Old-School CharGen for 4E?

Old School CharGen for 4E

When 3E was introduced, one of the first things I noticed was the point-buy system for stats, instead of rolling 3d6 for them. The designers made this change for the sake of balance. The natural progression from point-buy stats is the standard array, which is what we wound up with in 4E. Every character is balanced against each other in this way right from the get-go (and nevermind the perfectly balanced races and classes as well). 

Yawn. 

One of the best things from my DragonQuest days was the character generation system. I'm pretty sure it was our DM's set of houserules, as I only ever saw it on sheets that were printed off a computer, but the gist of it was roll a percentile to determine how many points you get to distribute and what your maximum score could be, and roll percentiles for everything after that on several charts. Background and family, race (!), money, hair, height, weight, eye color. 

The best part, though, was the bogey chart. If you didn't qualify for any race besides human, at least you got four rolls on the bogey table, which were mostly helpful but sometimes not. Everything from bonuses to ability scores, to cheaper prices for ranks in certain skills, to access to psionics was an option. Sometimes, with the right rolls, you could get a pretty powerful character right from the get-go. Of course, the flip side of that coin is that with the right rolls, even the most powerful of characters could suffer a career-or-life-ending grevious injury. 

So it was all kind of balanced in that way. And a whole lot of fun. There were still plenty of options to sift through at chargen, but the randomness of the possibilities made for a whole lot of fun. 

So, in that vein, I'm thinking of writing up an old-school chargen guide for 4e, with some modifications to races, and a full-on bogey chart. Anybody out there interested? I think it might work really well in a FourthCore style setting. I'm thinking we ought to go back to rolling for attributes, and rebalance through different possible random bonuses. Sounds more fun than just paging through the books to optimize your character.

On a not-so-random note, critical hits in 4e should have at least the remote possibility of instant kill. Or at least causing a Save-or-Die situation. Any thoughts?

PvP Shenanigans

A Memorable Session

This happened over a year ago, in a game of Dragonquest. We had a pretty interesting group going on. This was our GM's first campaign, and we didn't take it easy on him. Trial by fire, I suppose. We never gave any of us a free pass. 

Anyways, we had D playing an amnesiac elf-girl who turns out to be an assassin-princess (yeah, he got most of the plot cookies, but that was cool). 

J was playing some type of half-undead spellcaster whose familiar was an undead ferret with a broken neck. 

B was playing a magic-using elf who was primarily a jerk. 

P had a good old-fashioned human fighter, as i recall. 

And I was playing a crazy human with electrical-type abilities who got them after being struck by lightning. He was convinced he was the god Thor and told everyone exactly that. Warhammer, helmet and all. 

So we got wind of a rumor a coastal town was being terrorized by flesh-eating doppleganger demons. We went to check it out. One of the problems with the dopplegangers was that it was impossible to tell who was real and who was fake until they were dead; a dead doppleganger basically turned into goo. Apparently the demons had been eating people, adopting their likenesses, infiltrating their homes and then eating the rest of their families. 

It occurred to us that we needed a password system in case we got separated, to make sure none of us were actually dopplegangers in disguise. So we got to town, did a little investigating, fought and killed a doppleganger and then retired to the inn for the night. We three rooms at the inn; one for the elfgirl-assassin-princess, and one for me and B, and one for P and J. 

Shenanigans ensued. B the elf and J the undead had developed a mutual enmity; the elf didn't like the whole undead necromancer thing. While P was on watch outside and my character was fast asleep, B went out and started to cast a ritual of animal control in an attempt to bind J's familiar to himself. 

B failed. Critically. In Dragonquest, a critical failure on a spell (roll of 99 or 00 on D100), resulted in possible backfire. B backfired. The result of this backfire: loss of memory of the past d10 days. Confused and in a strange place in the middle of the night B's character started calling out for Thor. My character awoke and went to the door and calmly asked B what the password was. B's character had no idea about any password, and Thor let loose a cry to the rest of the team that the dopplegangers had gotten B's character. Thor grabbed his warhammer, threw open the door and attacked. We wound up chasing B through town. We even cornered him and gave him a chance to explain himself, which he proved unable to do due to the amnesia, and then we cut him to pieces. 

Needless to say, he didn't turn to goo.