Pen & Paper RPG 101 - part 2

[ayascythe]

Part 2 of my little 101 for RPG! :)

I'm going to start using an existing RPG system for some of my explanations, because it's much easier with an actual example. I chose White Wolf's „World of Darkness“, because
a) it takes place in our world so it's easer to get the references.
b) the setup is much easier and less overwhelming than in some other systems.
c) it's one of my favourite systems. ;)

Creating a Character

There are so many different levels and ways of roleplaying, but what they all have in common is that you assume the personality of a character and pretend to be him or her. You play a role.

That's actually something a lot of people on LJ do in various roleplay communities, claiming characters and posting dialogue in the comments. Now, the difference between that kind of RPG and pen & paper is that the latter has defined rules. Depending on the gamesystem, those can vary from simple to very, VERY complex. However, no matter the game, it all starts with a character sheet:



On this sheet is written everyhting about your character: your name, your age, your race (depending on the game system, this can be e.g. human, vampire, werewolf, elve, dwarf, ogre or anything you can think of, really), your profession, your looks, your cultural background etc.

In order to start creating a character, you first need a concept: a background story or an idea on what you want to play. Let's say you want to play a demon hunting guy who knows how to handle weapons and has quite some background knowledge about urban mysteries. He's also quite the womanizer and can be pretty persuasive, especially with women ... OK, fine, let's say you want to play someone like this guy:



How do we transfer this on paper?

First, there are attributes such as strength, dexterity or intelligence. You get points you can put into those attributes. The more points you have, the better you are. Since you only get a certain amount of points in the beginning, you have to choose wisely.



As Dean Winchester a demon hunter, you're most likely to need strength, dexterity and stamina, but also some manipulation and presence to get the information you want to have. So you put most of your points into those attributes. As Sam Winchester a more text-savvy demon hunter, you would need more wits and intelligence. Your attributes have to fit your concept.

The same goes for your skills. You will need a lot of points for physical skills like firearms or brawl, but also for other skills like investigation and occult-knowledge. Since you often need to patch yourself up (or your brother ;)), you have some basic medicine knowledge. And if you want to be able to get some information out of people, you will need some points in persuasion.



During the course of the game, you get experience points. You can use those points to increase your attributes or skills. For example: you could pay 5 experience points to buy yourself one more point in strength. This is how your character develops and grows stronger in his or her talents. Usually, you should try to make your character growth look reasonable, e.g. if you spent an entire night repairing your car, it makes sense for you to improve your crafts skill. If you hate animals and rarely have anything to do with them, then you can improve your animal ken but it would be completely off from what you've been playing. Some players care about that, others just want to improve their skills to look good and sometimes, gamemasters simply won't allow you to do it.

Attributes and skills are the basic things you will find on practically every character sheet, no matter which RPG system you pick. There are other ways to spend your points or how the system is built, but these two things you will always find. Then there are other things, like special talents (e.g. a certain martial arts technique), like magic (and the spells you can do) or certain things only your race can do (e.g. controlling people if you're a vampire).

There might be advantages you can "buy" for your character with generation points: things like a sixth sense for supernatural beings, the ability to see in extremely dark places, etc. There are also disadvantages that - depending on the system - you can or have to take. Personally, I often find disadvantages more interesting than omg-awesome-advantages, because it's the flaws that make the characters interesting and provide the funniest moments in a game. I currently play a character who has a gambling problem and he once lost everything he had, including his clothes. Everyone at the table was howling with laughter as my character ran stark naked around town. XD

So yeah, now we have built our own Dean Winchester clone and how we actually play him - that is up for next time. ;)

TBC

Coming up next: gameplay.