Pendragon Character Gen
Last night we made characters for King Arthur Pendragon 5th Edition, the RPG where you play knights in dark ages Britain and act out the adventures between King Arthur being concweived and King Arthur dying. A game I've long wanted to run, I was joined by Aaron, Raj, Dave, Matthew and Ailsa to make characters.
Each player made two characters so they'd have a backup for deaths, plot contrivances etc. Each player made one Salisbury Knight so they all had characters local to each other to start with. These characters were made pretty straightforward, taking the middle-ground point spending options where possible. The second characters were more random, with four players taking random starting locations and all players taking random personality traits and statistics. (Ailsa didn't randomly select - instead she chose to be French, so we'd have a single non-British knight.)
Character gen was quite interesting. The biggest focus is on Personality Traits - you determine them very early and choosing to make characters especially Valorous, Generous, Lustful, Cruel or wahtever formed a big part of the experience. Skills in and out of comabt were definitely the secondary concern, and physical statistics like Strength or Dexterity which would be much more important in games like D&D were notably lower in priority here. We used the Book of Knights and Ladies, the expanded character generation rules which was especially important for the second characters as it let them be much more varied.
I was worried that their first Salisbury characters might seem a bit samey - in practice it doesn't seem to have worked that way, though, with lots of focus on different personality traits and skills that should keep them feeling distinct. (If you need any Boating done, Dave is your man.) The second more random characters mix thinks up more, in particular with Matthew's Roman-descended knight (an expert at more talky, thinky skills) and Ailsa's French immigrant (who could get into the pants of all but the hardiest of woman). None of the second characters start with land but the first block all own their own manor and attendant village, so there'll be some Farmville-esque antics taking care of their domain and their peasants. (And for the crueler knights, squeezing them for as much money as you can from the peasants without triggering a riot!)
The process isn't super complex - it took us the whole night to do two characters each, but that included a lot of humming and hawwing over choosing skills. (Especially before your first game, it can be hard to wrap your head around if a Sword of 10 is enough or if you need to up it to 15.) Everyone seemed to enjoy the process alright, and there were a fair few chuckles as the dice produced things like Aaron's "poor" knight with a surprisingly large stash of gold, Ailsa's astoundingly pretty Frenchman or Raj's magical cat. It remains to be seen if they enjoy playing them in the actual game and in particualr if they can live with some of their more extreme personality traits - a high Cruel score might mean they end up unable to stop their character from being vindictive to prisoners, for example, which might not always be what you want.
Next week we're going to start proceedings with the year 485. In this year the Salisbury characters will get knighted to replace their fathers and the knights will all ride out together for the first time. The plan is to run for about two months or so - as each session usually covers a year, this ought to take us to about 495 or so. It's a very different pace to previous games I've ran and I'm curious to see what an actual campaign of it is like. Now, time to brush up on the Book of Battle...
Each player made two characters so they'd have a backup for deaths, plot contrivances etc. Each player made one Salisbury Knight so they all had characters local to each other to start with. These characters were made pretty straightforward, taking the middle-ground point spending options where possible. The second characters were more random, with four players taking random starting locations and all players taking random personality traits and statistics. (Ailsa didn't randomly select - instead she chose to be French, so we'd have a single non-British knight.)
Character gen was quite interesting. The biggest focus is on Personality Traits - you determine them very early and choosing to make characters especially Valorous, Generous, Lustful, Cruel or wahtever formed a big part of the experience. Skills in and out of comabt were definitely the secondary concern, and physical statistics like Strength or Dexterity which would be much more important in games like D&D were notably lower in priority here. We used the Book of Knights and Ladies, the expanded character generation rules which was especially important for the second characters as it let them be much more varied.
I was worried that their first Salisbury characters might seem a bit samey - in practice it doesn't seem to have worked that way, though, with lots of focus on different personality traits and skills that should keep them feeling distinct. (If you need any Boating done, Dave is your man.) The second more random characters mix thinks up more, in particular with Matthew's Roman-descended knight (an expert at more talky, thinky skills) and Ailsa's French immigrant (who could get into the pants of all but the hardiest of woman). None of the second characters start with land but the first block all own their own manor and attendant village, so there'll be some Farmville-esque antics taking care of their domain and their peasants. (And for the crueler knights, squeezing them for as much money as you can from the peasants without triggering a riot!)
The process isn't super complex - it took us the whole night to do two characters each, but that included a lot of humming and hawwing over choosing skills. (Especially before your first game, it can be hard to wrap your head around if a Sword of 10 is enough or if you need to up it to 15.) Everyone seemed to enjoy the process alright, and there were a fair few chuckles as the dice produced things like Aaron's "poor" knight with a surprisingly large stash of gold, Ailsa's astoundingly pretty Frenchman or Raj's magical cat. It remains to be seen if they enjoy playing them in the actual game and in particualr if they can live with some of their more extreme personality traits - a high Cruel score might mean they end up unable to stop their character from being vindictive to prisoners, for example, which might not always be what you want.
Next week we're going to start proceedings with the year 485. In this year the Salisbury characters will get knighted to replace their fathers and the knights will all ride out together for the first time. The plan is to run for about two months or so - as each session usually covers a year, this ought to take us to about 495 or so. It's a very different pace to previous games I've ran and I'm curious to see what an actual campaign of it is like. Now, time to brush up on the Book of Battle...