#charactercreationchallenge

I've never, and likely won't ever, find a group for this, but that's fine.

Anyhow.

The book spends a bit of time setting up the world, which is probably necessary. ElfQuest used to be gigantic among parts of fandom, it's significantly less popular now. If folks read into it, though, I suspect we'd have a whole new generation of feral fans. As for the RPG, a lot of fans took whatever it said as strict canon, though some of it later ended up being hard retconned.

Anyhow. Let's get started. First steps are name and soul name. Since I wanna make a Wolfrider, the name's gotta be descriptive. The soul name, for those who don't know, is gonna be a ~secret name~ that certain elf groups have. Mostly just Wolfriders, no one else really has a need for them.

You see, some elf tribes are telepathic. And ones like the Wolfriders have very keen senses. Privacy is at a minimum, there. So they developed soul names as a way to keep their inner selves private and capable of being shared only with the absolute closest of their companions. Lovers, lifemates, very close friends, etc. (Also, if someone learns your soul name and they're a telepath, it lets them punch right through your mental defenses.)

I'm stalling on a name. Since names are descriptive, I'll wait until after stats are rolled to have a first shot. Her soul name, however, I can do right now and it is... secret! (Okay, okay, it's Mir.)

As for age, since elves are mostly immortal (though wolfriders skew young), we roll 2d10 and 2d6. Multiply the d10 results by each other and then by the 2d6 result. For those curious, mine's a very young 36 years old.

Then you roll for Recognition, which is when two elves recognize their soulmates and magically pushed to love one another. It's an attempt to roll less than your age on a d100. My girl's yet to Recognize anyone.

Humans in ElfQuest roll 3d6 for their stats, but elves have very different capabilities, so they roll different dice.

STR 9, CON 13, SIZ 5, INT 14, POW 13, DEX 15, APP 16.

Not too shabby, Moonbright. She's not any stronger or tougher than her fellow tribesmen. A size 5 means she's somewhere between 52 and 77 lbs and 3'2" or 4'2". She's pretty dang smart, though, if lacking in mystic oomf, not quite as graceful as everyone else, but she makes up for it in looks.

Now, Damage bonus, Experience Bonus, hit points, magic points, and 'strike rank' are all derived from the above. I'll plug up the numbers without describing here.

Anyhow. Next step: Skills. This is all stat based as well, but then you can modify them by adding all of the rolled characteristics together and then multiplying by a factor decided by their age. At 36, Moonbright is a Youth (by elf standards, this means a young adult and not, like, a kid) and has a factor of x3, her result is 255. That's 255 points to be spent on stats *or* she could improve her current characteristics, though that's significantly more expensive (age factor times ten), though only her STR, CON, DEX, and APP can be improved.

When dealing with these points, I have to consider things so far. For instance, if I change any of her Characteristics, that means that any skill involving those Characteristics must be re-figured. Ultimately, though, due to reasons later on I won't bump her DEX up and I'm pretty fine with her being an average member of the tribe.

The big thing to consider, though, is that she is relatively young, so she won't have had enough time to develop skills that aren't taught mostly to support the tribe. Things that would be good hunting or some other useful function.

Another thing to consider is if she has a magical power outside of Sending and Wolf Bonding. To decide this, she'd roll 1d100 for the three main Wolfrider powers, Animal bonder, Plant Shaper, or healer, and then try to get a result lower than her powers. (She doesn't have any, by the way.)

You can also roll for special abilities, but you risk gaining a disability instead. You keep whatever you roll and can roll twice. Moonbright rolls twice and gets a 90 and a 22, meaning she's got +10% to perception rolls based on a sense that I choose, but also -15% from another sense I must choose. I think I'll give her -15% to hearing, but +10% to Sight. Maybe she had some sickness as a kid that made her lose hearing in an ear. Hm. That might also explain her slightly lower dexterity, if she's got some ear damage.

Anyway, when that's done and the points are rearranged, all that's left is to decide the wolf's stats, done in much the same way the elf's are. Of course, given that they share the same blood, well.

Anyhow. Here we go.

West End Games' Star Wars wasn't just influential for the early Expanded Universe, it was formative. Some of the writers, especially Timothy Zahn, used the figures and designs put out by this game system to inform the technology and world they were working with in their books. No, let me rephrase. These gae books were considered so important that when Zahn was settling in to write the first books that would tell the adventures of Luke and Han and Leia after the Empire's fall and the appearance of some admiral named Thrawn, they sent him a box of these as reference materials!

