Charactercreation

Here I'll talk a bit about the process of character creation.

I used the system of rolling 4d6 and leaving the bad one out.

Kris

I created Kris' character while still talking to him on MSN. I had some dice lying around so he told me I could roll his character for him and that's when the following happened :

17, 14, 15, 15, 14, 8

You can imagine Kris being happy about this and me wishing I had saved this roll for creating some NPC.

Anyway, I figured if I was that lucky, I might as well roll up an NPC character then and there. And the following happened :

12, 16, 15, 17, 14, 16

Kris divided the rolled numbers over his stats in the following manner:

Str 14, Dex 15, Con 15, Int 14, Wis 8, Cha 17

The character would be an Elementalist. Basically a variant of the Sorcerer class. I thought up a couple of nice things for him how he could work with the elementals based on how the shugenja work in Legend of the Five Rings.

But then all of the sudden Kris changed into Kris-who-changes-his-mind-all-the-time-when-it-comes-to-characters and he wanted to play a barbarian. At that moment I had a party of a rogue and a sorcerer so I had already prepared a half-orc barbarian for the combat encounters. On the one hand I was happy because if one of the characters was combat oriented, they wouldn't use my NPC as meatshield all the time. On the other hand I had already thought up a lot of cool things for the sorcerer so I was very reluctant to let that go.

I met up with Kris at the Oberonn, the local gaming store, and he explained his new character to me. He had been playing God of War a lot recently and the main character was a barbarian type. The character however also had some spellcasting ability and he had found the ragemage prestige class in one the D&D books which sounded very cool to him. Since he wanted to give his character spellcasting abilities anyway, I told him it would be ok if he took the elementalist class for that. That fitted rather well with the rest in my opinion. A barbarian who also controlled the raw and chaotic forces of the elements.

Kris then played a bit with his stats. He increased his roll of 17 and 15 with one and decreased a roll of 14 to an 11 (-1 for the first stat increase, -2 for the second stat increase). So his stats changed to:

Str 18, Dex 15, Con 16, Int 8, Wis 11, Cha 14

Player comments

Kris: "Kris changed into Kris-who-changes-his-mind-all-the-time-when-it-comes-to-characters… So true ;o)"

Steven

After my very succesful attempts of rolling up Kris' character and an NPC, I also tried to roll up a character for Steven but that one was so bad that I decided to let him roll it up himself. That didn't really work much better though.

Steven rolled up his character at the Oberonn, the gaming store he's working in. Since Kris' stats were so good, I told him I'd let him roll up 3 sets of stats and he could pick the best one. 3 sets of stats later Steven still didn't have a decent character so I changed it to 5 sets of stats. And what do you know ? 5 sets of stats later I told him : "Ok, just roll a set until you get a decent one."

He managed to start rolling really good but somehow one or more stats would get a really crappy role. With crappy I mean rolling 4 or 5 with 4d6. And believe me or not, it happened a lot. A stat of 7 or 8 can be a nice challenge but a stat of 4 is really stretching it. For a fighter or barbarian, one could easily stuff it in Cha or Int but Steven wanted to play a bard so that just wasn't an option.

I don't know how many sets he ended up rolling but finally he managed to get a set he was happy with :

9, 17, 11, 16, 11, 18

These aren't the actual numbers he rolled, it's the adjusted ones because I lost the original numbers. I allow players to adjust their rolled set to get one or two stats really high. The first adjustment is made on a 1-1 basis, then raising a stat will result in lowering another stat by 2, and so on. He wanted a high Dex and Cha score so he played with the numbers a bit and got the aforementioned result.

The stats became : Str 9, Dex 17, Con 11, Int 16, Wis 11, Cha 18.

I looked through the bard's abilities and found out that wasn't really what Steven was planning to play. He wanted more of a con man type character, one who gets in trouble and blabbers his way out, not a travelling musician. So we decided to switch the character class to Rogue. I decided to give him the Bardic Knowledge ability since his character had been travelling a lot and this would be a good way of introducing hints and tidbits of knowledge that his character found out about during his travels.

Koen

So just to be sure that the characters survive the first session, I added another player. Koen and I discussed a character on msn and he wants to go for a cleric.

I told him about the absurd rolls of the others players so Koen also got a chance to roll a couple of times until he found some stats he liked.

His first roll : 1, 1, 2, 3. Let's not go there. I had him finish the rest of the stats and he decided to roll another series.
Take 2 : his first roll : 1, 1, 2, 3. Right. Why can't my players use any of those weighed dice that always roll 18 ??

A bit later he came up with : 15 13 15 17 10 12 which he changed to 15 12 15 18 10 12 in order to get an 18.

The final stats : Str 12, Dex 10, Con 15, Int: 12, Wis: 18, Cha: 15

The character will worship Heironeous with maybe a warpriest of shining blade of heironeous prestige class target.


How it all started Session 1
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