So I finished the career paths thing I was working on. It was a fun little project. Defined goal. No risk of it going over 10 pages. It's sorta generic, but I guess that's the intent, so that people can adapt it to their home games. Making a career is pretty easy--you just need to come up with 24 entries and throw them in a table.
I've also been obsessing over the statistics of the project because I'm an idiot, but let's not talk about that.
A few test characters were born this morning. It feels about right. So far I've gotten a cleric who's god sent him a vision that taught him how to party, because he was such a goody-two-shoes stick in the mud, which doesn't quite suite the Moon God. I also got a noblewoman who hangs out with military dudes talking about military stuff in an attempt to be popular, but all she really wants to do is dance. (It is, literally, the only thing keeping her sane.) Which will be tough, with her 3 Dex.
Why am I telling you this? You can roll your own.
I thought it would be sort of a pain in the ass, but it's actually sort of fun to roll up a character using it. Each section (Childhood, Adolescence, Adulthood) sort of flows into the next. So you find yourself considering your childhood when making choices in the adolescence step, and you find yourself looking at your adolescence step when choosing what career you want to go into (and also looking at your stats so far).
I think this is a pretty cool departure from the usual method of background generation, where you roll all of your stats on one page, and then you roll all your history at once on a different page, and then it's your job to assemble a narrative out of that giant pile of unedited stuff.
Let me know if you find any typos.
I fucking hate typos.
This is the best.
ReplyDeleteThis is a pretty cool document!
ReplyDeleteOne comment I have is that some of the tables are... odd? Say the Statistically Anal Method is 1-15. What are we supposed to roll on it? Similarly, the career tables are 1-24. I don't think I can easily own a d24.
Besides that, looks fabulous.
True! I'm sorry about the tables. They were designed for math, not ease-of-use.
DeleteThe big design constraint for this project is that it needs to produce the same spread of numbers as 3d6-in-order. So that means that I can't have the tables mentioning Strength more than Dexterity, for example.
The Statistically Anal Method is the worst, because that table represents every possible combination of question pairings that will give you all six stats, in order to eliminate correlative bias. I've been rolling a d20 and just rerolling results of 16-20.
Honestly, just use the d5 table above it. No one will ever know the difference, or care.
Just use a D3 with a D5 to simulate a D15 and use a D2 with a D12 to simulate a D24.
DeleteAwesome!
ReplyDeleteAs a young child, I was picked on and easily embarrassed by my peers, leading me to spend time indoors at the family cabin. I was still my father's favorite, perhaps because I took so readily to reading, and he often took me with him on his travels through the forest. One time,we chanced upon a strange wizard who we travelled alongside for several days, and this memory has particularly stuck with me. Later, after growing out of my shell, our village was attacked by orcs. Rather than seek to die in a meaningless suicide, I chose to wait and organized an ambush the next day, freeing many of the villagers who had been taken as slaves. I found my father, the man I once adored, and told him bluntly my mother was dead and when he sought to hug me, I turned away. I went further into the forest that day and did not return to my village, choosing to live as remotely as possible. I almost starved that first winter, but I survived. The next year, I met a stranger who was dying of starvation and wounds and I offered to share my supplies with him. He took what I gave him, only to die himself from disease and I almost died myself from the encounter. Helping others can be a curse. To keep myself better fed, I learned to fish and soon enough, I had great mastery of the forest itself. However, I find myself recalling meeting that strange wizard and I have found myself returning to towns once more, seeking books on wisdom and philosophy. Perhaps I should seek to learn more...
STR 6, DEX 14 CON 8 INT 12 WIS 8 CHA 9
Skills: fishing, forests, philosophy
Probably gonna be a newly apprenticed wizard or something, but still very attune to the wild.
Out of wilderness: a wizard. I like it.
DeleteRolled up two characters, one more interesting than the other. (By which I mean, one would need a bit more thought to make interesting, while the other had a crazy life story immediately pop out of the charts.)
ReplyDeleteThe first one had a poor childhood - from a small family, but nobody loved her. She was picked on and got caught stealing, and planned to move away from it all but couldn't. Joined the clergy and spent most of her career calling people to prayer and serving various gods. Stats were STR 3, DEX 5, WIS 9, and INT, CON, and CHA 11.
Second one was the favorite and won most of his fights, but his puberty was awkward, marred by watching a villager kill himself. After that he spent a lot of time in his secret place, speaking to his many imaginary friends.
As a teen, he meddled in other people's affairs, usually giving them blunt & unvarnished bad news. And he chose his love for God over a career.
Here's where it gets interesting. He knew about money from his previous life, but spent his second year under a vow of poverty prompted by a vision. Which was lucky, because he wasn't at the monastery when tragedy struck - a hostile nation attacked and persecuted his faith. He kept himself and other refugee faithful together, earning money as an apprentice tailor in a heathen city. Finally returning to his homeland, he spent a year burying and blessing the many dead. Now, he's been trained to fight the evil at its source - the demons which brought this fate upon them.
There's an interesting momentum effect with adulthood - entering it with high stats gets you a lot of pluses, pushing your final stats even higher. Going in with low stats pulls you down at the end. With that in mind, I might let people discard their first set of rolls at childhood.
Hey I'd like to edit the document slightly and conform it for use with Goodman Games' DCC rules, would that be okay with you? I started doing it by hand and then was all like "this would be so much easier with find/replace" so ... can I get the source document for fiddling?
ReplyDeleteI FOUDN A TYPO
ReplyDeleteCLERGY PATH ENTRY 19 YOU LIFE WAS DIFFERENT BEFORE
The gods of spilling take note. Also, Crom does, but Crom laffs
Also, this thing is magickal