ACT I of a Campaign, Alternative Character Creation - OG Myth-Weavers

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ACT I of a Campaign, Alternative Character Creation

   
ACT I of a Campaign, Alternative Character Creation

One of the things I have always wanted to try was running a campaign where the first act is run sort of like the start to the first fable game. The basic idea is that the campaign world has societies that are sort of like the Pathfinder Society or "adventurers guilds" though I think that is probably a poor name for them. In essence different nations and organizations have institutions where they raise and train adventurers, agents, mercenaries, and general elites that are they recruited into other organizations or simply allowed to go out on their own as long as they retain some sort of relationship to the society. I guess a good example would be the Ninja Villages in Naruto.

The purpose of trying this type of start is to see if its a good environment for extremely strong character generation where the players can form firm roots for their characters relationships to each-other and have their characters abilities and specialization grow in a more natural way.

I generally like to just go to town with homebrewing parts of the campaign to suit exactly what I want the "feel" of the campaign to be. Generally this doesn't affect core rules as far as "I want to homebrew X to do whatever because I think its slightly over or underpowered" instead here are some examples of what I was thinking for this homebrew character creation.
  • Everyone starts out without a class.
  • Everyone starts at a young age (I'll probably homebrew the races to not have vastly different maturity ages)
  • Everyone starts with 3d6 attribute rolls, rolled straight down the line
  • Discuss with each player "If they could have one talent/ability for their character what would it be?"
  • A general understanding that regardless of what your characters backstory is he/she has to want to graduate from the academy
  • After the core attributes are rolled, write a backstory that includes, who your characters family is, how your character survived before arriving at the academy, who you met when you entered the academy/how you joined, as well as the general personality you have developed so far (there will be plenty of room for your character to change personalities while growing up at the academy)
  • I'd like to run the first act like how time passes during a harry potter novel, but have there be clear systems in place where the players can allocate time towards improving their attributes and learning skills. My goal is for it to be entirely possible to start out with poor stats for a class and still have the player be able to function well as that class in a unique way by the end of the academy.
  • The characters will discover talents that their character can harbor that will function like advantages in GURPS. These will significantly affect how their characters interact with some classes but should be very fun.
  • Towards the end of the act the players will leave the academy to mentor with specific NPCs where they will learn their class. (I don't plan on this taking very long in real world time because I'd rather keep the party together and the game moving forward but it will probably be pretty fun so maybe the players will want to use this time as an option to develop their characters in a unique way privately from the other players)
  • The characters will then meet up and go on thier first adventure together. (This is the part where the guild watches them and assesses them as a party.)
  • The climax of the first act is the world graduation tournament where the different schools send their graduates to compete against the other schools. This is to stir friendly competition, to show of the schools "crop", and to give a chance for the individual parties to make a name for themselves.

THE GOLDEN RULEI think the most important step in making this work will be constant discussion with the players. This isn't something that I want to be tedious simulation mumbo jumbo, I want it to be a chance for everyone to have a unique experience where the party and the characters form together, both mechanically and non mechanically.


So here's some things that I want to ask.
  • Do you think I'm wasting my time thinking about this, am I the only one that will find this fun?
  • I want to have in academy adventures along side the "training/class" segments. Think Harry Potter shinanigans on campus, ideally I want the group to act out and make their own shinanigans as long as their first reaction isn't "We need to get out of the school as fast as possible" which I'm pretty worried about.
  • For the class training part, if you were a player, would you rather have a 1 on 1 mentor type thing where you study your class (think Legend of Zoro)? Or would you rather be sent to like, the cleric branch where you learn how to be a cleric with other cleric students (think the part of KOTOR where you join the Koriban Sith Academy).
  • Has anyone tired this type of start before? How did it work out?

Anyways just an idea I had for at least the first part of a campaign. I'd like to have awesome overarching plot stuff be clear by the time they get out of the academy.

This type of format also gives me a very good insight into what type of campaign they want to run. They can even officially decide that when they leave the academy. "We are the party that hunts vampires and we work for ourselves!" or "Our party is a section of this mercenary group and we operate as a sledgehammer on the battlefield!"

Not sure what system you are using but if you are using pathfinder, there are ways to do it:

-You can roll or do point buy, up to you.

-You can start with young characters, they all start with npc classes and even some scores adjustment for being younger, yeah feel free to play around with the ages.

-They can retrain their npc class into the class that they want. Essentially replaces, now if you want to use npcs or whatever to teach them about it meanwhile, it can work fine.

-Ultimate campaign offers background generator for your character backstory which is of course available online. Giving them a more concrete place into the world/campaign. Of course since you start them young, don't need to do more than Step 1 (determine family, homeland, and childhood). If you use traits in your campaign, background also does help in the choices of traits.

I was planning on D&D 5e, I probably should have mentioned that, I don't really know any established campaign settings so I probably won't use any campaign setting sourcebooks.

Players could use any random background generator they want, actually listing a few in the character gen section would probably be a great idea. I'll look at the young characters rules and use those as reference.

I think rolling is definitely where I want to go as far as character generation. I find that rolling isn't nearly as much of an issue as most people make it out to be, I'm not going to make someone play a character they are going to hate playing, but I find that with point buy people don't tend to stretch outside of positions they are comfortable with.

