We had this discussion at my game table on Tuesday..If you were handed two identical sets of character stats, could you make different characters? For example, you just got handed two blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Reiklander Coachmen with identical characteristic, talent &skill blocks," are you capable of creating two different character personalities and play styles?

The answer is "of course," but I've seen a lot of arguing that we somehow need 233 different character careers, a D&D-style selection of races and the old d% system to somehow justify our lack of creativity in coming up with two different character concepts.

Is what we're missing the "distinguishing" features of characters? Do you feel that's crucial in a roleplaying game or is a character just a name and a bunch of stats?

jh

I would give mine a cigar, a floppy hat, and a drinking problem. Halflings would give him the creeps and he would cheat them out of their fares. He would constantly complain about his hemorrhoids and the infected splinter in his butt that he got from an unsanded runner board on those cheap Reikland Road Runner coaches (**** rich businessmen don't care spit for the common working man).

Emirikol said:

Yes you can, in both systems. Even after three identical careers they would be different characters.

So its not a flaw in either game.

Every roleplaying game has a metod of character advancement. As everyone knows the idea of Career Classes is an old one. In a Career Class system you take on a specific Class and your Class dictates which skills you can learn, which stats you can improve etc.. Games like D&D went with a small number of broad archetypes: Warrior, Cleric, Wizard and the rest. WFRP went further making the Career Classes job specific and highly focused. In WFRP within each Career there is not a great deal of choice in terms of how your Character Advances rather there is a large number of Careers to pick from. At the other extreme some roleplaying games have no Career system at all, allowing you create any combination of characteristics and skills that you want.

So why are people upset with the small number of Careers in WFRPv3? At first it was assumed that FFG had gone Career Class like D&D with each new Career representing several existing Careers, for example instead of Militiaman, Mercenary, Soldier, Watchman etc.. there would be one generic professional fighter Career possibly with a note suggesting that your character could be a Merc or a Watchman or whatever. When we got to see the Careers we found that this wasn't the case, that Careers are still very specific however unlike prevoius WFRP games there is only a very small number of Careers to pick from. This limits choice and as far as roleplaying games go limiting choice is almost always bad, but especially so when creating a new game that can be compared to another game that performed far better in this regard. The second thing that was great about the Career system was that NPC's used it as well. I don't know about the rest of you but I like to have a broad range of NPC's in my games for which I like to have a large number of Careers to help me create them.

Don't fear though FFG know how popular the Career system is that is why there are so few Careers in the Core Set. They will give out a handful of Careers with every supplement. So if you want a good selection of Careers all you have to do is buy every supplement that FFG release.

It's all about imagination; you play your role as one of these in this example:

• The corrupt coachman that is into smuggling
• The lawfull coachman that is very vigilant and possesive with his coach
• The sloppy no good greedy lazy guy who doesn't care for the passengers as long as hes gets his money

You can do this in any RPG I guess...

And after all I think Jay owes us a session demo video

My coachman would probably "shoot first, ask questions later" because it's well known that bandits like to prey on coaches. After years of being robbed, stopped, beaten and humiliated, my guy would be ready to quit his job to go kick some butt on his own and possibly make more money while doing it.

I love Armrek's WE WANT A DEMO in every post. That's a great demand.

Foolishboy said:

Er, this isn't really true. With the more flexible character creation and advancement system, each career in v3 can probably be used to represent a number of careers from v2.

Emirikol said:

oh yeah its super easy to make a chara personal but i dissagree when people say they can do this in any game....not DnD the high str, low Int character will always be Conan the Barbarian

macd21 said:

Yes Troll Slayer offers many options.

The background information about the Fish/Hooks gang war on the Dock Worker Career is obviously extremely universal and totally relevent to farm labourer.

Yes you CAN use Careers in a representative manner, but a specific Career is much better and judging from the background info found on the back of Career cards it seem that is how FFG intend the Career system to work.

I actually think FFG have done the right thing by keeping focused careers rather than generic Classes. I suspect that when FFG release a supplement 5-10 Careers will probably come with each one and in time build to be a set of over a hundred. As I understand it one of the reasons Careers were put on cards was so that you could intergrate the Careers as FFG release them. Also the Entrance/Exit system was redesigned to avoid the updating issuses that blighted the Career Compendium.

Of course mac if you have inside info that confirms that FFG have destroyed the Career System and replaced it with a representative Class System please speak up, start a thread a to discuss it. Because lets be honest nothing would turn fans off of this game faster than if FFG have ruined the Career System as you seem to believe.

