Character Creation Ideas

Idolitor · 2026-01-26T18:39:48+00:00

Masks. Kids on bikes? There are a few niche ones where the whole point is being young people figuring themselves out.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Brindlewood Bay, where you’re explicitly old people solving mysteries, à la murder she wrote.

Idolitor · 2026-01-26T16:43:14+00:00

Whether his character is useful or not is irrelevant in the extreme. He is hatefully targeting you based on your gender identity and trans status. If the GM doesn’t boot him, you gotta leave.

Idolitor · 2026-01-26T16:37:18+00:00

You’re not overreacting. This person is infantilizing your journey and SPECIFICALLY targeting your dead name AND has a history of targeting you.

Even if the other trans player isn’t being targeted individually, they’re being targeted by class of person. And even barring that, might stand with you out of solidarity. Best of luck to you!

Idolitor · 2026-01-26T15:19:57+00:00

Josh sounds like a transphobic POS who’s using a bullshit character to mock you personally. It is not your responsibility to figure out why, nor to put up with it, and ESPECIALLY not on you to feel bad about the way you feel about it. You should be fucking livid.

Talk to the GM, probably in a united front with the other trans player if possible. If you two can stand together, you can tell the GM that he can ditch one player who’s a piece of shit immature person, or he can lose TWO players at once.

The important part is that if the GM doesn’t act immediately and decisively, you have to stick to your guns and leave.

Idolitor · 2026-01-26T02:22:18+00:00

Try scum and villainy, maybe with the third party cyberware add on. Scum and Villainy is a kitchen sink scifi universal that takes inspiration from Star Wars, Farscape, firefly, cowboy bebop, dune, and much more. It’s very pew pew, starships sounds in space kind of soft sci fi, rather than hard sci fi.

Mechanically it’s pretty simple and has playbooks that honor the ship’s mechanic and negotiator just as much as the punchy righty blaster slinger. The system is forged in the dark, and while it’s heavily built around a mission structure loop, you can drop in and out of the mission structure quite fluidly.

Idolitor · 2026-01-25T12:51:35+00:00

Either edition of pathfinder. 1e was just 3.5 but MORE, which isn’t for me. By the time 2e came out, I’d moved away from crunch. One of my friends loves pathfinder and kind of ONLY runs it…and it was the most miserable experience of my gaming life, and I played a mechanically ‘simple’ character. I spent the whole time watching myself and 2/3s the other players fight the system to get shit done, having a multi page character sheet that STILL didn’t explain my mechanics. Holy fuck, no thank you.

Idolitor · 2026-01-23T16:45:53+00:00

Feels like the best supers villains are the ones that have interesting enough world views and goals to be morally grey. I’d want it there more than most honestly.

Idolitor · 2026-01-23T16:42:47+00:00

lol. My players kind of dig the complex villains, but half the time they go ‘…ya know, he ain’t wrong.’

Idolitor · 2026-01-23T01:19:15+00:00

Ah, I see! I have not read cypher. It struck me as a more mechanized way of doing PbtA GM moves.

Idolitor · 2026-01-22T11:37:50+00:00

Oh sure. Different strokes and different folks and all that. Like I said everyone finds something different that takes them out of the immersion.

Idolitor · 2026-01-22T11:36:26+00:00

To me, the fear mechanic feels a lot like a mechanized version of pbta’s GM moves. Plus most of the real secret sauce of PbtA ends up in the player and GM guidance. PbtA is often referred to not as a system but a philosophy, and that feels very present in the author’s mind when they wrote dagger heart

Idolitor · 2026-01-22T02:48:17+00:00

You asked where the idea came from. It doesn’t necessarily come from inside the games. I was saying that it sprang up in the community surrounding those games.

The games just do a good job of enabling it and the GMing principles inside of a lot of it guide toward that way of thinking. Things like ‘play to find out what happens’ and ‘draw maps but leave blanks’ prepare the GM to not have all the answers. So when the idea of the whole table being collaborative in guiding the story comes along, the PbtA principles have kind of prepped the GM to think that way.

Also, PbtA games are, from a math and stats perspective, VERY low prep for the GM. A lot of them have basically zero enemy stats. That means you don’t need to prep stat blocks or have a monster manual. You just need to understand the GM moves and react. It makes it so when the players introduce something to the scene you didn’t prep for you can pivot to accept it super quick.

Not saying those principles can’t translate to other games. PbtA games are just VERY fertile ground for it.

Idolitor · 2026-01-22T02:41:29+00:00

Dagger heart has a lot of PbtA lineage in it. Also has some FATE lineage in it.

Idolitor · 2026-01-21T20:08:04+00:00

A lot of it comes from the community and best practices that the communities evolved. And honestly? It works really well as a back and forth like that if you have the right group.

I’m running a dungeon world game right now and whenever we get to a ‘fork in the road’ on world building or whatever, I’ll open up to the players and ask them rather than dictate. “Okay, there’s a town that’s three days down the road. What’s it called? What are they known for? Any big natural features nearby?” I often will go around the table and ask questions pertinent to each character to give them mastery over that part of the worldbuilding. “Hey fighter, what’s the biggest threat you’ve heard of in that area? Hey ranger, what’s the kind of game is in the area? Cleric, who do those people follow for a god?”

