#ttrpg character creation

[literalcatpod]

This Month on the Literal Cat Podcast (09.2024)

Hey guys! Hope you liked Herding Cats Pt. 2! That's just the beginning of what we have to offer this month! Check it out!

On September 4, we've got a 2-for-1 special! Monsters and Other Childish Things by Arc Dream Publishing lets us give you more cat per cat! Special Thanks to @jackfrostdoll for joining us this episode!

Then, on September 18, we make a cat in the newly-released Break!! RPG! Luckily, @break-rpg made it easy for us with a convenient freebie! (they also made the rest of the game but we know why you're all here)

[lyndentree63]

That "whoops I made a TTRPG character that has some fun personality things wait we unearthed some Stuff I didn't even know was there" feeling.

[omamervt]

Hey would there be anyone in the TTRPG space on Tumblr who would be free on a Tuesday night and willing to see their favorite game's character creation system abused until it produces a literal cat? Because I'm back to looking for guests for my podcast, How to Make a Literal Cat In Your Favorite RPG

[hitsugiyukirpgart]

I finally had a chance to play my Drow wizard in a oneshot! He is the younger brother of my regular character Erel´Brin. Kalannar is from a warrior family, so they didn't recognize him, as he's "just" a magician. His curiosity for knowledge and spending most of his time in the library, he began to discover in books how to use his abilities. Thanks to his brother's training and reading books, he eventually developed his own magical rapier fighting style.

(I tried a somewhat abstract style)

Complex character creation for roleplay games like DnD, JaD, etc.

Creating Character sheet, biography, character acquaintances and enemies or story themes for GameMaster.

[foldingfittedsheets]

Me making DnD characters:

Expectation: Okay, this character is a Phoenix aarakocra wildfire druid. She has only vague memories of past lives but just wanders around doing good and helping people! So when I play her she’ll probably be pragmatic, patient, and wise.

Reality: Furious, feral bird woman rampages against the institutions of the world and wants to burn down everything.

Expectation: Okay, this drow fighter has been held prisoner, tortured, manipulated, and has had the lines of reality blurred so much she doesn’t know what’s real. She’ll be angry, mistrustful, and broody.

Reality: Absolutely in love with life and it’s beauty, the sweetest little ray of sunshine. Utterly charms everyone she meets and delights in learning new things.

Expectation: A dragon spy posing as a courtesan and socialite in their tiefling form, tasked with spying on another party member who carries a dragon tooth axe. They’ll be cool, collected, and very suave. They’ll change allegiance to the party after a long time of bonding and building trust.

Reality: A nerdy disaster who doesn’t know how to process their feelings, who gets tongue tied the moment their first crush smiles at them and changes allegiance to the party in under five sessions.

My betrothed: What’s your next characters personality gonna be?

Me: Fuck if I know. Guess we’ll find out together.

[leftsidebonfire]

I gotta build a dnd character for a one shot this Monday and I'm hitting a wall with creativity.

So I'm putting it up to a poll with my favorite options. Winners will make the character, second place will be my backup character in case I die!

Edited to Add: No Druid, because I'm currently playing a Druid in a long campaign and wanna switch it up

And no Paladin/Cleric because the DM said those two might have some "surprising effects" in this setting so I took that to mean it's going to be difficult to communicate with a Holy Patron here jfhfjdjjsjd)

[educationaldm]

As a Forever DM, I feel this. They sometimes make appearances as NPCs though.

