Monday, September 28, 2015

Fantasy Age Musings - Non-Randomized Character Creation

Fantasy Age's character creation process is almost entirely randomized. Players roll to generate their abilities, certain aspects of their race, their social class and background, and a few other things. Personally, I really dig this element to the game. I love letting the dice fall and seeing what kind of character I end up with.

However, I know some people would like a process that is a little less random, one where they could have a little more control over how their character turns out in the end. With that in mind, I thought I'd work out a method to achieve just that. Here's what it looks like:

  1. Players should use Option 2 for generating their abilities. This method gives each player 10 advancements to spend on generating each ability's score. The only restrictions are scores can't start above 3 and you can't lower one ability to gain more advancements. 
  2. Players may select two benefits from the table associated with their chosen race. However, you may only select one benefit that actually raises the score of an ability. For example, a player creating a dwarf could not select the two benefits that increase their Fighting & Willpower.
  3. Players may select one of the 4 social classes: Outsider, Lower Class, Middle Class, and Upper Class. Furthermore, they will also select one of the backgrounds tried to their selected social class, receiving one of the focuses associated with said background. 
  4. Mages receive 20 + Constitution + 6 Health, Rogues receive 25 + Constitution + 6 Health, and Warriors receive 30 + Constitution + 6 Health at 1st level. Characters receive their Constitution + 4 Health from levels 2 to 10, then just their Constitution every level thereafter.
The only element of randomness that I decided to keep with this system was the generation of starting wealth, mostly to prevent people from solely picking to play Upper Class characters because they receive the most silver pieces. However, everything else has been reworked to allow each player to select the different parts of their character.

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