We will soon have our first play test with the scenario "An eye for an eye". I read through all the rulebooks (finally).

I´m sorry guys but I have a hard time with the character creation!

Can you please help me with some advices so this section doesn´t take the hole day!

Sure !

1- Use the random career system as per RAW (draw 3 basic careers choose one). If the player is very disappointed, just have him draw 3 more.

2- Write in race abilities and starting stats (+1 on career stats)

3- Spend creation points, stats at a value of 2 are liabilities, but can be interesting from a roleplaying standpoint. If the players are new to roleplaying, I recommend a minimum of 3 in each stat, with a 4 for career stats. That would be the usual thing, but here, let the player choose whatever he wants.

4- Here is where things usually slow down... Action cards and Talents ! Some players will want to read ALL the cards before choosing. That is just not possible. GM intervention is needed. Talk about the character concept with the player. What does he see his character doing well and often, what type of fighter is he, what personality type has he ? This player input should help you pick 10 or so talents and 10 or so action cards that the player can choose from.

Tell your players that if they want to swap a card during the first 3 or 4 sessions, you're okay with that. As they get to know the rules and read the cards, players might find cards that they would have chosen "had they known". That's okay. Let them swap. For a while.

5- Find a good name, write down equipment etc, create story links between the characters in the group and voilà ! You're all set.

The above steps can take an hour or so, if you keep things organized and rolling. Again, beware the card choosing step ! Working with a character concept as base is essential, it makes choosing cards so much faster and easier.

There's generally not that much too it. Just follow the step in the rulebook.

After deciding career and race:

1: You get a number of Creation Points (25 for humans, 20 for everyone else, if I remember correctly)

2: You get a set of starting attributes based on race.

3: Increase the two Attributes listed on the career sheet by 1 each.

4: Spend as many creation points as you want on increasing your Attributes. Each increase costs the amount you're raising it to. (Going from 2 to 3 costs 3. Going from 3 to 4 costs 4. Going from 2 to 4 costs 7 etc.)

5: Spend the remaining points on wealth, skills, talents and actions, reference the list in the rulebook for prices.

6: make sure to add any extra skills granted by your race.

Jericho said:

What I've started doing is this:

Either agree with the players ahead of time what careers they're playing or decide on only a limited amount of careers available. Before the session, I'll go through the stacks of actions and talent, and pick out the cards that will fit. (For example, if they are playing ruffians and thieves in the slum of a city, there's no reason to have action cards intended for noblemen in the stack.) This slims the card stacks down considerably.

Thanks Ralzar and Jericho for your answers!

I´ll go through the character creation again with your advices in mind!

I too have found that its best to have the players draw/roll for random careers and races. Give them 2-3 options each.

jh

I recently did character creation for my group, and we took a whole session to do it. That allowed time for everyone to come up with some background & make a group connection. We went with the random roles, but put all the choices in a pool for people to choose from. I did 2 cards per player & then put them all in the middle of the table. I took out the apprentice wizard & initiate card, because I prefer a low magic start. I will allow them to come in as replacement characters or as new careers (if a good roleplaying reason is given..)

The hardest part for my players was actions & talents, and I really love the idea of giving them a small group to choose from based on their character idea. I wish I had thought of that. It will require the GM to be pretty well organized, and to have grouped the cards pretty well in advance.

ezradenney said:

If you are not prepared in advance, you can always use this emergency technique.

I take the talents cards in hand (remove the tricks if no pets are around), and I just read the titles. If a player is interested, he raises his hand, I give him the card.

I do the same with actions (remove slayer, wardancer and any other actions that don't seem appropriate with your group).

Sometimes players will be perplexed by a card name, I'll just add a one liner to explain the card quickly.

Once that is done, players each have a hand of actions and talents to choose from.

For the last campaign I started, I actually made a step-by-step guide for each person to make the careers available. So I did all the Creation Point calculations ahead of time and selected a set of 5-6 talent cards and some Action Cards that would fit each career. I did this with 6 careers for a group of 3 players. I like thematic groups that fit the campaign I'm running, so I just boiled it down to 6 careers that fit like a glove to the adventure I was running.
Then the players chose careers and got a sheet for their career looking like this:

(Calculations for Creation Points are off here, because I just made this up as an example)

1: Your main attributes are Strength and Thoughness. Choose one of them to be 5 and one to be 4.
Now select one attribute that will be your weakest. This is set to 2.
Set the rest of your attributes to 3.

2: Your skills are Athletics, Resilience, Weaponskill, Riding and Discipline
Choose 3 of these to be Trained.