[57sfinest]

also yall we need to step back from the harryvision and understand that kim, at his core, is a loser (affectionate) like everyone else. so much out there wants to portray him as limitless patience, great cook, super organized, good handwriting, nice tasteful living quarters etc and that's fun to contrast him to harry but well i am here to RUIN that we need to take off the du bois glasses and appreciate kim for the weirdguy that he is. he has horrific fits of road rage and harry genuinely fears for his life riding along with him and witnessing the generational curses this man is capable of unleashing upon the stupid little fucks that cut him off on the 8/81. he has never had the time or space or budget to learn to cook so he lives off deli sandwiches and butter noodles and the occasional grab-and-go fruit. he writes so much so frequently with such awful handwriting that he has invented a new form of shorthand and the moralintern is contacting him to create a cipher system for them. he has no resources to furnish and maintain a nice flat so it's like a slightly gentrified r/malelivingspace but with a table for his sewing machine and there's scrap fabric and thread and half-pinned half-hemmed pants strewn about the place. there are absolutely a bunch of shitty mockups of his old wirral character in the backs of his notebooks and he hasn't played it in years but if he ever picks it back up then his minmax high int high dex definitely-not-a-self-insert sidhe artificer is READY. everyone add your weirdguy kim thoughts NOW 👇

[ratwavegamehouse]

The Infinite Dancefloor

"The Infinite Dancefloor is every nightclub and none of them. A sprawling, ever growing, ever shifting venue behind a thousand small doors. A party that never ends. A night where the sun never rises. Unfortunately that can make it a pain to actually leave the Infinite Dancefloor once you’re there. But you and your friends are done. You probably should have left at least two hours ago but you didn’t and now you’re here. You’re separated from one of your gang. You need to find them then find an exit. The Infinite Dancefloor won’t make it easy for you. You’ll need to band together and maybe you’re already a little past that but you don’t have much choice. Let’s get outta here already."

The Infinite Dancefloor is a GMless rpg inspired by those rough nights that could have been good, if you just stopped sooner. Set to the album Time Flies by Ladyhawke, you'll use dice and a tarot/oracle deck to determine and overcome Obstacles in your escape from the title venue, such as​ finding a friend you've been seperated, facing down other partygoers and confronting the location itself. The Dancefloor will keep warping you back to the beginning, putting pressure on the cracks in your friendship.

Get it here: https://ratwavegamehouse.itch.io/the-infinite-dancefloor

Thinking about what I'm proud of with this game; how quickly it came together, how strong the themes feel, I think it's a very neat visual design and I think the character creation is a blast.

I kinda think of it as something of a companion piece to How to Embrace a Swamp Creature; a very personal exploration of a friendship filtered through a unreality to give it some distance.

[names-hard]

[literalcatpod]

41 - Making a Cat on a Mouse's Journey Into Public Domain in Wanderhome

Wanderhome by @jdragsky is the story of a journey, and the people you meet along the way. For instance, Mickey Mouse is making a journey into the public domain, and now instead of being an anthropomorphic mouse, he's an adolescent Literal Cat, in a world full of anthropomorphic animals. It'll be quite the journey for our naive young friend. Who will Micholas M. Mouse (the cat) meet along the way?

Follow the show online: https://literalcatpod.start.page/ 

Follow Joel Holland: https://jholland.start.page/

Follow Austin Erwin: https://twitter.com/AvalonAlchemist

We’ve got a Patreon now! https://www.patreon.com/BadgerTrove 

Download the character sheets: https://bit.ly/literalcatpod 

We’re on Bluesky now! https://bsky.app/profile/literalcatpod.bsky.social 

Cover art and Intro/Outro music made by Joel Holland

Thanks for listening! We’ll Cat-ch you later!

[lyndentree63]

So there's this conventional advice in acting (and writing) that your character needs a goal, and it's obstacles to a goal and conflict that makes an interesting story and tells us about the character. This advice is ubiquitous and treated as foundational, but it never quite worked for me.

I don't fully know why, but something about goals being what motivates people doesn't really ring true to my experience. This method also led to kind of navel-gazey flat overly-self-aware acting when I tried it, because focusing on my character's goal would take me out of the scene.

I did a three-month intensive acting school in 2017, where we were coached by people from Straeon, and their technique was all about exploration in rehearsal, connecting with your scene partner, and living in the moment. No goals. No text analysis. It worked for me.

