BFRPG Character Creation

[Dustinian]

Character Creation
Link:

• Character Creation

Background:

• As I just posted over in General, I just played my first "big" BFRPG game this past Sunday. I took it upon myself to convert my player's characters over from D&D4e to BFRPG, and that process took a little while. I would up flipping around in the book quite a bit in order to create each character.

Summary:

• Because of the flipping around, I tried to put together sort of an "all-in-one" document for building a level 1 character. I also tried to focus on the "crunch" of building a character rather than the "fluff," because my players (and I do this too) tend to focus on the mechanics until they have it down, and THEN they start telling stories within those mechanics. So putting together a document that focused on the mechanics of building a character worked awesome for my group.

Disclaimer:

• By no means should this document be taken as a critique of the BFRPG Core Rulebook! No one document can be all things to all players. The BFRPG Core Rulebook has to help players build (crunch) and play (fluff) characters of all levels! So it can't afford to have a section devoted to step-by-step building a level 1 character; doing that would break up the text/choices/etc. across too many pages and create different organizational problems.
  
  But, having said that, I hope this document might help GMs out there with potential new players who want a simple, all-in-one, step-by-step process to put together a level 1 character.

Call to Action:

• This document isn't 100% yet! But it's far enough along that I'd love feedback. Are there any egregious oversights? Would this work for your "new" players? Why or why not?
  
  Thanks, everyone!

[Metroknight]

Looks nice. Are you going to tie it into a specific edition or revision? By this I mean putting page numbers for reference. This would allow new players to know what page they can go to for reading more in depth information for that edition/revision. There is a character sheet that is set up that way but I think it is out of date now. That would be a downside of tieing it to a specific edition.

[Dimirag]

Nicely done, this would be pretty useful as a supplement with the addition of a couple of example character created step by step, and it could be expanded to include alternate creation rules

[Hywaywolf]

Nice, but have you looked at this http://basicfantasy.org/download.cgi/BF ... als-r6.pdf

here is a thread that discusses it more viewtopic.php?f=19&t=225&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

[chiisu81]

I like the simple clarity of Dustinian's work; step-by-step easy-peasy. For me the Beginners Essentials just seemed too "copy+paste" of parts of the BFRPG core rules, which honestly aren't that complicated! I think citing page numbers would be fine, as there aren't that many editions of BFRPG. I would only cite what's in the core rules, trying to include alternate items would just muddy it too much.

[Hywaywolf]

You are right about that. The beginners essentials isn't a character creation document, its everything the beginning player needs to know without all the stuff they don't (stuff for GMs, monsters, etc). I was asking the OP because I wanted him to know it existed in case he moved onward to developing more into that direction.

You might be surprised how many people come here for BFRPG but don't even know all those others supplements exist. Just trying to help out.

[Koren_nRhys]

Hi Dustinian,

I'm fairly new to the boards here and stumbled across this topic as I was looking through the older posts. The link in your opening post is no longer active and I was wondering if you would be willing to repost or share your character creation document.

I have been shanghai'd into DMing for a group of the kids of the other guys in my gaming group. We don't play BF ourselves, but have all agreed it's a great rule set to use to introduce new, younger gamers. I'd like to work up a basic document they can use as a beginning reference, mostly during character creation, and had planned to start with the Beginner's Essentials and modify that, but then I found your post. Sounds as if this might be a better starting point if it's still available.

Cheers!

[Dustinian]

Hi Koren_nRhys,

Sorry for the broken link. I'm rearranging dustinian.com, and I moved that file. I just moved it Tuesday! Bad timing!

I've attached the file to this message.

bfrpg_character_creation.zip

(2.75 KiB) Downloaded 396 times

I'll correct the link in my first post once I finish moving things around on dustinian.com. I hope the attached helps! Let me know if you recommend any changes!

[Koren_nRhys]

I'll grab it and take a look, thank you!
Since I plan to add in some optional stuff from various supplements and tweak things a bit to better lead into what the adult group is playing I'm not sure how useful the end result will be to anyone else, but I'll share it once it's finished.
Thanks again!

[Dustinian]

Looks nice. Are you going to tie it into a specific edition or revision? By this I mean putting page numbers for reference. This would allow new players to know what page they can go to for reading more in depth information for that edition/revision.

I'll wait for third edition to go to print (if it hasn't already? I haven't been keeping up...). Once that happens, I like the idea!

There is a character sheet that is set up that way but I think it is out of date now. That would be a downside of tieing it to a specific edition.

I actually use that character sheet in my BFRPG games, and I like it a lot. I haven't noticed the page numbers being out-of-date, they're pretty accurate when we play...

Nicely done, this would be pretty useful as a supplement with the addition of a couple of example character created step by step, and it could be expanded to include alternate creation rules

I toyed with the idea of producing pre-generated characters, so that I could start new players out really quickly. Like, "here's a character sheet, let's play" quickly. But once I wrote out the instructions, I saw that it takes so little time to generate a character... Last time I played, I had a player brand new to BFRPG roll a character in 10 minutes, and I think 6 minutes of that was selecting a spell (PS: Next time I'll make the player roll for it).

I was asking the OP because I wanted him to know it existed in case he moved onward to developing more into that direction.

I did know it existed, and I have referenced it!

The link in your opening post is no longer active

I finished re-structuring dustinian.com, and I corrected the the link in the first post!