RPGaDay 2024 #14 Compelling Characters

I feel really bad because I'm thinking about calling a mulligan on this one, but we'll see.

I don't play regularly enough to really think about what kind of character I want to play. I don't experiment with builds or spend a lot of time on backstories. Neither of which would really do me a lot of good in an OSR game, since there aren't a lot of build options and your character is not guaranteed to survive long enough to make a backstory relevant.

But I should be trying more games and building characters to see how things work. I know I didn't really understand Burning Wheel until I went through the character "burning" process. And that was a really good game for creating compelling characters. Even though I've never played or run that game, every character I built became a character I wanted to play fairly readily.

I do spend some time with NPCs, since I do think of myself as a GM. But often not enough.

I spend so much time either rolling things up randomly or running something very heavily improvised that I don't think about spending a lot of time with my NPCs.

The occasional exception can be fun, though.

During lockdown, I tried to do my blank map exploration/world-building game and had a lot of pre-rolled encounters. One of them wound up sticking with me. It started out as a werebear and since this was an intelligent creature in their lair, I started adding more details to help me answer questions as they came up. I rolled up a gender and a name, so this was a female werebear named Ealdred. And I made a reaction roll and it turns out that she was very friendly (by which I mean willing to ally with the party when encountered).

The party did meet her, amusingly enough on the night of the first full moon in the history of the world and she kept watch over them in her werebear form as they spent the night in her lair.

That was all of the action she got to see, but she's been in my mind ever since. If I ever go back to that campaign, I think it would be to see what actually happens to Ealdred. Not that I have a plotline or anything in mind for her. Just to see how the players would react to her and how she would affect their course of action.

Okay, I guess I fulfilled the mission today without a mulligan.