[Mighty Thews] Character Generation, Part One: Bones

[zakarntson]

I'm a bit proud of the simplicity of character generation for Mighty Thews. There are still some things to work out, but the general idea is this: Through each player making a few discrete choices and providing a few sentences, you have bad-ass characters, a new game setting (or at least details from an existing one) and all the PCs tied together

Comments

[greyorm]

Looks interesting so far, though there seems to be a limited number of choices each step. Are you going to be expanding on those and adding more possible choices per step, or leaving them as is?

(Mind you, I'm not against a limited number of choices. Just wondering.)

[zakarntson]

It's an intentional design decision. You get no choice or three choices at any point in the game (I'm hoping to reflect this in play, too; though it may become no more than three).

The short of it: This is the game I'm writing to play pulp fantasy with my brothers in a single evening of play, once in the Summer and once in the Winter. They both live far away, so we need to get as much gaming in as possible when they stop by. It seems to be shaping up pretty well, I figured I'd share it.

If it seems to be extra awesome, it ought to be pretty easy to write up new options to support more pulpy choice or even new genres. Over-the-top spy or heist movies come to mind.

We did have one successful Sorcerer & Sword run, but we just ignored demons to save time on chargen and play. And, you know, demons are kind of the reason to play Sorcerer. Last Christmas, when we did introduce demons, we didn't get very far in the actual play part. (I'll post the actual play link to that when Indie-RPGs search starts working again)

[zakarntson]

No prob. It was this close to being Matty Thews. But I wasn't sure if "matty" quite encapsulated the spirit.

[buddha_davis]

Zak

[zakarntson]

It's funny, I hadn't noticed the 3-2-1 score adjustment pattern. Funny!

You're right; no advancement. You deal with your Drives and the story ends. If you become Cutthroat of the Red Sea during play, that's cool. There may be a Boon system set up for that kind of thing. But so far as carrying characters from one session to the next, you re-create your character at the beginning of each game (recycling what you're interested in recycling).

I've heard about Giants through Jeff's blog and the Sons of Kryos podcasts. I love the idea of shared map creation. Mighty Thews already has Setting as part of chargen; you can just draw where your Setting is on the map.

Thanks for digging it! I'm pretty jazzed myself, as you can probably tell.