They held the license for about a decade, but then the owner of West End Games tried to funnel money from it to save his failing shoe company and both went under, so the license went up for grabs and Wizards of the Coast snagged it. To think that, if he hadn't done that, in just two years Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic would be released... Powered by the WEG rules!

...anyway.

This was a time when surviving Jedi were insanely rare. We didn't have lightsaber styles. We didn't know who Mace Windu was. We thought Obi-Wan had done that damage to Anakin Skywalker by throwing him into a volcano at the climax of their epic duel. We thought that Jedi Knights were more like knights errant, wandering around the galaxy and righting wrongs with their laser swords, than warrior monk cop/diplomats.

They kept the license for a good while.

Anyway. The first step to making a Star Wars character is to look at their character templates. These have statistics mostly already laid out, but I'll be tweaking them later. They're not quite character classes, more just... A rough idea of the type of person you are. Here's some example:

In this edition, in the core book, we have the Alien Student of the Force, Arrogant Noble, Armchair Historian, Bounty Hunter, Brash Pilot, Ewok, Failed Jedi, Gambler, Kid, Laconic Scout, Loyal Retainer, the Merc, Minor Jedi, Mon Calamari, Old Senatorial, The Outlaw, Pirate, Quixotic Jedi, Retired Imperial Captain, Smuggler, Tongue-Tied Engineer, Tough Native, Wookiee, and Young Senatorial.

Did they think Senatorial was just what they called senators? Weird.

And here's your note about the Jedi. Yeah, they're there. But they're failures or bit characters so unimportant that the Empire isn't even hunting them. They're not the grand heroes. They're bit parts. Even the Quixotic Jedi is just a delusional fool who thinks he's a Jedi (but sometimes, sometimes, he can feel the tingle of the Force at his fingertips!)

You can make your own Templates if none of these feel right, or tweak things like the background if you feel like it's needed. There's even rules for playing Droids, but those are Different.

I think I'm going to go with this:

SO, this is a d6 system. The attributes here above are Dexterity, Perception, Knowledge, Strength, Technical, Mechanical. And a slew of skills. You're born with Attributes. You learn Skills.

I have 7 dice to any of the skills I like. Any others, I'll roll with just the raw attribute roll. But no skill can be increased by more than 2D.

I figure out grand lady here is heavy on the social stuff, so I give her an extra die in Bargain (You've gotta make deals as a senator!), Command (And project authority), Con (because sometimes you just have to maneuver your opponent into a trap), Cultures (She's experienced enough to have been around the galaxy on a few tours!), and Starship Piloting (She used to fly skimmers and such to destress, before it got to be too much for her.). And I'll add two to Bureaucracy, letting her tie all of that red tape into a neat little bow around her rivals.

You see, I'm working off of averages here. Very Easy Tasks are Difficulty 5. Easy is 10. Moderate, meaning you've actually got to know what you're doing, is 15. Difficult, meaning you need to be an expert, is 20. And Very Difficult, nearly impossible, is 30.

Looking at that, knowing what I want her to be expert at, I wander on down to anydice.com and tell it to output 4, 5, and 6d6.

And there's our percentage chances of getting any result of those dice rolls. If I want her to be really good at something, it's gotta be 5d6. For Amazing? 6. And rather skilled, that's 4d6.

Anything else she's okay to outright bad at. But since she's got people for technical efforts and she's rather old, I'm fine with those being dump stats.

And... there we go!

Even if I'd made my own Template here, using the below sheet, it wouldn't've taken long. Most of the effort would be communicating with other players to figure out how we knew each other!

The sequel has one, too.

I never actually played. Once upon a time, I found the idea of paying more than once for a game galling and greedy. I've since played a few MMOs and sunk far too much money into them. EverQuest was never one of those.

This being 1999, what we have here is a game built on the d20 System's OGL. Just with some tweaks here and there and also advice on how to translate your MMO stats to tabletop stats. I'm serious about that last bit, btw.

I've never played this, either. I wonder if the character creation system is standard 3.x or not...

Ability scores are bog standard Third Edition, but there's no dice rolling to generate them. Instead, all scores start at 8 for free and you have 27 points to spread throughout the rest. 10 is average for a normal person, 12 or 13 is average for the MMO heroes, and we can't go beyond 18.

Apparently Bard is a class here, so I'll go for that. I like a well-played bard. But for me, I'm not a huge fan of the bard as nothing but a hype man sex machine.

