Character Creation

On Sunday, we had our first Character Creation session. Everybody but Anthony made it, so we had a good crowd. One thing I did before running this game was buy six more copies of A Time of War, an investment that paid dividends during Character Creation. Let's talk about what worked and what didn't.

The first thing I noticed about A Time of War is that it has no separate character worksheet the way MechWarrior 3rd Edition did. We briefly considered using the character record sheets themselves as worksheets, but that was obviously going to become an unmanageable mess very quickly. Every grabbed some blank paper and started compiling their life paths on those. Very soon, though everybody was plugging away on laptops into spreadsheets.

My players largely agree that the new character creation system is both extremely elegant, in that everything is expressed clearly in XP and can be molded through XP into interesting delineations of what are normally boolean values (-25 Illiterate for example, doesn't represent you're actually illiterate, but you're inclined that way if later life choices push you down that road), but equally unwieldy as the lists of skills, traits, and attributes (both values and pre-reqs) quickly grew to consume multiple columns of number printed in small, neat letters on their scrap paper. I took it upon myself to create an audit tool to make sure everybody's XP actually added up, and I was glad I did -- nobody got their totals right on the first pass.

The character creation process took five hours, and only two of the five characters were really "Ready to Play" at the end of that session. Amusingly, Cameron, the player with the least experience, was done first. He created a purely civilian character, and used Optimization to flesh out the skills he was likely to find useful in the campaign. The Life Path system handed him a few surprises as he created his Veterinarian, such as Advanced-Tier Computers (Bert, a physics grad student, simply nodded at this and said, "Yep, grad school does that.")

The big win we got out of the session was getting everybody almost everybody onto a Google Spreadsheet so we could quickly share the sheets back and forth, and I could copy and paste their Skill, Trait, and Attribute values into my audit spreadsheet and find any issues they might have. In retropect, we should've done that from the outset. A few things took a while to figure out (Attribute Link Modifiers, for example, are referred to in numerous places, but the actual table to find out what they are is in the second section of the Action Check Modifiers table on page 41 of A Time of War.)

As has historically been an issue in MechWarrior, the Skills section on the Character Record Sheet doesn't have enough entries for characters the Life Path System produces, especially if those character elect to be older than the recommended starting age of 21. Both Bert and Henry have characters in their late 30's, and have co-opted sections on the back of the sheet to continue their lists. Which reminds me, the Personal Data block is mysteriously devoid of an Age field, but I suppose Extra covers that. I may end up adjusting the Character Record Sheet to more appropriately handle the large number of Skills and Traits my players seem to be accumulating. I suspect if I do so, there will be an article here about it.

This covered the blocking-and-tackling of the mechanics of Character Creation. Tomorrow I'll talk more about fielding the more... creative character concepts, and how I handled those.