Project Obrigado: Character Creation

As I said on Twitter earlier today (Look, I have a widget! Make with the following.), the amount of positive feedback and offers of help I’ve gotten for this project has been amazing.  I have no illusions about being able to do this alone, and so seriously every link and suggestion is awesome.  So, onward and upward.  Character creation is something incredibly near to my heart, so I may be spending more time on it than I should.  One of my favorite parts of starting a new RPG is creating my character - I spend a lot of time in the customization screens and if there is an option for creating your own class I jump on that shit like nobody’s business.  But beyond my own personal preference, I do think that the process of character creation is pretty important for this project.  First off, I’ve decided that each player will have one character.  For one thing, that makes things simple and simple is good for a launching point.  Also, I mentioned in my last post that I want the focus of this game to be creating an extension of yourself and having that extension of you increase your stability.  Every aspect of the game should reflect and support that fundamental goal, and having more than one character would seem to contradict that.  But I also don’t want players to be locked into the choices they made at the start of the game - I’ll get into that in a bit.  

Most RPGs have you start out with a race and a class, but I’ve decided to kind of throw that mechanic out the window.  Hold on, don’t break out the pitchforks yet, I swear there was a logical reason behind this.  Locking players into one race and class at the beginning of the game has always been something that bothered me.  In tabletop RPGs there’s enough elasticity in the system to let you build pretty much any character you want, and that’s an idea I want to emphasize.  With enough effort you can make yourself into the kind of person you want to be.  Within reason, of course.  The kind of person I want to be is a smoking hot half-dragon (silver, natch) but that’s kind of outside the realm of possibility so I had to settle for a tattoo.  Back to the point, and that is that this project is focused on proactively making your life better.  Its easy for people like us to see ourselves as victims and to some extent we are victims of genetics/brain chemistry/circumstance/whatever, but I don’t believe that mindset is helpful.  The effect I would like to see is a shift from a victim mindset to a hero mindset.  Because let’s be honest, when we choose to deal with all the crap instead of letting it overwhelm us and make the effort to create for ourselves the life we want we are heroes.  I’m kind of getting sidetracked here.

So the first part of character creation will be customizing your appearance, and I should mention that in my brainstorming process I’m operating in the fantasy world where money is not a concern.  All major game production companies have called me personally to commit their support, I’ve got funding from the UN, and to top it all off an alien landed on my patio the other day that poops gold.  These are the parameters my brain has created, ok?  So in this perfect world appearance customization would be ridiculous, and pretty much the only restriction is that your character is humanoid.  Want to be a tall purple ferret-faced person?  Fine, go nuts.  Pouty-faced douchenozzle with too much hair product?  Done and done.  Wings?  Sure.  Horns?  Fantastic.  But that’s all it would be, appearance.  There wouldn’t be any bonuses or negatives attached whatever appearance archetype you chose.  Also, beyond cosmetic changes like hair color or tattoos changing your appearance wouldn’t be easy.  I’m not saying it would be impossible, but there would be some kind of quest involved if you want to drastically alter your character.  Being able to just pull up a menu and make yourself a foot taller would break the immersion I think.  

The next logical step in the RPG process would be choosing a class, which is where the most drastic changes come into play.  I want people to be able to create whatever type of character they want, so instead of defined classes there will be an array of action trees you can select from, and you won’t be limited in the number of action trees you can invest in.  Like I said in my last post, your character’s Equilibrium will determine how many special actions you have and you can put them anywhere.  So if you want to be a fire-magic wielding tank in heavy armor you can totally do that, just remember you will probably need a high PP to be able to use the armor.  If you want to mostly use ranged attacks but also dabble in some illusion and summoning magic that’s fine too.  I actually would encourage players to pick whatever looks attractive to them and try it out without thinking about it too much because one thing I am taking from D&D is the ability to take back your choices.  If you decide at level 9 that you don’t actually like the spear-throwing alchemist you created you can reset all your special actions and chose new ones.  This won’t be something you can just do whenever you want, however, but there would probably be a couple ways you can go about it.  There might be a quest you need to go on to defeat some big bad and open up a portal to the distant past to reshape your destiny.  Or, and I’m including this because no matter what the Internet trolls say there are gamers in this world who are more interested in the story than the combat, you might have the option of writing up a scenario that gives a reason why your character suddenly has an entirely new skillset.  If its reviewed and approved (so no submitting a 250 word essay full of Lorem Ipsum) you’re set to pick another archetype.

The third part of character creation is the one unique to this particular game, which I’m just calling your Profile.  This is where you would outline what kind of issues you face in your life and which ones affect you the most at any given point.  You can change your profile at any time without jumping through any hoops.  To use myself as an example, I deal with depression coupled with a fair amount of anxiety.  A few years ago I would have ranked depression as the thing that made life the hardest.  But lately, since I’ve switched industries and have a job that I actually like for once the anxiety has played a much bigger role.  Everybody’s issues shift in their ability to affect us, sometimes over the course of only a few days.  Whatever you outline in your profile would affect whatever metric calculates how many “points” your character receives for certain things.  For example, someone who has anxiety and rejection issues would receive more points in Charisma for publicly publishing a journal entry than someone who doesn’t have those particular issues.  And by “metric” I mean “sorcery”.  Because at this point I have no idea how that would be set up. Your profile might also affect how your character reacts to different areas of the game world, with some players receiving bonus in an area while another might not.

So that’s character generation.  Its a little rough, my thoughts weren't quite as organized as I wanted them to be when I started writing this but I wanted to get it down to keep my momentum going.  As always, comments and suggestions are welcome, even its to tell me I’m insane.  Just do me a favor and let me know which bit you think is impossible so I can re-think my strategy.