Next is picking a race. I guess all of the typical EverQuest ones are featured? Barbarian, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Erudite, Gnome, Half elf, Halfling, High Elf, Human, Iksar, Ogre, Troll, Vah Shir, Wood Elf. Of them, only Half elves, Humans, Vah Shir, and Wood elves can be bards. Vah Shir are, apparently, cat people who got blasted to the next dimension and then came back.

I'm gonna be boring and do a human because yeesh those are some ability point penalties out there and I didn't build with those in mind.

I luck out when rolling hit dice. Bards have a d8 hit die in this game, and I roll the max. Good, since I don't have a CON bonus. And then I doublecheck and I would've started with that anyway. Waste of a good roll...

For skills, Bards have a hefty list.

I get (8+Int mod [+3])*4 skill points to start. Cross class skills cost 2 points, regular skills cost 1, and I can have my character level+3 ranks in any given skill. As a human, I start with 4 ranks in Common and 4 extra points to use anywhere else.

Now for feats. As a human, I get a free one, and bards get some armor and weapon proficiency feats right off the bat.

This being an early third edition thing, Monte Cook's brilliant idea to reward system mastery by making some options just plain worse than others, as if we're playing a game of cards and arranging a competitive deck, is in full effect here. Fuck I hate that aspect of this system. (To his credit, he regrets it.)

Frankly, most of the feats are dogshit if you're not building towards a combat build. Then again... MMO tabletop. I'll take Mystic Capacity (gain 1 additional song slot) and Heighten Spell (use more mana to cast a spell, but cast it at a higher level).

And then some minor details and I'm rolling my starting gold. Bards get 4d4*10, and so I'm starting with 70 gp.

There's a starting package, but I'm just gonna pick and choose.

Actually... I'm not feeling great, so I'm gonna go with the starting package.

I get to choose two songs to start. I'll go with Chant of Battle (+1 to target's STR and DEX, +1 luck bonus to AC. +2 if on a percussion instrument) and Jaxan's Jig of Vigor (Removes fatigue penalties, heals 1d4 points of subdual damage. 2d4 if performed on percussion).

Guess I've gotta change that Stringed skill to Percussion.

All of a sudden I've just lost all motivation. Sorry. Here's the character.

Man... Traveller. My father tried to get my brother and I into it when we were younger, but we were a little too young to understand imaginary worlds that didn't just do what we wanted. Honestly, I do wish Traveller got a bit more love in the modern era. Maybe in the far future it'll happen.

Traveller wasn't the first sci-fi RPG, not even in 1977. I'm not sure what was, Gamma World? Technically, you could say D&D. There was certainly some sci-fi stuff that's been removed from later editions.

But Traveller was different. It was possibly the first game to ditch the idea of character classes deciding your skillset, even Bunnies and Burrows told you that what you could do was decided by what kind of rabbit you rolled. That's probably what helped it translate so easily to other systems. There's been Traveller HERO (which, you know, keep your ear out if you're a fan...) and GURPS Traveller, for the HERO System and GURPS, d20 Traveller existed, and Traveller itself has had three or four different rulesets!

But the very first came in the above box, with its attention getting cover, with three books and a few other goodies I'm too young to really know about. They're available in a big batch from DriveThruRPG, if you're curious. There's even a free fascimile edition!

And, honestly, even if you can't find a group, Traveller can afford you a bit of fun if you're willing to stretch the imagination a bit. Because, like FASA's Star Trek that followed, and several other systems (including one for The Witcher), it has a life path system. It invented the damn thing and it was a bit more brutal: Your character could die mid-generation!

Traveller was sci-fi yes, it had aliens like the cat-like Aslan, but it also had a few tweaks of the setting you rarely see. For one thing, no faster than light travel. For no thing, no faster than light communications! The only way to get news on the outskirts of civilization was for some ship to come through and hear the news from the travellers themselves.

Anyway, let's start. All characters begin at 18 years old. I'm going to roll 2d6 for each stat.

The results are, uh. STR: 7 DEX: 2 END: 8 INT: 7 EDU: 9 SOC: 6

So, Traveller uses something it calls the UPP, the Universal Personality Profile, which expresses the base characteristics of a being in a sequence of hex numbers, where 0-9 are normal numbers and 10-15 are the letters A-F. So the above character would be expressed as 728796 and anyone versed in Traveller would recognize it.

Don't worry, it's optional. And the stats will have chances to improve, but Wow, a 2 Dex is gonna hurt.

