@Tabloid Believer:

I know you said you were splitting the difference, but I think I'm with you on all the points you made... ...so maybe i wasn't articulating my position very well.

~PS

Just wondering if we should fire up a character creation thread. No gaming intended (but it might happen), just because and perhaps as a resource for GMs looking for NPCs. Maybe every few weeks we change to a different game system.

Thoughts? Interest?
--
TAZ


Tangent-palooza: "Clown Love." How many of you all had that micro nightmare moment? Oh, when I googled Juggalo images, I was kind of surprised at the number of pregnant women that showed up. *flesh crawling* Ok, perhaps I should stop before I creep myself out too much. Funny, clowns didn't bother me when I was a kid. Only with cynical adult's eyes do I see something disturbing that probably isn't.

I could go for that. Although I'd keep it system agnostic and let GMs strap on stats if they feel like it.

Pros and cons to that. Part of the 'joy' for some is the number crunching, the optimizations, and the 'shopping'. The way I'd pitch a format would be to have the color text box first and then the stat block beneath that can the GM can use, lose, or abuse.

There's also the possibility of a lot of bandwidth chatter, things like the Fate system love to have hooks that cross over to other characters. Written in a vacuum, these would probably be stubs.

I also have some shameless ideas to intoduce people to other RPGs that you can find on the web.
--
TAZ

In other words, there'll be 3 million Wu Shu Open characters.

I will admit, there are quite a few games I'd be renascent to run [WoD, Star Wars, Dr. Who, Star Trek, Anything in Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk/Dragonlance] just for the sheer quantity of thing I know that I DON'T know about the setting.

LOL, the funny thing is that I wasn't even thinking about Wushu. Wushu characters are like popcorn; they're mechanically simple and the joy is in using them.

One of the ideas I was playing with was a full blown Fate session where the characters are all interlinked so you have a ready made group. Spirit of the Century might be a good choice because of the SRD being readily available.

Icons or Villians and Vigilantes would be a hoot because they use random tables for their super powers.

Another idea was maybe a team building project to create a The Trouble with Rose playset (after all, TTwR is all about the character design and there is a process that might be hidden from the casual reader.)

And... I probably have seventy or eighty games sitting on the back burner.
--
TAZ

Setting Bloat only becomes an issue for my games when I get a jerk player who knows the setting better than I do and insists I stick to published canon. I haven't run into it that much because most of the people I game with tend to be the least setting-focused gamers I know. They wouldn't know a departure from canon in most games unless there was a big sign that said in neon lights "This departs from established canon."

Still, when I do plan to depart from canon, I make a point of telling people during campaign prep, usually in the background documents I hand out that have the basic info they should know (e.g. my Star Wars games discard anything having to do with the Reborn Emperor or the New Jedi Order extra-galactic invaders crap).

I generally don't run Forgotten Realms because of the setting bloat, so it's not even an issue in my D&D games. Until I started my Doctor StrangeRoll campaign, my previous three D&D games were set either in my own world or in Ptolus (I was the only one who had that book), so I could deviate all I wanted and no one knew as long as my campaign was internally consistent.

I'm lucky that all the people I game with now are easy-going types. If I change something in a game that they're familiar with, I just get shrugs and they roll with it, if they even notice. I think gaming with someone who corrected me at every time because Elminster slept with person X but not person Y, would drive me bonkers (I also don't play in the Realms anymore because it seems to me that the PCs aren't really needed; there are enough high-level characters and god-like beings wandering around that a 1st level adventurer really shouldn't have much to do unless all those high-falutin' folk are just really lazy, unsympathetic bastards).

I think setting bloat can occasionally be a pain the players have inflicted upon them by the GM. I've played in a game where the GM had a home-brew setting he had spent literally decades building. He knew more about this fictional world than he did about the world we all live in (sometimes). Which was kinda awesome... except when it wasn't. He would kill cool character concepts because of historical footnotes. We were expected to know not just a few pages worth of background information, but whole text dumps. I suggested playing a character from a certain geographical region and a certain class. I got an email with three word documents containing a grand total of over 140 pages of text (a few images did spice things up) in order to make sure I understood enough history to create my character. I didn't read it. I didn't end up joining his game.

Which isn't to say I don't enjoy putting effort into creating a character. It's why I also occasionally get frustrated with character creation that goes no where. I was planning on playing a WoD game. I wanted to create an asian vampire. So I read three history books on Chinese history to place my vamp in time and culture. I spent a long time on it. And the game died. Now, I am glad I now know more about Chinese history than I did before. But I was very frustrated at the time.

Any GM with that much fluff better damn well be prepared to serve as a wiki for their players.