SUN-03 The Chargen Circle

[ping]

It was the perfect way to wind down the weekend.

A whirling dervish of chargen. I rolled a really bland colored (beige & grey) Maid with laser beam eyes and we rolled up a Space Castle with an atmospheric shield (it's space after all) and game room where you can take your clothes off. I'll leave Mike, David, and Kynnin to describe their own maids.

Then we collectively did Star Trek and just about killed ourselves and I don't think we actually graduated from Starfleet Academy. This was possibly due to waiting around for Mike's character to pass his first ship tour. Mike kept flunking and having to go back again and again on tour before making Ensign. Yeah, it was that or possibly the fifty thousand skills you had to write down - dunno, a little of column A, a little of column B. My Vulcan T'(something) was better at brawling than anything else, even 3-D chess. Must have got beaten up a lot in the space playgrounds of Vulcan.

We closed out with some old skool Traveller - that's LT COL Starkiller of the army and low passage to you!

What else did everyone make? I could see books and dice everywhere.

[GregF]

I was also part of the Star Trek fiasco- probably the one notable thing I saw other than that (my Traveller character got kicked out of the service before he even got to die.) was Reign, where you can do everything with one roll. 11d10 and a lot of table lookups said that I had an odd birthmark, a far-off lover, and had spent as a sailor, a soldier, and a beggar before settling in as a merchant. Or something.

I still have all these sheets somewhere, and part of my packratty rules is to never destroy character sheets, because they're people! Not sure how this qualifies...

[John Powell]

I'll have to bring Space Quest and a scientific calculator for next year's Circle. Here's a basic description that doesn't really cover how horrible of a game this is:

Space Quest
1st ed by Paul Hume, George Nyhen (1977) Tyr Gamemakers Ltd
A spacefaring sci-fi RPG. It uses a d30-based system with class-based character creation and level-based advancement. The basic system includes six classes (spacers, warriors, mutates/psionics, technics, or biotechs) and three races. The basic system also includes random star system generation, though based on the erroneous Bode's Law.

[kscott]

Going from memory, my Maid was a vermillion and silver–uniformed innocent*/heroine cyborg with a taste for cigarettes and a tendency to accidentally-deliberately set things on fire. Her weapon of choice was bombs (incendiary, I'm assuming), and she had a will of steel to match her visibly-steel chassis.

(* Apparently "lolita maid style" means young, innocent, and charming. Terminology appears to have drifted from the source material somewhat.)

My Star Trek cadet was a human who was good for little except for her LUK 100 and decent skill speaking Klingon. Got an undistinguished Ensign on her first military cruise, then died in a horrible fire/rocks falling/everyone dies/spacetime anomaly/Klingons incident before she could choose her advanced school of training. I blame the ridiculous lists of lists of lists of percentile-graded skills. Also the fact that the book seemed to have the character creation steps in a slightly shuffled order.

Traveller chargen was fun. Who hasn't heard of its (in)famous random character generation system in which your character can die before play? I'd never actually seen it though, and imagined massive tables and flowcharts, but it reality it was really quite modest. That you can get such a variety of characters out of such a simple system is impressive.

Next year I'm going to bring Mutant Chronicles, which has a chargen system akin to Traveller's in that you can die in chargen, but which actually does have all those tables and flowcharts that I was imagining in Traveller.

It was entertaining to hear the results of the other chargens going on around us. Was there a possum-shapeshifting superhero at the table? Was that the same character who could generated hurricanes?

[ping]

Traveller chargen was fun. Who hasn't heard of its (in)famous random character generation system in which your character can die before play? I'd never actually seen it though, and imagined massive tables and flowcharts, but it reality it was really quite modest. That you can get such a variety of characters out of such a simple system is impressive.

I agree. I am more and more impressed by the original Traveller chargen system each time. It's elegant and rich without needing huge numbers of tables because each choice is so important (you're getting older, do you re-enlist and risk the chance of dying) and the upgrades are unique enough that they really speak to what the character focused on during their tour. Compare that to the Star Trek masochism. It was 1000x more complicated and unintelligible and yet the characters were far less developed for the amount of effort and paper on our part. I mean does anyone playing a Star Trek game really need to know what their character took as extracurricular electives in Year 2 of the Academy? Do you need to know what he had for breakfast on graduation day?

[kscott]

To be fair(ish) to Star Trek, there was a disconnect between what the designers thought players needed to get out of the process and what we, in the Chargen Circle, were hoping to get out of the process. The stuff that we seemed to enjoy most were the turns of events, while what the designers were focused on were building up stats and skills through a detailed history. If we could somehow streamline the acquisition of skills and assignment of skill points so that we could skip to the interesting bits (which depend on those numbers) like tours of duty and horrible asteroids falling accidents, then I think Star Trek would be a much more enjoyable Chargen Circle activity.

As it was, it was certainly an experience. There's something to say for getting a bit of exposure to a piece of roleplaying history that, today, I would probably avoid like the plague!

But on that note, now I kind of want to play original Traveller, warts and all.

[Ben Robbins]

It was entertaining to hear the results of the other chargens going on around us. Was there a possum-shapeshifting superhero at the table? Was that the same character who could generated hurricanes?

Different characters, but combining them might have been even better...

The superhero was in Villains & Vigilantes, but only after I got special dispensation from the Circle to make a character who wasn't _me_ with superpowers, side-stepping the whole "gee, do you really think you're that smart?" phase of character creation.

I rolled Weather Control (but only Rain and Hurricanes), Enhanced Speed (Flash-style superspeed) and Telekinesis. Putting that all together I came up with: The Flash Flood! She races in on waves of fury, drowning evil where she finds it! Sometimes she moves objects with her mind! (yeah, I have no idea why, sue me) She was looking ultra wimpy (4 hp, d3 damage), until I noticed she could attack with her Hurricanes for 2d12! Go team!

My ninja-opossum didn't actually shapeshift: he'd already been mutated by [insert origin here] into an anthropomorphic ass-kicker. That's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, baby. Palladium-bog aside, the system for mutating animals is a surprisingly nice piece of rules design.