Next, a name. We'll go with Jacqueline Glass. 18 years old, ready to make her mark. The first step is to attempt Enlistment. I've got the choice between the Navy, the Marines, the Army, the Scouts, Merchants, or Other. Each has their advantages. I want either Scouts or Navy, but I can only pick one and I'll have a better chance of joining the Navy thanks to my higher Education. With a seven, adding two for my high education for a 9, I make it! For the next four years, I will travel the stars and hunt pirates.

Now, I roll to see if I survive my first four years! With a 7+2, and a threshold of 2, I do, tidily. I do not, however, get commissioned as an officer, but I do get to roll for acquired skills, comparing them to three tables. The fourth is only available if I get more education, nnine or more... which I have!

I get a 1 and a 6, which I'll use to gain the Vacc Suit proficiency and becoming a Jack of All Trades. What this tells me is that Jackie spends her first years spacewalking, setting foot on planets humans normally can't survive on, trying to learn everything she can, picking up every book and studying every lesson there is to offer to try to pick up rank. It's an utter failure, but she survives and she becomes a Jack of All Trades, able to perform the basics of any situation she runs across! By now she's seen it all and done it all, twice! It makes her very useful, but still not enough to become an officer...

At the age of 22, she attempts to reenlist. She succeeds. And we begin the dance again! But this time, she only rolls to gain one skill. She fails to get a commission again, but she's earned a chance to sit at the bridge, becoming a qualified pilot able to fly ships of 100 tons and over!

At 26, she goes for another term. (This is more fun at a table with multiple people, or when you're not trying to overwhelm an audience with namedrops.) She just barely makes it, but settles in and survives another four terms, learning the basics of medicine and becoming someone the others turn to when they've caught a nasty wound in combat.

She's thirty years old now, and goes for a fourth term. She could stop now, but she's giving herself until she's 34 to become an officer. Chasing that paycheck!

Jackie goes in for her final enlistment. She doesn't die, but she kind of wishes she does after spending 16 years chasing a rank that never comes. Through it all, though, she hones her skills as a pilot, learning to fly smaller ships as well!

She tells herself she'll try one more time, make it an even twenty and retire, but I roll a 5 and she is refused reenlistment. Her skills just aren't high enough to overcome the fact that she's aging. It also denies her retirement pay, the bastards!

Now comes the Mustering Out process. I can roll once per term of service and then pick from either the skills and benefits table or the cash table, but I can only choose cash three times. (Well, technically I have to pick, then roll.)

On the first roll, I choose Skills and Benefits and become a member of the Travellers' Aid Society! Through some act of extraordinary service, she's drawn the attention of the Society. This is a lifetime membership to a private organization that maintains hostels and facilities at any decent starport in human space, which I and my friends may visit. At a reasonable rate of course. Every two months, it grants me a High Passage trip pass, a pass that comes with free first class accommodations, the best food available on board, and up to one ton of baggage! It has a cash value of 10,000 credits, and I can save it, use it, or sell it. Not a bad way to earn a living from here on out...

The second roll is for cash, and I net a thousand credits. My next roll is for the same and I get five thousand. And my final roll, on skills and benefits again...

And I get to choose a blade. Given that she's a pilot/medic and not really a brawling type, her blade will be a weapon of last resort, a dagger that can be drawn in a cockpit without trouble. She does not really know how to use it well, in fact she only knows the basics, but it's hers. It probably has a decorative Imperial Navy seal to remind her of where she came from.

Retirement-denying bastards.

There we have it, though. It can be done in ten minutes, with practice, or longer if you're trying to tell a story to your friends.

Jacqueline Glass - Former Navy Pilot and Medic. 728796, Age 34. 4 terms. Cr 6,000. Pilot-2, Vacc-1, Medic-1, Jack of All Trades-0 Dagger, Travellers' Aid Society Membership.

She could make a living just selling her tickets from the Travellers', but she'll probably want to find a job as a pilot to see if she can't make a better nest egg for herself. But first, she's gonna get one of those first class tickets and see what the fuss is about...

Everything else is just gonna have to wait until I see what kind of world she lands on!

Of course, if you don't want to spend ten to thirty minutes rolling up a character (let alone worrying about equipment!) there's a ton of character generators out there. Why, with a click of a button....

But for Traveller, the official looks rather like a bit of government paperwork. You'll note extra slots for special assignments and stuff that I've left blank: Those are all in expansion books I didn't want to crack open right now.

By the way, don't worry about the Free Trader Beowulf...