Foolishboy said:

I don't have any inside information, but I think it's obvious that the new system allows for far more flexibility than the old one. Certainly many careers will obviously be rather limited - a trollslayer is a trollslayer, after all. But what about a commoner? Can a commoner represent a farmer, a charcoal burner, a fisherman? Obviously we'll have to wait and see, but as you have more options available to you than you can take, it seems clear that two members of the same career could be made to represent two very different 'jobs'. The differences between a Soldier, a mercenary and a militiaman can be represented with the selecetion of advances, skills, talants and equipment you pick. I think such flexibility is a huge improvement over the old (highly rigid) career system.

macd21 said:

What are you basing this on if you have only the same information as I do. We have seen the Dock Worker Career and it could be converted to a generic labour type Career but the information written on the Career Card is specific to a Altdorf Dock Worker.

Representative Careers of the type that you are championing are basically D&D style Career Classes. A move in that direction is sure to turn off fans. It will be a truly sad day if all non-profesional Careers have been sidelined into one genric "Commoner" Career. It would be extremely unsual if FFG have done that. If as you suggest the Careers occupied by 90% of Imperial people have been swept into a single Career then why create a seperate Dock Worker Career? Out of all the jobs the peasantry do why create Commoner and Dock Worker? Unless more specific Careers are intended to be released at a later date.

It may well be that you are forced to use some Careers representatively until the specific Careers are published. In fact with the low number of Careers included in the Core Set it will be next to impossible to run a game without representative Career use. But I expect and FFG have indicated that more Careers will be coming in future products and just to reiterate the sample Career (Dock Worker) that I have seen contains very specific Career information rather than instructions on implimenting representative play.

I will point out that in v2 two starting characters with the same race and career are nearly identical. Just a few stat differences from random rolls (which the OP in this case said were identical), and a random talent. Initial career skills, talents, and equipment are all the same (other than a single initial XP purchase choice).

v3 allows players to choose how many skills and actions they start with, as well as which ones they start with. This leans quite heavily in favor of making characters different right off the bat, roleplaying personalities aside.

NezziR said:

Aaaand I've a new NPC. Thanks!

Farin said:

Which is amusing in itself because Conan is quite bright

dvang said:

The main problem I see with point-buy systems is that they force a player to max-min his character. Who is going to create a Fighter type with less than 5 starting Strength? I love the roleplaying aspect of RPGs more than other aspects of RPG, that does not mean I'm careless about my character's stats. It is not the same to start with a slightly crippled character due to bad rolls than to start with a purposefully crippled character... almost nobody will try it (and I've seen my share of RPG games with point-buy characters).

So, to me, the debate is not whether you can create different characters with the same stats or whether v2 or v3 will make less identical characters... both question are hitting a straw man, as there is an obvious answer: of course you can create different characters with same stats, and of course both v2 and v3 can produce different characters,...

The debate should be about which system gives a player more "psycological freedom" or "less stress" to create any kind of character?... and in this case the winner, in my opinion, is a system like v2 because, at the end of the day, it really can bring any kind of character into play, whereas a point-buy system will make you feel a fool if you decide to play with a 3-Strength Fighter.

That does not mean I don't like v3; indeed I like almost everything that has been presented in the developer's diary, but I can still keep my critical mind and cry wolf when I think there's one... that's why I have already made a house-rule proposal in a post, although it seems some people have derailed it into some rant about their manhoods...

Artaxerxes said:

cogollo said:

I can certainly agree with this possibility. However, I can name quite a few players around here that wouldn't necessarily start a fighter with a 5 Strength (assuming their max was 5). It all depends on the character concept, really, and the GM can help play a part in character creation process. Personally, I think it's better in general to have a fighter start with 4's in S, T, and Agi if possible, over maxing out S or T and leaving one of the others at a 3. Still, as long as the initial points with which to buy upgrades are reasonably limited, min-maxing will force a character to have some inherent weaknesses. WP is pretty important for things like fear, so a fighter really shouldnt skimp on it, for example. We also don't know which actions are associated with which stat. There could be some nice leadership actions fighters can use that require Fel, for example, so any fighter that fails to get a decent Fel will miss out on those. Now, in v2 I didn't mind the random stats really, because they were weighted pretty well, and you were practically always around 34% (give or take 5%). You'd get enough advances through your career to offset the majority of any slight deficiency in your 'prime' stat (and we used the Shallya's Mercy rule too). My biggest gripe about v2 random was the starting talent and the career.