This doesn't sound too far off from some games I've seen advertised, or one campaign I'm in: Vellerion Chronicles. You might want to take a look. The basic premise is it's a 5e game on a homebrew world where all the PCs start as young teens as applicants to basically Adventurer College. Graduates can go off and do whatever but they're expected to take missions for the school when required. This campaign also had the only pre-game rp I liked because it was integrated into the storyline.

Some of the stuff you want to do is real different, but so far this game has been very successful, so it might be worth checking out for ideas.

I'll apply as a reader? I think that's how that works, I'm not sure, I'm pretty new to the weave but I know being a reader in a campaign is a thing. I think reading through a similar game would be a very strong tool to take advantage of if your DM/PC's don't mind.

At the very least thanks for the reassurance. Its nice to know something like this has been tried before and worked out well.

I may actually just make this a GURPS game. I've never played GURPS but its the system I have always wanted to learn/master. If I'm going to be jumping in the deep end as far as my first play by post game might as well learn GURPS at the same time. That transition is never going to be easier anyways. If I do both at the same time I can truly spend a lot of my focus as a person on taking in and maximizing the new experiences.

You don't have to apply as a reader since the game isn't private. In this circumstance, I think the only benefit of being a reader is being able to see any private text. You can just find the game from the link in my profile's games list.

I'd like to see this put into play too... Tried it once for SAGA, but it only lead to a poorly planned series of skill checks. (Most likely I'd want to blame my lack of role-playing requirements.)

I have run and played in games like this, but without the focus on Guilds or Schools. Effectively, the characters are tossed into danger and their actions dictate was classes and abilities they gain going forward.
  • One instance, I used typical classes and each character got one after awhile.
  • In another, I made new classes for each character (3 PCs). Balance wasn't much of an issue because the group was small and everyone was homebrew.
  • One game, the GM took notes (much like I did in my game) but kept them secret. 95% of the players were new to D&D and I thought this worked well for them. They had preconceived notions and GitP MinMax tips, this eliminated those.

Things to be on the lookout for:
  • Players are sneaky as hell. They will bend a character to the class they want no matter what you toss in front of them and/or regardless of the foundation they've built for the character.
  • Storylines dictate actions (with good players/writers). In my game of homebrew classes, there was a bent toward natural magic due to the setting. One character got some ranger spells purely by default of the actions taken that he otherwise would not have been able to avoid. KEEP THIS IN MIND.
  • Doing it all while also playing is a fun mix, however make sure the story holds up. Otherwise, you're simply delay the Character Generation and not giving the characters or the players much use for Act 1. Essentially, they'll be just playing along in the hopes that Act 2 gets to the heart of things. In PbP, games take long enough as it is and they are especially fragile in the early stages. Doing things this way always has a high attrition rate. Be prepared for this.

I'll think of more things, but that's off the top of my head.

Make the base characters all even enough to promote an open minded writer. Make the opportunities open enough to sustain that open-mindedness. Make Act 1 personal enough to make it worth the effort for the journey of the story and the characters.

P.S. I like games like this, so I hope my warnings and whatnot do not keep you from moving forward.

Thanks for the warnings. Yeah I figured Play by Post has advantages and disadvantages for trying this. Some of the advantages include
  • Its much easier to handle some things privately and simultaneously during the game.
  • In my opinion its easier to personally address each player during the game because you don't have to put what everyone else is doing on hold.

But the disadvantages you listed certainly exist and I'm prioritizing addressing them as I work on my concept document.

But the plan isn't to pick the right class for a character/player I think that would really just make it delayed character generation and ultimately I'm going to let the players pick whatever class they want, I'm not going to surprise them with a class. The goal is to give them naturally developed bonus's and advancements that aren't necessarily in the books and are generated through roleplaying that may shift how they may play or what class they may want to play. If through classes/random roles they discover their character has a talent for healing magic i want to give them the option to expand on that talent and gain that type of skill while giving them the flexibility to not necessarily say they have to play a cleric/paladin. They could very well otherwise be a character very suited to being a rogue or a wizard and they could end up being a rogue/wizard that can heal. They could also just ignore that talent and focus on something else gaining a higher level of proficiency with that skill/stat. Maybe player a) just wants to lift weights all day and become a super swole barbarian. He could end up being extremely strong and also have a talent that I think is reasonable because he spent so much time focusing on that.

All I really care about is that the entire party likes their characters and there's a semblance of group synergy and balance between the members. I can balance the encounters afterwords. In my opinion making balance your number 1 concern at the table is a mistake that a lot of DM's fall into.

Totally agree. I've played both; giving the characters their first level in a class and allowing the players to decided after a dedicated amount of roleplaying has been achieved.

I got away with picking/creating for the players because I had a group that trusted me. It was a relationship that started before that particular game began.

When I ran the one where they choose (and they too got some minor bonuses along the way via GM/reactionary gifts), I did find that some -NOT ALL- of the players had a tendency to try and fill in as many actions that would 'get' them things as possible. Like a CharGen land grab. I would have to repeated explain that time and energy would need to be dedicated to certain aspects and some of them understood, while others were content to tally-mark their way to X, Y, and bonus to Z.

But I think going into the program (let's call it that, since you're effectively run it this way) with reservations and some earmarked warnings has put you head-and-shoulders above some GMs who simply jump in head first.

Good luck!





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