Post by Happy Fun Ball on Oct 22, 2019 19:32:10 GMT
Character Creation
If you want to get this done quick, pick one of the many, painstakingly developed pre-gen characters in the pre-generated characters thread. All pre-gens are present day characters, as opposed to, say, Wild West or Cyberpunk. Give it a name. Give it an age. Give it a hair color, etc. if you really want. Do not name your character “Freddy.” That name is spoken for.
You will need to type the new character into Roll20 (Step 5 below). Feel pleased with yourself. Done!
Am I Really Done?
Yes.
So, you’re the kind of person who customizes your Fallout 4 character’s face even though it’s a first-person game and you’ll never see it? You spend a half-hour doing that? Good. You’re in the right place.
This is going to be much more involved. Expect to take from 1-3 hours doing it, depending on how solid an idea you have for your character, and how familiar you are with a skills-based system.
If you have played Call of Cthulhu, that will go a long way as this is very similar. If not, well, there are over 100 skills to allocate. Don’t be intimidated or overwhelmed by that. You’ll have excellent tools, and it will be much easier than it may seem at first.
STEP 1:
Read at least the Novice Rules (super-brief). The Basic Rules (brief) will be more helpful. Nothing from this point forward is going to make any sense if you don’t know what the numbers on the sheet mean.
After you have finished the entire process, you should post your character to the boards so that expert players can review it and give you suggestions. Use the “Add Attachment” button on the far right of a newly created thread to attach your spreadsheet.
You will want to use the Character Creation Sheet which can be found here: Anytime_Anywhere_Char_Gen_v1.5.xlsx (37.15 KB). This will be a tool to create your character. It is not your character sheet for play. You will transfer the values to Roll20.
So, go ahead and grab the spreadsheet. It is formatted for Microsoft Office, but if you do not have Microsoft Office, you can get Libre Office here: Get Libre Office. That will open the character generator just as well.
Go ahead and open up the sheet if you like, but you won’t actually need to open it until Step 3.
QUICK OVERVIEW: Green boxes are places where you put your desired points. That’s where you change things. Brown boxes are not to be messed with. They are automatically calculated.
STEP 2:
Figure out who you want to play. All characters must be human. You can play a character from ancient, cowboy western, roaring twenties, present day, cyberpunk, or space travel periods. If you aren’t sure, “present day” will be the most useful to you.
Then you figure out who you are. Are you Socrates? Are you a pirate from the days of privateers? Are you Doc Holiday? Are you Jason Bourne? Are you Neo from the Matrix? Are you Luke Skywalker? Think about what sort of skills your character will have in Step 4.
A very easy character concept (for a first character) is a modern day character or even 'yourself' with various skills that you might not have.
Don’t sweat making the perfect character. After your first game you can literally change anything on the character sheet if you are unhappy with it. This is a one-time only offer, however. By your second game, you will have to live with your choices.
STEP 3:
Please read this entire section before you allocate points.
Now, you should open up the spreadsheet in MS Office or Libre Office. Allocate your Statistics (stats) – which are your core attributes.
You have 10 points to allocate to your four stats: Willpower, Learn, Essence, and Sanity. The first three are on a scale of 10-20, similar to the 3-18 initial stats in Dungeons and Dragons.
Sanity, on the other hand, is a 1-99 stat that rolls like a skill. You can’t get any saner than 99.
The non-Sanity stats start at 10, and each point you allocate will raise that stat by 1. So, if you put 3 points into Willpower, your Willpower will be 13. One to one.
Sanity starts at 50, and every point you put into it gives you 5 more Sanity points. So, if you were to put 3 points into Sanity, that’s 3x5=15, and your Sanity will be 65%.
Put the stat points you want to spend (remember you only have 10) into the green boxes. The spreadsheet will calculate your stat in the brown boxes. It will show how many points you have left in the brown box labeled “Points Left.”
IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT STATISTICS:
b. Essence becomes your magic points and is also how many Hero points you start out with. Some direct attacks drain magic points, but this can almost always be made to miss with a Hero point.
c. Learn gives you a better chance at learning new “write-in” skills, and “write-ins” are called for often in this game.
d. Your first serious insanity will appear when your Sanity drops to 40 points or under, so if you don’t put any points into Sanity, you’re 10 points away from being really and actually crazy. An average sanity penalty is around 1-6 (d6) when a sanity check is failed. As your sanity drops, you will start losing Sanity points at an accelerated pace, as a successful check gets less and less likely.
STEP 4:
Please read this entire section before you allocate points.
Allocate your skills – the things your character can do.
You have 2,000 points to put into skills. Skills that have a number in parentheses after them start at that level (your base skill), and any additional points you put in will be added to it. Skills that start at 0 base (or less than your Learn) will instead start at Learn as your base skill. You generated your Learn in Step 3. The spreadsheet will handle this automatically. All you have to do is fill in the green boxes.
Follow these steps, after you have read through the entire Step 4 section at least once:
1. Allocate the core skills that your chosen character should be best at. Choose 10 of them and then write them down in a list and leave it for a bit. Have a sandwich. Look at the skills again, after a break, and make sure those are really your core skills. Put a 60 in each of them.
If you don’t see the skill you want on the sheet, write it in on the blank line in the “Write-in Skill” section. No super-powers. You are human. Just what humans can do.
For “Boating, Driving, Piloting, and Riding,” there is a Operate Transportation matrix here: Get Transportation Matrix. There are drop-down boxes on the Character Creator. Select the green cell and an arrow will appear. Press the arrow to show the drop-down list. Set the categories. (e.g.: If you want to drive a Ford Explorer, set the skill to Modern, Land, Medium. You can then drive any car from the 20th/21st Century.)
2. Allocate 50-60 into all of the bold-faced skills that were not already part of your core character concept. These skills have been determined to be critically necessary for success by experienced players. For instance, if even one person out of the three playing fails a Stealth check, the jig is up for the entire party. If you can’t Sprint, you won’t be able to run away.
3. If you want to be a healthy, average adult, Allocate 40-60 points into the four basic attributes skills: Dexterity/Maneuver/Dodge, Luck, Strength, and Constitution/Endurance. Leaving them at the base skill of 25 means you have accepted a character flaw for the extra skill points. These four skills are called for often, especially Luck.
4. Allocate two combat stats – one common melee and one common ranged. Make sure they are appropriate to the time period your character is from. For instance: Club and Pistol. Club is a great melee choice because almost anything can become a club. They’re everywhere. Put a 60 in each of them.
5. Allocate your support skills. For skills that you intend to use as support skills for your chosen character, put 60 (or close to it) into the skill. There should be around 10 supporting skills.
6. All other points then go into flavor skills that your character may have picked up. Put at least a 30 into each if you expect to do anything with them. A skill at 30 is a hobbyist skill.
7. If you run out of points, you can increase your Learn stat to give yourself extra points for skills, at the cost of less Willpower, Essence or Sanity. This is why we set that first.
IMPORTANT NOTE: You should know that Acting is your ability to lie, and Streetwise is your ability to find things like weapons, drugs, or any other illicit goods, as well as know the good places in town to get inside information. If you don’t put points in them, your character will be terrible at both, and though you may choose that to be the case, most players don’t want that to be the case.
On the spreadsheet, you will put your desired point level into a green box. Put your desired skill level there, and it will automatically calculate how many of the “Total Initial Skill Points” you have spent and show you what you have left in the “Remaining box.” These two boxes are right next to your core attributes/stats. The sheet will automatically calculate base points you automatically got from either Learn, or a higher base skill level than that.
Step 5:
Type everything you put into the scratch sheet into the appropriate skills on Roll20. To do this, you run the game in Roll20. On the right is a chat bar. On the top of that, the second icon from the left is a newspaper. Click it. Choose one of the blank character sheets and edit it. Follow the instructions on this sheet.
Am I Really Done?
No. You’re never really done. But now you get to play. Good work! You are done with this phase of the game.