Quick Time Lord Characters

[paulb]

I’m running one or more convention games of Doctor Who over the next few months, starting with this coming weekend.

This past weekend, I finished creating a set of “pre-generated” character cards for the game.

Essentially, they’re not complete characters by any measure – just enough to get through a session. While I could easily have done six or seven fixed character sheets, I have been pleased with card-based characters when running The Dee Sanction (my own game - and Night’s Black Laundry (a variant on the games from Pelgrane Press and Cubicle 7). My thinking, why not!

I plan to lay the cards down on the table and players get to choose one (or more) from each row as the game progresses. In practice, when someone pushes a challenge, then would be a good time to choose a card.

Alternatively, they could take one from each row at the start of the session. Or I could hand them out at random. That’s the approach with the other games I’ve used character cards. Indeed, my last game of The Dee Sanction generated some fantastic characters right off the bat based on the cards alone.

I think these cards might warrant some tweaking to achieve something like that. I’d quite like to add a random naming suggestion and maybe a motivation or two.

In use, characters will possess any Skills not listed, but they’d have a value of 1. Or zero. I don’t want to go down that route. I’d rather people stick with what they’re good at. Otherwise, players can make rolls based on Attribute alone if no one has the right Skill at the given location or a specific scene.

I tweaked the character generation process of my Call of Cthulhu game on the same basis around skills. I dislike the standard method that creates characters with tiny percentile chances of success on skills.

All characters start with 12 Story Points. Because I’ve created the cards without the full spread of abilities, I don’t want to penalise them further! While I have given everyone a gadget worth a Story Point, it still doesn’t quite compensate.

The three cards align in a column. I noticed that you could actually boil the standard character sheet down into a half an A4 column – so, why not do it with cards.

The top row of cards has each of the six classes from the Time Lord Academy, plus a Gallifreyan who opted to ‘go wild’. The Shobogan made their appearance in Classic episode The Deadly Assassin. I wanted a non-Time Lord as an option, but with the potential to be involved and of value. Herein, the Shobogan fills the base roll of a more physical Gallifreyan.

The middle row has aspects of personality, which serve up good and bad Traits.

The bottom row fits a sort of career path, offering an extra Attribute point and key Skills. Also, extra Traits and a Gadget.

My adventure concerns students escaping Gallifrey at the start of the Time War, which (from a plot perspective) excuses the shortfall in points here and there. They are, however, the best and brightest the Academy has to offer.

Link to card sheets:
Google Drive Shared Folder - Character Generation Cards

[da professor]

Looks good to me.
You realise, of course, that I will be stealing this idea.

[paulb]

Tell you what, I'll do a deal. You steal the idea, but come back with comments and feedback on how it works out for you. We both benefit, and I can make the next iteration a better one!

[paulb]

In general, the use of the cards worked out well. I had positive feedback from a couple of players after the session, and one who engaged me in general discussion about the Vortex system.

Over the course of the game, I did find once the characters split up some found having the right skill an issue. When I declared a combination of Attribute and Skill, the response was they’d have one and not the other. With a full character, this would simply be a Skill with a low or zero value.

I think I’ll plug that gap with Story Points.

In a short convention game, Story Points don’t actually get spent as quickly as you might like as a GM. At a push, characters in a bind can get a Skill in something – as a one off – by spending a Story Point like the “Like This, Doctor” ability. A straight +3 modifier for a single Point should suffice and make the difference where there’s a shortfall.

That should keep the story moving and the Story Points flowing, so by the end of the adventure the players might get the sense of impending doom that comes with a Story Point overdraft...

[misterharry]

I spotted a few traits which I don't have listed in my checklist of Vortex system traits - are these homebrew ones, or have I missed these somewhere?

The ones I'm particularly interested in are:

• Air of Wealth
• Oneupmanship
• Friendly

I'm keen to know where these come from.

[paulb]

After taking a few from Primeval, I found I still didn't have all I needed.

Friendly is simply a human variant of Animal Friendship.

The Air of Wealth occurred to me as a way to influence people through the appearance of wealth, rather than necessarily possessing any.

Oneupmanship occurred to me when flicking through another game (The Gaean Reach, I think).

All made up, based broadly on the structure of others.

[misterharry]

Well, they look reasonable and balanced to me - I thought they might have been official traits I'd missed.

[Catsmate]

Oct 20, 2015 21:05:41 GMT paulb said:

After taking a few from Primeval, I found I still didn't have all I needed.

Friendly is simply a human variant of Animal Friendship.

The Air of Wealth occurred to me as a way to influence people through the appearance of wealth, rather than necessarily possessing any.

Oneupmanship occurred to me when flicking through another game (The Gaean Reach, I think).

All made up, based broadly on the structure of others.

I like them. Air of Wealth reminds me of the infamous "Credit Rating" from Call of Cthulhu.

[zebaroth]

i like the idea it streamlines things makes it easy to run and not have to fumber with my notes

[paulb]

Running with these again in two weeks time. Hopefully more outings will reveal any oversights in my construction of the baseline cards.

[paulb]

Second outing went well. Scattered the cards around the table and the players shuffled through them during the first 10 minutes of the game. If they liked the look of something, they took it. If we needed a certain skill, someone committed to it. In the end, we had a few players who still hadn't committed to a third by about 20 minutes in and then we sort of just had final choices. Quite fluid.

After the game, one of the players commented he thought the process was a neat approach to pre-generated characters. Normally, pre-gens means choosing from a bunch of fixed sheets. Someone always ends up compromising on the character they end up with. Having them broken down into threes cards - roughly attributes, traits and skills - means they have more choice. Even if they end up with one card they don't really like, they'll have had their choice of the rest. No one ends up with anything totally rubbish because I also have enough spare cards to make for more choice.

I think I need to add one or two more cards to each level - at least one character with decent athletic skills would seem ideal. Not likely to run another Doctor Who now until sometime early next year, but worth tinkering in the meantime.