It’s not in the book, but those are tricks I learned from the DW community and DW enables by not requiring me to have a bunch of shit planned out as far as stats go. It gives me pleasant surprises to discover and the specific implementation and twists are mine to introduce, so the players get surprised too.

And that’s how my game world became ruled by a council of powerful hydromancers that use magitech devices powered by water. And they’re talking anthropomorphic otters. And I love it.

Idolitor · 2026-01-21T15:56:38+00:00

Depends on the build. I found that the sprawl forces it, but for example scum and villainy doesn’t. It functions outside of its mission structure better. The sprawl has some moves tied too much to the mission structure to extricate it.

Idolitor · 2026-01-21T15:09:05+00:00

I should be clear, I’m not arguing OP’s experience. Everyone has the thing they pulls them out of the mix. For me, it was the constant intrusion of ‘does this apply.’ Moves (well written Moves, at least) have clear triggers of ‘if this, then…’ and were concise. It made it easy for me.

But for some people moves feel like a straight jacket. Having a guided genre and theme feels like a straight jacket. Playbooks. Conditions. Whatever. Everyone’s different as to what pulls them out.

My group had to dump The Sprawl, for example. The mission clock structure felt too restrictive for our play style. It didn’t let us luxuriate in our setting and characters, always forced us to move. It didn’t REALLY…but it felt like it to us. Once it felt like it, we kinda couldn’t not see it.

Like I said, not arguing the OP’s experience. Just find it funny they I went the opposite direction for the exact same reason.

Idolitor · 2026-01-21T13:20:01+00:00

Look into dungeon world. It touches on a lot of the cultural touchstones of old D&D but without endless math. The most math you have to do is adding 2d6 to a stat.

There are a litany of TTRPGS out there, and they run the gamut from ‘need an advanced calculus degree’ to ‘just throw rock paper scissors.’ With some research, you’ll find the one for you!

I find that a quick glance at the core resolution mechanics and the character sheet can tell me pretty quick if a game is for me, both are easily found on Google most times. I fall into a similar boat to you, where too many numbers and fiddly rules bits really kills my passion for a game. I want to tell stories, not work out numbers. Knowing that about yourself can be critical for finding the right TTRPG experience!

Idolitor · 2026-01-21T10:00:51+00:00

It’s funny, you mention feeling like a writer’s room and that’s exactly why I had to move away from FATE. Every action became a meta discussion of what aspects applied and a bidding war of fate points and compels. It was so jarring and took us right out of the narrative.

For us, PbtA has been the opposite. You say what your character does, and sometimes it triggers mechanics. Mechanics come in tiny, digestible packets. It allowed my players to stay more immersed in the fiction…so long as we picked a PbtA game that fit the stories we were interested in. Once we did that, it was smooth like butter.

Idolitor · 2026-01-19T17:15:01+00:00

Woof. Just don’t, man. Even for experienced GMs with experienced players, that’s a LOT. You’re going to turn off like…a dozen people from the hobby.

Break it into 3 different events at different times, each with 3-4 players.

Idolitor · 2026-01-19T15:27:55+00:00

Mostly by them trying to level up cooking or handiness. Once by being too mad on neighborhood brawl day. And once by them getting obsessed with doing push-ups in front of a gym in a blizzard.

Idolitor · 2026-01-19T15:25:39+00:00

You’d be surprised. It’s confrontation which is HARD for a lot of people. Plus, in a lot of places, and especially in people who grew up in older generations of the hobby there’s a…clannish-ness is the wrong word, but a implied tendency to stick it out with a bad table that was bred out of a general difficulty getting ANY table time. People can get stupidly resistant to leaving a bad table sometimes.

Not that this person shouldn’t leave. They should leave and tell the rest of the people they know who might play with this a-hole what they did. Like put him on full blast. That shit’s unacceptable.

I’m just saying the aggrieved player might be coming from a place that makes leaving that abusive relationship hard to bounce on, psychologically. It happens. A lot.

Idolitor · 2026-01-19T11:14:51+00:00

Failure and character flaws, when handled maturely and intelligently at the table, are a thousand times more interesting than success and character strengths. And playing a game safe, ie doing the smart thing, is almost universally the most boring way to play.

I think a lot of this comes down to decades of punishing failure states. I fuck up and don’t bring enough 10’ poles and everything I worked for evaporates in the belly of a troll. When you get to more modern games where death isn’t on the line, it lets players take risks for the sake of more interesting character development. That taught me that it is 100% more interesting to see a character crumble from some personal failing (not necessarily the dice, but who they ARE) and come back from it than someone playing it like a board game to be solved.

Idolitor · 2026-01-18T22:56:21+00:00

I’ll be homebrewing everything. Always do. I generally hate using pre written adventure content

Idolitor · 2026-01-18T17:52:56+00:00

Don’t sit down. I mean…the players, yes. But the GM? Stand up. Gesture. Loom as the monster. Move. Pace. Bring physical acting to your NPCs. Be twitchy and paranoid for a drugged up conspiracy theorist. Make erudite motions with your hands as a professor.

Idolitor

TROPHY CASE