Last year I read Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita, which is fascinating for a number of reasons, but my biggest takeaway was this idea that emotions exist between people, not in people. Suddenly my acting school made sense. The times when scenes shone were when each actor was completely focused on their scene partner and responding to what they were doing in the moment. You could feel story sparks crackling in the air. When the actor started focusing on their ideas, then the story would go stale. Anyways. I don't think characters NEED a goal (though that can be useful), I think they need connection. Connection to an idea, a thing, a place, a person. And I think we can actually tell stories without conflict if there's connection.

[omamervt]

21 - Making a Big, Strong, Focused, Dumb Boy in Warriors Adventure Game

It took nearly a year of doing this show, but someone finally decided to tell us that there was an officially licensed Warrior Cats RPG. But as SOON as we were told, we knew what we had to do.

Follow the show online: https://literalcatpod.start.page/ 

Follow Joel Holland: https://jholland.start.page/

Follow Austin Erwin: https://twitter.com/AvalonAlchemist

Download the character sheets: https://bit.ly/literalcatpod 

Intro/Outro music made by Joel Holland

Thanks for listening! We’ll Cat-ch you later!

[patmax17]

I can't overstate how much I love the color wheel (or color pie) from Magic:The Gathering

I started playing magic back in 2001 when I was 14, Odyssey had just come out. I knew a bit of English, and I soon started reading Magic's website for news and spoilers. That's when I discovered @markrosewater 's column Making Magic. MaRo is both a great game designer and an impressive writer, his column was entertaining, witty, fun and informative. I consider Magic and especially his column to be the main reason I learned to read English so fast.

Now, 2001 was a period of transformation in Magic. The main saga in the story had just ended (consider Avengers:Endgame), and the people at WotC were reconsidering and rebalancing the color wheel. I remember there being weeks dedicated to the single colors, and MaRo's comulumn being deeeep dives into those colors.

Now, what's the color wheel? You see, in the universe of Magic: The Gathering the primordial energy and building block is mana, which comes in one of five colors: white, blue, black, red and green. Mechanically, each card is associated to one (or more) colors, and each color has mechanics that are typical for it, like green being the color of growth and big creatures, blue being the color of spells and flying, and black being the color of death and zombies. But the people at WotC put a lot of effort to also distinguish each color thematically, defining *why* each color has certain mechanics, what it says about the color's philosophy and values. Green is the color of nature and community, where the small ones help the big ones grow and foster. Blue is the color of knowledge and artificiality, black is the color.

It's pretty intuitive most of the time, but here's where it gets even better: the placing of the colors on the wheel has a meaning. Colors that are close to each other are "allied" colors and have something in common, while colors that are opposite of each other represent the two opposites on an axis:

I don't have the time (or skill) to go into detail here, but this system is so damn elegant. It has five basix building blocks but allows to represent an incredibly vast array of concepts, characters and behaviors.

The color wheel is still my favourite system to define/describe fictional characters, it's miles better than the alignment chart of D&D (or, like, hogwarts houses).

I find it incredibly fun to discuss what color(s) certain character fall into: is superman white, green? Is batman white, black, blue? A combination of those? Ryuko Matoi is red, Satsuki Kiryuin is white. Do you disagree? Perfect, tell me why, it's always super interesting to see which aspects of a character people consider the most prominent!

My favourite Magic blocks and sets were those playing with the color wheel and its concepts, mainly Planar Chaos but ESPECIALLY Ravnica. Man, I really need to play some rpg campaign set on Ravnica sooner or later.

I played magic for 5-6 years (until I finished high school), but the color wheel is ingrained in my mind. It was the main chitchat topic when I first started going out with my SO more than 15 years ago xD

So yeah, not sure who this is for, it's mainly me rambling and fanboying about one of my favourite game design and character creation concepts. If you don't know the color wheel, I suggest you try to read a bit about it. And if you do know it, what do you think? Is there anyone out there who used it as a basis for an rpg or foe writing?

