Fireside Gaming Part 2

So my group's camping trip is a week away. Based on the low number of posts over the last week or two I'm sure people have realized that I've been busy working on my game. Did I go overboard? Yes. Could I have gotten away with far less work? Yes. But as I've said, I plan on running a longer game in this setting later. So it isn't as though all my work is for this particular game.

At this week's game we decided to do character creation so we can jump right into playing next Friday. I started by asking if there were any questions about the setting, house rules, or anything else. I cleared up a few minor questions, and the players broke out their dice. I had the players roll their stats round robin style, with each stat being rolled by each player before moving on to the next. Here were the results...

	Mike	Christian	Josh	James	Bryan
Str	7	11	6	6	10
Int	11	14	10	10	10
Wis	13	7	7	8	10
Dex	10	11	13	13	12
Con	13	18	12	9	14
Lks	8	15	12	8	13
Cha	13	13	14	11	11

Everyone, save Bryan made changes to their stats. Josh and James swapped two, while Christian and Mike rearranged everything. So Bryan got +50BP, Josh and James got +25BP and Christian and Mike got +0BP. Completely rearranging stats proved to be a very limiting decision for Christian, as I'll explain in a moment.

Choosing a race went very quickly as the player's only choice was human. This was a hard decision when designing the campaign, but adding non-human races just didn't seem to fit.

Next came the finalizing of stats. Bryan spent some BP to boost his Intelligence and Wisdom, James Boosted his Strength, Josh boosted his Wisdom and Dexterity, Mike boosted his Constitution, and Christian left his alone. Overall everyone's stats look pretty good. Chritian has the best stats overall, with his 18 looming large. Even his 15 is superior to the stats rolled by the other players.

Then it was time for the players to choose their class. This is where I should note that campaign factors caused me to modify the BP cost for some classes. Fighter and Thief cost the normal amount for the human (25) but Clerics and Mages are far more rare. While priests are quite common in the campaign world, priests who wield divine magic are quite rare. To reflect this Clerics have a BP cost of 50. Mages are feared, hunted, and killed throughout the world. As a result they are extremely rare and have a BP cost of 75. So Christian's decision to rearrange his stats completely meant that it required all of his 50BP just to purchase his Cleric Class. James, Bryan and Mike decided to play Fighters. Finally Josh decided to play a bow toting theif.

For Priors and Particulars I had several charts for things like social class that the players had to roll on. By the time they all finished rolling they each had an idea of who their character was and how they wanted to play them. Overall this part was a lot of fun for them and me.

Next up was quirks and flaws. I offered an option to pay 5BP to get out of one or 10BP to get out of both. No one wanted to pay the BP so they all rolled. I offered rerolls for duplicate quirks or flaws so each person got something different.

Starting honor took some time to calculate because we only had one calculator at the table and no one wanted to do it by hand. In the end honor varied from a low of 9 for Mike to a high of 14 for Josh and Bryan.

Skills, talents and proficiencies were next. Christian had almost no BP left (he picked up four for having two loving parents) and used it to buy a single weapon proficiency. Luckily Clerics get a number of free skills, so he didn't have to go completely without. James bought mostly weapon specialization with what he had left. Mike and Bryan bought a number of trade skills, specifically Blacksmithing and Leatherworking.

Money was hard on the group. Most were lower class and received very little money. This problem was compounded with inflated prices, especially for weapons and armor. A great deal of leather armor was purchased, as well as varied kinds of weapons.

After the characters were finalized we did some story stuff to jump start the character's backstories. We started with a round robin story. Essentially the first person begins a tale about the characters and passes it around to the next person. The tale, begun by Josh, centered a round a day of celebration six years prior to the start of the campaign. We went around the table twice with the story before finishing up the exercise. We then moved on to a very short story about how the PCs rescued a young girl who was lost in the forest from some starving wolves. We played out the majority of the story, which only took about a half an hour. It was fun and a good little introduction to running the game for me.

Overall making characters was a lot of fun and got me even more excited for the upcoming trip. I can't post too much about what I have planned for campaign because my players read this blog, but rest assured I'll post the play by play when I get back!