Character Creation Challenge 2024 - A Summary

Third attempt for the win!


After two meager attempts the last two years, I finally managed. Like most things that isn't a five minute job one day, it takes some structure and discipline to get done, even if it's a casual hobby thing.


The list of character/system spread

  • Runequest Glorantha (4)
  • Vampire: the Masquerade 5e (4)
  • Mutant: Hindenburg (4)
  • Mörk Borg (4)
  • Old School Essentials - Classic Fantasy (4)
  • Alien RPG (4)
  • Coriolis (4)
  • Mothership RPG (1)
  • Drakar och Demoner (1)
  • Mutant: Undergångens Arvtagere (1)

 

Takeaways from creating 31 characters in a month

  • Book formating/editing means so much. When you make a character, having all the info easily accessible gives you an immediate impression of how figuring out the game will be. Coriolis and M:UA have lots of information spread out across the whole book, but is really bad at giving page numbers and in M:UA's case create rules dependencies you find out when you make the character, and then not provide them. Then compare that with how much better Alien, Mutant: Hindenburg and Drakar och Demoner are when it comes to providing needed info in few words. And this is the same publisher (albeit M:UA was before their time and I assume they did not do any changes for the reprint), which is a bit mind boggling. I assume they have learned down the years. On the other hand, Old School Essentials avoids the "bury rules in walls of text for higher wordcount" problem in an incredibly impressive way.
  • Systems bloat. Both Runequest Glorantha and Vampire: TM 5e has so much stuff. Yet when I am done with the RG character, it feels alive with a story and opinions and personality traits built into the sytem. Meanwhile, the Vampire character has a bunch of attributes and skills, and then a whole slew of various systems that gets bolted on a solid core system without it feeling like it added much and just adds a lot of complexity.
  • My favorite gimmick is how the YZE games put in some easy personality traits, like "I like X for Y reason" "This is the character's problem" and provides you with some options you can just pick or give you inspiration. And then it comes up in various form in the game. It's a bit bad, because when I then encounter stuff like Vampire's conviction/touchstone system which asks you to be so bombastic without putting examples and how they will actually work in game at the same place, it comes across as just an annoying thing. The fact that the rules and ideas for conviction/touchstones are spread all over the book and that it boils down to "GM will threaten your touchstones, and you need to defend the poor helpless people" as the only jist makes me not like the thing even less. I'd rather not have stuff like that for characters. But then again, I'd strip away a lot of the Vampire systems and ways of doing things, not just that.
  • I think I just like rules light games a lot, as those are the ones I typically want to play after making them. But there is a line, where the game has no or shitty progression systems (like Mörk Borg) which makes me not want to. I will keep this in mind when choosing games to GM and play in this year..

 

Some notes for next year

  • Do other games, don't default back to Free League spam!
  • Put up some comparison picks of games that are close in spirit, like PF vs D&D. Vaesen vs Call of Cthulhu. There is a lot of games that occupies the same space at the moment, including my bookshelf, so eliminating some would be ideal.

 

Perhaps I will get to use the blog for the character thoughts and rambling for the next 11 months, instead of trickling in late characters for the challenge.


 

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