[theworldbrewery]

Funmaxing: How to Create a Character You'll Like Playing

Part Two: Choosing Your Features

'part one: choosing a role that fits' can be found here.

Okay, so you've decided on the roles that sound fun to you and that suit your character. Now for the fun part: actually doing character creation.

Every part of character creation is made up of two basic elements: flavor and mechanics. Each of these affects the other; when people talk about the 'fantasy' of a given class, they're referring to the experience created by the synthesis of the flavor and mechanics. For instance, the 'fantasy' of the Ancestral Guardian barbarian is a character that goes into a mystical warrior state to deliver no-holds-barred beatdowns, powered by the support of their long-dead ancestors. In order for that fantasy to work, you need both the flavor of the 'mystical warrior state' and the 'support of long-dead ancestors,' and the mechanics that let this idea work out in practice -- a character needs to be able to deal sizable damage in one-on-one combat, with meaningful support mechanics from their ancestor spirits.

The trick of choosing character options that work for you is twofold: you must determine which mechanics let you engage in the roles you have selected in part one, while also checking the flavor for compatibility with your character's roleplay concept.

First, let's talk mechanics.

Understanding how to choose mechanics that you will personally enjoy is surprisingly difficult; I think it's because the flavor is doing so much heavy lifting that it's hard to see the game expectations underlying each concept, and because it takes experience to recognize how different mechanics interact. To help provide examples, I'll be using a friend's character from my prior campaign to demonstrate.

Alice is a half-orc with the guild artisan background and the wild magic sorcerer class.

How does D&D expect Alice to behave? What does she do?

As a half-orc, Alice will have a bonus to her Strength and Constitution scores, proficiency in Intimidation, an extra damage die on a melee-weapon critical hit, and an ability that lets her drop to 1 hit point instead of 0 once per day.

On its own, this doesn't tell us much. These abilities could enhance Alice's efficacy as a Tank and a Powerhouse...or they could be used to help compensate in some areas where she is weaker, like keeping a fragile Glass Cannon standing and giving her a bonus to melee attacks if she's low on spell slots.

As a guild artisan, Alice is proficient in Insight and Persuasion plus a set of artisan's tools. According to her backstory, Alice is a stonemason, so she's taking that proficiency in mason's tools. She also gains a feature that connects her to the rest of the guild, who will help her meet patrons and allies and grant her lodging when needed, as long as the guild has a presence in the local community.

Now here's a better look at the picture! Alice has skills and features that help her in social situations, mostly with personal charm and insight, so she might be good at the Cold Reader and Friendly roles. She's also connected to the guild, which could set her up for a role as an Information Broker. Her skill with mason's tools could help her detect traps or other dangers, or give her an edge on finding secret areas in a building -- so Trap-Wise and Mapper are good prospects for her role in Exploration.

As a sorcerer, Alice has access to spellcasting features, including sorcerer cantrips and first-level spells. Looking ahead, she'll gain access to sorcery points, which let her cast more spells, and at third level she'll gain Metamagic options, which let her change elements of the spells she casts. She has proficiency in some simple weapons, but no armor, and her hit die is a d6. Her spellcasting ability will be Charisma.

So here we can see Alice is going to be a spellcaster first and foremost--at least, that's the assumption the class mechanics have created, because everything about this class revolves around spellcasting. If Alice's player wants to play a weapon-based character, this is likely not the class for them. We can also see that with no armor and the smallest hit die available, the game expects that Alice will be avoiding melee combat at all costs. Instead, the class is designed to fire spells at longer distances and deal large amounts of damage, so the sorcerer class is built for a more Glass Cannon-like role.

