Characters are defined by a list of qualities, created by answering the following questions:
What quality causes people to argue in favor of you being chosen to rule the Starflower Empire after the Empress’s passing?
What quality causes people to argue against you being chosen to rule the Starflower Empire after the Empress’s passing?
What quality do you possess that the character of the player to your left does not?
What quality do you possess that the character of the player second to your left does not?
(and etc: ask that last question once for each other player. Certain groups may wish to collaboratively discuss this beforehand, establishing basic character concepts and allowing player veto before one player declares that another’s does not possess the quality of “Intelligence” or so forth.)
Jot down any additional small details you feel are worth noting about your character. These aren’t mechanically significant Qualities, but inform the other players as to the nature of your character.
Questions to be answered as a group:
Why is the Starflower the symbol of the Empire?
What was the cause of the Starflower Empress’s death?
What important events were going on that will require any successor’s immediate attention?
Tags: the starflower throne
August 31, 2009 at 3:39 pm |
Oh, this I like.
I don’t like the implied fiction. Starflower Empires aren’t really what kicks my imagination in the proverbial groin. But that is a personal problem. The mechanics are where they should. This stuff works.
It’s important, I think, to clearly tell the players that while they are telling how they character differ from the neighbour they are allowed (and supposed to) also to create that player’s character, not only their own.
August 31, 2009 at 4:07 pm |
Thanks for your feedback! Are you doing a game chef blog where I could reciprocate?
It’s interesting: in playtesting, the group actually took it an entirely different way than I had envisioned. “The StarFlower” became the colony ship flying through space, and the problem was that the Empress’s death caused the core to shut down: we established that the people were mostly transhumanist plant-folk, and “flowering” was a sign of the Noble class.
I admit I myself had first pictured a vaguely video-game-inspired fantasy kingdom (“Ice kingdom! Desert kingdom! Sea kingdom!”), where the ‘starflower’ symbolized a connection between the heavenly and terrestrial. But that playtest convinced me to leave it vague, I think.
But yeah, the questions and character creation process worked really well, although it took a bit longer than I expected since it requires everyone to grok the basic concept of everyone else’s character, rather than just their own.
September 1, 2009 at 10:35 am |
Hey!
This seems pretty cool. How do the answers feeds into the mechanics?
September 1, 2009 at 8:56 pm |
I’m still sort of debating the exact applicability of Qualities in my head, but right now I’m thinking that having at least one will make Challenges a bit easier: decrease the amount you have to pay (or increase the amount you’re paid) by one. But not stacking with each other if you have multiple, probably.
September 1, 2009 at 12:41 pm |
Yeah, I am doing one of these blogs. I haven’t come as far as you yet (these days I live like a bum and I get all my internet connection from McDonalds and Starbucks). My entry is here: http://bosporen.se/schweiz/
What happens when you create characters like this (I did something similar for a larp… actually I translated that part of the game to English. Maybe I could find it.) is that it can become too fun and people just going off on tangents instead of really being productive.
And you might want to look at Jason Morningstar’s Potter’s Raid. A very, very different game from yours, but it might be of some interest (you can find it here: http://structured-freedom.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=53&page=1#Item_0)
September 1, 2009 at 8:58 pm |
Yeah, like I said, character creation took a bit longer than I expected, and part of that was people getting excited figuring out the differences between their characters and jumping ahead to witty banter “You don’t know yer taters, girl!” “You ARE a tater!” and so forth. So it is at least fun, but I’m not convinced of “too fun”, yet.
Thanks for the recommendations, I’ll check them out!