Are there form-fillable .pdfs of the character sheets around?
Both times I’ve run/played BitD (as a one-shot convention game), character creation and crew creation have taken a long time.
To speed that up, I’d like to set up 10 pre-gens. 5 of them would be archetypical versions of the character classes. 5 of them would be the character classes with a bit of a spin (a Cutter with a bunch of points in Cloak, for instance).
Has anyone else found character creation takes quite a while (30-40 minutes)? I can’t quite figure out why it takes that long … it could be because we’re orienting ourselves to the world of Duskwall at the same time.
Yeah, there is a lot that goes on in that part of the first session and the character sheets help. Follow the directions and ask a lot of questions as it goes on and you will have so many ideas to kickstart that first session. I do exceptionally minimal prep, so I use that time to help acclimate to the world and start following the GM section, specifically in the Bring Duskwall to Life, Painting the world with a haunted brush, and Surround them with industrial sprawl.
This also gives the players a chance to bond. You can help by asking them cross questions, like
* how did you meet Argus?
* why does Soup, your fence distrust Argus, but love Thistle?
* what was the last thing Thistle’s raven bring back on it’s own? And why was that a problem?
This time and process is a chance to find out what the character’s goals are and what the players are interested in doing.
Everyone will be more invested if they are all involved in the initial character build session. And that is worth 30 minutes, easy.
And it will be quicker the next time, too.
I think the extra time is because you need to teach the rules while building the characters. There are a lot of rules relevant descisions to make when building a character and it’s pretty hard to have player make random choices and live with the consequences. I think that makes the game a bit more like d&d than AW in this regard. I think the solution might be to have skill and effect packages for players to chose from during character creation, but rather than be specific, keep it broad. An example would be (choose 2 skills to be at 2 dots and 2 to be at 1 dot). That simplifies the choices a lot. That said, my experience tells me that the game is better for campaign play over one shots.
Also if you want to reuse sheets, I highly recommend plastic sheet protectors and wet erase markers. Then you just wipe down the sheets with a damp cloth after the session.
I prefer print-out expendables, myself. I’m old fashioned; i like to give out the sheets as mementos when players are done with them.
Never erase a character! I’m still finding gems when I move, and it’s been twenty five years I’ve been gaming. 🙂
I’ve become a ‘scan the character sheets’ person, myself. Some of my 1st edition AD&D sheets are pretty tattered by now 🙂
Hmmm. I appreciate your point, Nathan. Asking those juicy world-building (and society-building) questions is vital.
In a one-shot, I do think the character creation choices could be more limited and you wouldn’t lose much. David’s ‘skill packages’ could be the way to go. But it could be just as effective to ask, “Do you want to play the Hound? Or do you want to play the Hound who specialises in tracking and dealing with ghosts?” and hand them a sheet with skills already filled out.
Really, I’ve been thinking about this because I want to get to the game quicker. I’ve found that the good stuff really starts to happen in the second and third scores. I certainly didn’t find character generation quicker on our second one-shot, and I was doing everything I could to keep it moving along at a good pace.
Anyway, pre-gens will be something for me to experiment with. Along with, maybe some adjustments to my process, like
– presenting the heritages and backgrounds more effectively
– having them not select gear in advance, but having them choose item on the mission as they need them
There’s probably a few little hacks like that to speed things up.