Anyway, the topic of the thread is not "is Random or Point-Buy better?". My post, of course, just pointed out that the point-buy offers more variety in character creation than the random rolling method. As you correctly pointed out, though, it is more easily abused.

>>>>The debate should be about which system gives a player more "psycological freedom" or "less stress" to create any kind of character?... and in this case the winner, in my opinion, is a system like v2 because, at the end of the day, it really can bring any kind of character into play, whereas a point-buy system will make you feel a fool if you decide to play with a 3-Strength Fighter.>>>>

I cant' disagree with you there. There will have to be in-game disadvantages to having a one-trick pony. When I ran 3xD&D, I typically used the skill checks a LOT and used the ones where I felt players were not well rounded. For example, I did a survey on ENworld and RPG.net asking what the least commonly used skills were (ranked). I used those for a lot of my adventures. Not to be a ****, mind you, but to encourage players to well-round their characters and encourage them to fit into my world rather than thinking that it was "just another hack n slay n take their stuff" world.

I would expect to do the same thing here..AND to NOTE IT IN MY HOUSE RULES [emphasis, not screaming for those hypersensitive types out there who freak out when posters use "CAPS" to deliniate emphasis].

I'm going to challenge players' weaknesses every game (hopefully in a fun and non-dismembering way), but remember that they picked a particular set-up for a reason and also cater to that.

WFRP in my opinion, encouraged one-trick ponies as PC's had lack of access to some very crucial skills. Not saying everybody should be able to get healing +20 specialization..but something along the lines of everybody should be able to get healing skill.

jh

..

True, Emirikol, but this situation is true for ANY RPG. Any RPG could have characters min-maxed to some degree by their players, and every RPG has underused skills (well, those that have skills anyway). Exactly as you said, the GM needs to make the story include checks of skills if they are going to be used. Character advances aren't cheap for PCs, so they must pick and choose carefully. Most of the time (there are some exceptions) a player (not just min-maxers) is going to choose to take a skill that actually could get used. For example, most PCs in most games don't spend points on Swimming (in my experience). That's because swim checks tend to be few and far between in games, either because the campaign/adventure didn't have water of the GM didn't enforce checks when they should have, etc.

I never found it any worse in WFRP than any other RPG. It was very GM dependent, not game dependent.

Well put. I"m going to pose a question in a seperate thread related...which skills expected least used in 3e...

jh

I wouldnt think you cant come up with 3 seperatly good coachman characters, however are they are less liekly to have those significant/insignificant quirks or factors that a random generation often puts before a person.

In a point buy system I think its unlikely to see any 'warrior' type character with 2 in strength, agility, or toughness (sure they may not be huge but will be atleast average across the board). Though with a random system you may get one thats low which then to me atleast says explain why its low for a character style/career that normally wouldn't be low.

Or you have a character that rolls max fellowship in 2nd ed, yet for your character concept fellowship wasnt even a consideration, so it was left as a whatever characteristic. Now the character likely would need some kind of explination as to why they are so charming, where with a point buy the fellowship wouldnt have been anything but average or maybe a little lower if more points were needed elsewhere.

Take a dock worker for example they arent likely to have high fellowship but low strength, but the random roll give's it to them, while they are decent in any other characteristics that they would typically be seen to be normally good in a dock worker.
What can one come up with to explain this abnormality?
While conversly if the character has characteristics in line with what a dock worker would have, there realy is no need to explain the differences, since they are the expected norm.

So maybe in both cases the character is the younger brother of the forman, explaining why they have the dock worker career. While sufficient for a basic character backgroud, I fee with the low strength high fellowship I need to expalin that too, so would add that though the character is a dock worker, he spends more of his time in the tavern chatting up the waitreses than actually working at the dock, he only keeps his job because of his brothers clout which is why his brother is a little disapointed in the way he does things.

A simple thin as two out of the 'norm' stats has actually give some feel into the character and another NPC.

Sure I could have come up with this idea otherwise, however it just flowed from the descrepenacy of the characteristic rolls.

This is realy why I like the random over purchased figure.

It also kinda means that the developer cant skirt on what the is achieveable for an average character since they have to consider the possibliity of a random roll where as with purchase point thye can cop out a little saying "well the player chose not to take a better build, how is that our responsibility". Ie combat is figured that warrior types will be average (though often above average) in combat characteristics.

