[Design] Character Generation: Detail vs Opportunity Cost

[David Cake]

At 4:42 PM -0800 15/11/05, Lev Lafayette wrote:
>Last night Erica and I visited Kyle's place to play
>Ars Magica. It's a game I've read and wanted to play
>for many, many years but have never had the actual
>chance.
>
>It's got great ideas. A mythic Europe, which you all
>know I like. An interesting magic system based on
>nouns and verbs and in Latin (e.g., "Creo Ignem" =
>"Create Fire"). You roleplay a troupe of characters, a
>main wizard, a couple of companions and a bunch o'
>grogs. Your group forms a covenant.

	It certainly does have some great ideas. A classic game 
design. Established Jonathon Tweet as a great game designer. Mark 
Rein*splat* Hagen, of course, went on to wealth and fame gaining what 
rep he has as a game designer by building the whole World in Dimmness 
on working one of the great ideas in Ars Magica to death, the 'take 
the players and their alleged allies and fellow travellers and split 
them into organised political factions and use that as a major source 
of in game antagonists (so the players cannot simply defeat all 
opponents with violence, but must use politics and guile)' idea.
	A great game, pity its not bigger. I think its suffered a bit 
commercially from being very much grabbed by the medievalists - the 
game products have drifted very much in a direction where you pretty 
much have to be a medieval expert to write for it, and you will end 
up being at least pretty well read in medieval history just by being 
a dedicated GM. This is quite cool aesthetically, but I think has 
cost it all hope of a mass audience.
	Though Paul Kidd claims its major commercial failing is 
trying to sell a game called Arse Magic to an industry where many 
customers are teenage boys :-)

>
>In this case the golden mean applies, I think. How
>much time should character generation take? How
>individual should a character be?

	Ideally its a 'to individual tastes' thing. ArsM 4 used to 
have a (fairly half-arsed) system of templates, where if you wanted 
you could just bypass most of the process and start by saying 'I'll 
have a classic Tremere' or whatever.
	The best systems are the ones where you can start with a 
workable character really quickly and customise it just as much as 
you like.

>One thing I've noticed. Random rolling of
>characteristics can often be faster than players
>having to choose stats and traits!

	Yep, but the payoff of a choice system is not in the 
characteristics, but in the broader character design and the stuff 
that makes your character really individual (in Ars magica, virtues 
and flaws), because by the end of the design the players are already 
established in their character roles, and usually already have a fair 
bit of backstory, which is good.
	Real shortcut systems (that don't rely on rules lite systems 
- its easy to do quick character creation in a rules lite system) 
like the templates system etc work best in games where (either due to 
gameworld assumptions or campaign particulars) you don't really 
require the players to have a lot of individual backstory. For 
example, it can work very well in HeroWars/Quest, where a lot of the 
support material is based around group backstory rather than 
individual - work out the details of your clan, or your hero band, or 
regiment, and the characters can pretty easily slot in around that if 
that is what you want. It can also work very well in games like 
Shadowrun, where the game default is more or less that backstory is 
unnecessary because the characters are connected to the plot only as 
hired professionals - a character who has their memory wiped after 
every job is just as playable as that guy with the complex history of 
betrayal and lost love.
	Cheers
		Dave