3: Slecet one Specialisation from the list below. It must be a skill you have Trained.
Athletics: Swimming, Climbing
Resilience: Disease, Recovery
Weapons Skill: 1-handed, 2-handed
Riding: Drive, Trick-Riding
Discipline: Resist Fear

4: Choose 1 Tactic and 1 Focus Talent from the cards available.

5: Choose 2 Action Cards from the cards avilable.

6: Your Stance is 3 Reckless and 1 Conservative.

And they were done. Took a bit of prep-work for me, but it was well worth it to have the group finish the Character Creation Process in 30 mins.

ezradenney said:

I wouldn't call myself terribly organized, but what I've done is this:

Spells in one stack, stacked by School and then by Rank.

Invocations in one stack, stacked by Diety and Rank.

One stack for Basic Action cards, Wizard/Priest Basic Actions, Slayer, Pet, Swordmaster etc.

One stack for everything else, but stacked according to the icons in the upper left corner of the cards. So you get all the melee cards, then all the ranged cards etc.

Once you've just done this once, it'll be a bit easier to prepare for games. If you want to split the largest deck up even more, take the last deck and split it into combat and non-combat cards.

The thing is that it's not THAT often you'll have to use these stacks, so once you've organized them, you generally won't mess up the system too much, since you only have to break out those stacks when someone is making a character or buying a new Action.

I let my players choose a race, and then tell me what sort of character they want to play, from which i give them a selection of careers i feel are most fitting for them to choose from. Action cards are the only thing that would bog down character creation, but i tell players to scan the titles and choose one they feel appropriate, if they are unhappy after a couple of sessions i allow them to swap one or two out for ones they feel are more fitting.

I have my cards divided in two sets of sliding draws one for players and one of gm. i have a draw for rank 1 spells, another for rank 2-3 spells, and another for rank four and five spells, i have blessings split the same way, then i have a draw for all basic actions including petty magic and minor blessings, a draw for reactions and defence, a draw for combat fighting styles, one for ranged fighting styles, generic combat actions, generic ranged actions, social actions, then i have a draw for racially specific actions, eg sword master ones in high elf, ancestor, rune, and engineer in the dwarf one. I find this break down allows me to find just what type of card the player is looking for in the space of twenty seconds.

All my monster/ NPC actions are divided even more so i can pull actions cards i need, without sifting through piles of cards. took me a while to organise but now its done, its very easy to find what people are looking for.

I have my talents set out filed in plastic wallets, alphabetically by group, with the epic talents following each relevant grouping, same for order, faith, oath, engineering, and rune cards. I find it so much faster than players going through pile after pile of cards.

For me the longest part of character creation, is my questions about who there characters are, I email out a questionnaire for my players to fill out before our session, and then write each a specific series of questions based on there answers, and if my players are still being vague I will repeat the process until I and the player have a clear picture of exactly who the pc is, once this is done, i give the player a choice of fitting careers and they can do the crunchy stuff within an hour when we meet up, so we can get straight into gaming. I also award bonus creation points for players that write up the answers to the questionnaires into a page or two of back story, as this makes my life easier for designing subplots for each of my player characters.

crimsonsun

Thought I''d throw my two-penneth into this thread. I''m just planning for starting my first WFRP session with my group. We shift from game to game every few weeks, so the emphasis is to make things as easy as possible whilst still allowing them to make their own characters.

1) Select race - as standard, except that humans have 4 fortune points instead of 3 to better balance them against other races.

2) Select career - draw 3, pick one. If you hate them all, draw another three and this time you must pick one.

3) Attributes: Allocate attribute scores: 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2

4) Packages: Chose one of three option packages:

• Option 1: Increase attribute score of 2 to 3; 3 skills + 1 specialisation; 2 talents; 2 actions
• Option 2: Increase attribute score of 3 to 4; 2 skills; 2 talents; 2 actions
• Option 3: Increase 2 to 4; 1 skill; 1 talent; 1 action

5) Equipment: All characters will start with comfortable clothes, a bag with another set of clothes and a few knick-knacks such as candles and a tinderbox, as well as basic tools for any skills in which they are trained. They can then spend eight points on equipment.

0 Points: Dagger, Staff, Sling, 5 javelins, Cloth, Robes or Leather

1 Point: Hand weapon, spear, Shortbow, whip, Brigandine, Buckler, Shield

2 points: main gauche, sabre, morning star, crossbow, longbow, 5 throwing weapons, mail shirt

3 points: Halberd, Crossbow pistol

4 points: Rapier, Flail, Great weapon, Chainmail

8 points: Blunderbuss & 12 shots

You get 25 silver for every equipment point unspent. I dont playn to track ammunition for bows etc. but will for thrown weapons and blunderbuss.

Another option is to download LIBER FANATICA #7 and use some of the 40+ pregenerated characters in there.

jh