In a time period that most fantasy games play out in rarely does an individual get a choice in what career that can actually be. Typically if you are born to farmers or peasants you will be a farmer/peasant, reguardless of your natural aptitude.

I can see what you're saying, Loswaith. Players can certainly try to adjust their character's concept based upon their rolls, and sometimes it can even add to the character. Sometimes, though, there is also no getting around the fact that what was rolled is nothing like the concept the player was thinking of/wanted to play. The problem I also see, however, is the fact that if a career and stats have an opposing mismatch, the player is at a significant handicap that can make the character unfun to play.

For instance, a player is the only wizard in the group, but rolls a minimum intelligence. First, how do you explain a sub-average intelligence on a wizard? Second, it significantly impacts the character's role and usefulness as a wizard. If they're too stupid to reliably cast any spells, and all their available skills are based on intelligence so are practically useless too, then the player most likely will feel useless and won't have fun. The point of the game is to have fun. I have seen this sort of thing happen too often with random generation, which is why I prefer a bit more player control over completely random. I don't mind some randomness to generation, but I feel a player should be able to prevent having their character actually handicapped at the start unless they are willing to run with it.

Of course, that said, I just realized that I have been a forgetting something about 3e. Your starting career gives you an increase to a stat or two at generation. So, you'll never actually start with a minimum stat in your career's primary, because it gives you a boost. That makes implementing a random stat generation house rule less of a concern to me.

Intelligence is less of an issue for a wizard than Willpower is.

Personaly I have played a character that has less than optimal stats, a thief that their lowest Characteriistics were in intelligence and agility. I found I had to think more out of the box for this character, and as such it offered the ability for me to concider options or tactics I wouldnt have otherwise done. However once the character had a few advances up his sleve he was the donimant factor for tasks revolving around his skillset, even though initially others could do it better. The character was played as if he was a bit more green than a typical character of the thief career.

I do generaly recomend that a player spend Shallaya's Mercy after career selection/roll, so the character can then be atleast average in a characteristic the player feels is important.

Though Honestly if a concept requires a character to have a specific value in a characteristic rather than just a general one (above average, average, doesnt matter). Then for me its not realy a concept its has gone past that stage.

In the end though the advances a character gets from careers are far more important than their initial rolls.

Though I can understand the feeling some would have in the case of opposing characteristics and career path.

For me I usualy come to the table with a loose concept because I know warhammer 2nd ed provides random character/characteristic generation.

I kind of look at it this way:

In the movie ALIENS, you had a bunch of grunts.

They all had the same stats AFAIAC. Anyone who couldn't make these into individuals is simply not a good roleplayer:

Ellen Ripley
Cpl. Dwayne Hicks

Bishop

Carter Burke

Pvt. Hudson

Lt. Gorman

Pvt. Vasquez
Sgt. Apone
Pvt. Drake

Pvt. Frost
Cpl. Ferro
Pvt. Spunkmeyer
Cpl. Dietrich (as Cynthia Scott)
Pvt. Crowe
Pvt. Wierzbowski

Al
Lydecker

Actually, they were all different with different personalities as well as skills and stats. Some were medics, some were techs (Hudson, for example), some were heavy gunners (Drake, Vasquez), Apone and Hicks were NCOs, Ferro and Spunkmeyer were pilots, etc. They all also had different stats, with some being physically stronger than others (although, not by a drastic amount), and some more attractive than others, some with better willpower than others, some smarter than others, etc.

Of course, it helps that I have the Aliens! RPG from Leading Edge Games and have seen a bit more detail into their histories, backgrounds, and skills, but you can see it in the movie if you look closely. It's why Hudson is the one to unlock the exterior door and does a lot of the technical stuff in the movie, and Ferro and Spunkmeyer pilot the dropship, for examples.

@ Loswaith

Now, I will agree that usually a character can eventually overcome their initial stat handicap, whether it is through skill increases, stat increases, or career change. My point is that, especially for someone who isn't wanting that challenege, they will feel sub-par to other player characters (that don't have a handicap), and so will likely not have fun playing that character enough to get to a point where they feel useful/fun. It can take a dedicated person to play a handicapped character and still have fun with it, or even to keep playing until the character becomes fun. That's part of why I prefer a more player-oriented generation. The game is for the players to have fun (GM too, but as a GM I have fun if the players have fun).