If we take a closer look at the sorcerer spells, it doesn't seem to have many summoning-type spells, and zero spells capable of healing or ending harmful effects. Instead, the sorcerer's spells largely deal targeted or Area of Effect damage, affect the environment and enemies, and defend the sorcerer and their allies from attacks. Alice is therefore well-suited to a Glass Cannon or Battlefield Manipulation role in combat -- and since she doesn't have many abilities beyond spellcasting, she should prioritize spells that let her act effectively in battle. The metamagic options reinforce this: they let Alice deal extra damage, fire a spell across a greater range, cast an extra spell as a bonus action, and extend the duration of a spell, all of which are assets to a character in long-range combat affecting the battlefield and dealing high amounts of damage.

But what about outside of combat? Some spell options for the sorcerer are more useful outside of the battlefield, and it's wise for Alice's player to choose some of these as well. Spells like Comprehend Languages and Knock can help Alice read unfamiliar writing, eavesdrop on an enemy, and magically unlock manacles, doors, and treasure chests. Depending on if the player prefers a Trap-Wise, Looter, or Puzzle-Solver role, the player can choose spells that fit those preferences. As a sorcerer, Alice is likely to have a high Charisma score, which means she would make a great Friend or Influencer in social encounters.

At first level, Alice also gets to choose her subclass. As a wild magic sorcerer, Alice's first subclass ability is Tides of Chaos, which lets her grant herself advantage on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw.

Because Alice can use Tides of Chaos, it makes sense for her to take on roles in the game that let her make use of her skills and saving throws, but it also would help if she took combat spells that use attack rolls instead of making the enemy make a saving throw. Why? Because her Tides of Chaos lets her give herself advantage on spell attacks. Spells like Chromatic Orb and Witch Bolt can then be more likely to hit their target. Later on, she'll gain abilities that let her affect other creatures' saving throws, so she might choose more save-based effects then.

As you can see, even though the race, background, and class/subclass features are guiding the player toward certain roles, these roles are by no means a hard and fast rule. And with each layer of customization, you can specialize your character into the roles you most enjoy. If you like the idea of playing a spellcaster, but the Glass Cannon doesn't appeal to you, you might instead choose to play a bard or a warlock, which have higher hit dice and can let you branch out into melee fighting, or choose the Clockwork Soul sorcerer subclass to access more defensive and healing-oriented spells.

The trick is to put all this into practice in reverse: if you know which roles you'd like to play, your task is to look at the classes, subclasses, and other character options that most interest you and evaluate whether or not they will help you fulfill those roles. Not everything must be of use to your favorite roles to play, and you aren't obligated to stick closely within the confines of one role in each pillar of play, either. But in general, you'll enjoy playing your character much more if you know you like using their abilities!

Lastly, you'll need to reconcile the flavor of your chosen character options with anything you already know about your character concept. Some mechanics are simple to re-flavor, like changing the source of magical abilities or changing a damage type. Others, like reflavoring spellcasting as weapon attacks, are extremely difficult verging on the impossible. If you find yourself trying to completely overhaul the flavor of a class or background, you might want to look in a different area for the mechanical features you enjoy.

If you're looking for more specific advice, feel free to send in an ask. Happy character creation!

[rollforthings]

I’ve come across confusion with how Fabula Ultima’s character creation works, especially in people coming to it from DnD5e, so here’s a post to break it down and show how awesomely customizable FabUlt PCs are straight from the hop.

In 5e, pretty much everything about your class is decided immediately. Take it at level 1, it drip-feeds you the same features in the same order. At 1st - 3rd level, you pick a subclass from a short list, and this sprinkles in a few more set-in-stone upgrades. A Level 10 Champion Fighter will have all the same class features as every other Level 10 Champion Fighter. If you multiclass, you get to add in some other features, but always the same features in the same order for every class you do this with.

