during character creations is what everyone else is making. Do not like to have a complete overlap since we only have 3 players at the moment. Then I think of who this person is, what does he want, what has he done. Yes, he. I have not played any female characters. Have played a few Bi ones. Do not like to over lap skill sets because of the way I build usually overshadows the other characters.

There are certain things I almost always do, if the characters have the money.

The lifepath helps to flesh out where he has been. I have moved things around in lifepath to make sense, but no ignoring a bad result. Then my characters grow from there.

One of my favorites grew from a gang member/thief into a cop/netrunner/pimp/pornking/slumlord. He changed from a kid with an inferiority complex to a decent, if lethal person. This was over 8 years of ingame time. He had a fairly complex backstory that never came out in game. In part because people rarely asked, and then when someone did ask one of the other players changed the subject.

Have played almost all the archetypes.
Chak sl Moray. Solo predator biosculpt.
Pedro "Keys" Rameriz. Gang member/thief to cop/netrunner/pimp/pornking/slumlord.
Peter. Medtech. Started running to pay for medical school. Wound up as psychiatrist who did his doctoral thesis on the edgerunner subculture.

 

[cycoholic]

Sometimes I have a straight out concept when I make up a character, sometimes it develops during character gen. I think also tend to be the only one in the group who will wait to see what everyone else is going to make for the campaign, then make a character to fill any void to balance the party. As a CP2020 example, I joined a group like 20 years ago, who had just started a Cop campaign (had only done 2 or 3 sessions). They had several Cops, a Solo, a techie, think we even had a token Media at the very start. Or maybe it was a Fixer. Anywho, I made up a Netrunner (obviously NetSec).

(as an aside, that's where my handle comes from, CyCo is an abbreviated version of cycoholic, which was the name for that character). To twist the character some (and I guess you could say fit a stereotype), he was actually a crim, who managed to wipe his slate clean, fab up a new ID, and switch sides to become a NetSec, as he had become bored of being on the wrong side of the law.

So sometimes my mind is made up before the game starts, sometimes it develops in Character Gen, and sometimes it's decided for me (those premade characters (rare these days) or 'filling a need' within the group.

Once, I had a character concept that started a long running game. We had basically finished a long running fantasy game, and were in between games. We were going into town shortly after to hit the FLGSs, and I happened to mention that my for my next character I'd like to play a Grenadier. That one character spawned a whole new setting, which went down as one of the most epic campaigns in out group, ever.

 

[teamfinnigan]

well you got to decide at least a general direction. I tend now to prefer hybrid type characters rather pure. Had a thief/netrunner. The thieving was so she could get the high tech items that were other wise out of her reach in her social circle. At start she was a better pickpocket than netrunner. She had no skill with firearms but was quite good with martial arts. Her downfall was she liked to party.