In Fabula Ultima, each Class is a bundle of features called Class Skills, and in most cases these Skills can be taken in any order and as much or as little as you like. Each level your character has represents such an investment in a chosen Skill in a Class that you have. (There’s an example of all this later that makes it clearer.) Some Class Skills are one-and-done -- spend a level on it and it’s yours. Others Skills have multiple tiers to them, allowing you invest multiple character levels into them to make them more powerful. (Each class also has couple of Free Benefits, little boosts you get for having at least one level in a class.) You can also skip a class skill altogether, if it isn’t something you want for your character build.

Looking at each class, they seem a little barebones. Only five Class Skills, not a lot, and each class is kind of niche. The Rogue doesn’t get martial ranged weapons, and the Entropist's only damage spells deal Dark damage. But you see, in Fabula Ultima, multiclassing is mandatory. At character creation, you get 5 levels and you must invest them in two to three different classes, in any of the skills available from those classes. This does two very important things. One, it ensures a character is good in at least two ways straight out of character creation. Two, when combined with the previous point -- that class features can be taken in any order and arrangement -- it creates this unprecedented level of variety, including with starting-level characters.

Like okay, as an example of all this, I’m going to make two builds for starting characters. They’ll have the same number of levels in the same two classes (Guardian 2 / Weaponmaster 3), and not only will they not step on each other’s toes, they’ll play completely differently.

Our first character is going to be a teamwork-oriented tank, focusing defensive support and enemy debuff. The combined Free Benefits of Guardian and Weaponmaster grant +10 max HP, plus martial armor, shields and melee weapons. From Guardian, we’ll take Protect so we can jump in the way of attacks and spells aimed at our allies. We’ll also take Dual Shieldbearer, to give us some insane Defense scores and let us dual-wield those shields as brawling weapons. Now for Weaponmaster. First we’ll grab Counterattack. This grants us a 50% chance to hit back at enemies when they attack us with melee, including the attacks we block with Protect. And we’ll invest our last two levels in Bonecrusher, so we can choose to swap out damage with status effects and MP drain (lots of it because we invested 2 levels) when we hit -- and since we’re dual-wielding shields, we can debuff this way twice per turn without the damage penalty from dual-wielding mattering (because we’re giving up the damage anyway). Guardian 2 / Weaponmaster 3 who’s tanky as hell, can intercept and punish enemy attacks, and debuffs enemies with shield bashes.

Okay, same Guardian 2 / Weaponmaster 3 spread, same Free Benefits. However, instead of a tank this character is a simple but reliable damage-dealer. From Guardian, we’ll take one level in Defensive Mastery and one level in Fortress. These skills give us a bit of damage reduction and a bit of extra max HP, respectively, and we’ll probably level these up over taking new Guardian skills in the future. As cool as it is, Dual Shieldbearer won’t work for this build since we’ll use a two-handed weapon like a Katana or a Waraxe for bigger damage. From Weaponmaster, we’ll invest in Bladestorm and two levels in Melee Weapon Mastery. Bladestorm lets us spend MP to hit multiple targets when we attack, and the two levels of MWM give us a +2 on our melee attack checks. Guardian 2 / Weaponmaster 3 who’s got a little padding as protection while they focus on accuracy, damage, and hitting multiple targets at once.

So there you go. Same classes, same number of levels in each, completely different playstyles. And these are just starting characters. PCs gain a level every session or two, and they can invest in up to three classes at once (and 5-6 classes over a level 5-50 career). On leveling up, the tank could double down on Guardian to get even tankier, or level into Orator or Spiritist for more support options. The damage dealer could lean into Fury for increased crit chance and bonus damage, or into a magic-hybrid spellblade build via Elementalist. Or either of them could take on Wayfarer for an animal companion and increased travel/exploration aptitude. The possibilites are truly amazing, and you can get super creative with them as you find synergies and build up team combos. And I didn’t even get into Quirks, custom weapons or Heroic Skills.

So yeah, if you haven’t yet, check out Fabula Ultima. Character building is insanely fun and it’s honestly spoiled the 5e equivalent for me.