More Player Character Rolling Up Creation Experiences and the Manual Write-Up

Co-creating Player Characters and a Sneak into the Hydra Gaming Manual

So last night I sat down with two of my old chums, with whom we’d plotted over the creation of this new mashed-up hydra system back in the dark depths of earlier this year. We had a couple of hours to get the characters rolled up in the new system. I of course had the advantage of having rolled up quite a few characters both for DMC’s (that’s dungeon master’s character btw) and for the PC’s for the current playtesters. Having said this – rolling two up at once and only a couple of hours was a challenge.

We got pretty much all of it done, except for the little twiddly bits that don’t take too much effort. It was a co-creational process. So what the heck do I mean by that? Well it’s down to how Hydra encourages you to create characters. I’m working hard behind the scenes on the gaming manual for hydra as the playtesting helps prove the currently written rules. I’m currently scribing the framework (or philosophy/approach to gaming) and the human PC character creation process chapters. You can see this in the gaming menu, although as of yet – because it’s NOT READY YET – you won’t be able to see the protected entries that make up those chapters. Fear not, you eventually will but there’s a lot to do in writing a new system manual! And not all of the playtesting is done yet.

So we have most of two new PC’s carved out and it seemed to go well enough. A bit taxing on me as DM though – I’ve never been great at mental arithmetic and the skill category defining process is a bit math heavy for the DM. It’s getting easier though and the players seemed to find the experience pretty simple. That’s mostly thanks to my practise at doing it with the playtest group! We have a little more to do to the characters (equipment, some derived characteristics to calculate etc), and I’ll get them transcribed and up and published, along with the other PC’s of the current playtest. It will then be a wee while before the new PC’s are introduced into the campaign evolving out of the playtest sessions. This is mostly as a result of the practicalities of life more than anything else.

Some general DM tips though. With Hydra the good thing about creating characters is that mostly the players get to do that for you, you just help them clarify what skills to pick. Their attribute creation helps shape the working experience they settle on. The DM and PC negotiate around the character’s evolving experiences as a function of their generated ‘lived experience’, which determines age and length of occupational experience. The PC generates ideas for reasonable professions given where the player character has ‘grown up’. The system scaffolds this by helping generate family background and circumstances. The DM needs only to know the world setting and kinds of profession and skills that are reasonable to a given area of the world and the people who inhabit that area.

In a nutshell it is a combination of – some rolling to seed the process, some DM authored bits and pieces and a big chunk of PC driven imagination that creates a character in Hydra. We’d like to think that’s how it ought to be. Every character we’ve rolled up so far, irrespective of the numbers generated on the dice, has been created as-is, (so no discarding the stats), and has felt unique and as much the brainchild of the PC as the DM and, of course, partly the brainchild of the system that we are using. So, character creation is a collaborative process involving – the player character, the dungeon master, the system, the dice, and the world the character is to inhabit.

So What About This Hydra System Manual Then!?

Just to show you how the playtest is starting to influence the manual, here’s what the final (well 1.5.0 version) of the character sheet is starting to shape up as. This is the rolled/derived attribute description table section of the hydra character sheet (v 1.5.0) which is used in the character creation process in the manual. (Oooh snippets!). You can see that there has been some ‘rebranding’ of the attribute categories – strength has become ‘might’, constitution – ‘condition’, size has evolved simply into ‘body’, and dexterity has become ‘adroitness’. Appearence has become comeliness, and I’ve shifted towards ‘intellect’ for Intelligence. Magical affinity is the new Magical Power. The derived attribute descriptions are pretty much as they were but with a minor Nehwonesque twist. The changes have come about as a result of my opportunity to reflect over the attributes and from the playtesting experiences. Have to say though that other changes to the character sheet have been more affected by the playtesting, and certain bits of mechanics have been adjusted by the playtesting as opposed to these bits. I just find these terms better reflections of what the attributes are intending to ‘measure’ or ‘describe’. Also, it moves hydra several more steps away from the original material it is referenced from.

The revised attribute description table for the Hydra character sheet (Version 1.5.0).

More meta-blogging – month three of Hydra.

How many Heads has the Hydra got?

Well, look here I am in the third month of the Hydra project. Time to take stock and also reflect on the process. Well, ahead of schedule in terms of play-testing – one session down, and more to come, so hopefully all play-testing done by the end of the month and this will mean that the manual will zip straight to version 1.5 from version 1.0 where it is at right now. (Well it’s more at 1.1 but hey).

I’m behind on writing up the manual however. Not that you, gentle reader will know much of this because it’s locked behind passwords until complete. Or someone chucks gobs of money towards me to publish it. Or until I give up on the gobs (or goblets?) of money and publish anyway. People hit the link quite a bit which is encouraging – people are clearly interested in the manual. I am planning on releasing excerpts and tasters of it when there is enough stabilized to ‘taste’. At the moment I am still working on the character creation streams and the underpinning framework. You can I suppose see the progress somewhat in the relevant manual menu, even if you cannot see what lies beneath. I think I may have been very optimistic in thinking I could get the write up done in 6 months – I may need to double that at this rate.

What I have seen from the tag cloud (fusion processes) that there is now a fairly even headed-ness in the state of  Hydra development between the world development and the rules synthesis. World development and the manual writing should now start to take over from the core rules-synthesis you would tend to think if I keep up the writing. So if things are going badly it should become evident from the fusion processes tag-cloud. Let’s hope not. I expect also, as is starting to be borne out in the tag-cloud that the art-work category is going to get strengthened. I’m trying to upload things as they significantly develop, during the work so you can see how things are developing and shifting in the game development. How does the art shift, mature etc within certain pieces and across different work? Hopefully this is reflected in the blogging here.

I have been advertising the blog site a bit more by spidering it to to some RPG specific search engines – both that I have bothered with so far  are being very slow in allocating the site to their respective databases. That’s a little frustrating but there is little that I can do to expedite this apart from a little e-mail pestering. That doesn’t seem to do much other than alleviate some of my pent up rage. RAGE! I mean, sorry :)

It’s also evident from the fusion processes that play-testing is another process at the fore at the moment. As it should be. I’ll be blogging each of the sessions, and also asking for my players to contribute to the blog if they feel so inclined. Would be nice to have some direct feedback on the play-test sessions from the play-testers themselves rather than filtered through the inevitably distorting eyeballs of the DM. Umm, or something like that. I still have the other PC’s to blog up, lots of NPC’s to add-up, and more artwork to do. I have some other players waiting in the wings to have their characters rolled up – and the next session will hopefully give the combat rules a ‘trot out’ as we say in these parts.

Right, gotta fly. I’m going to focus on writing up the manual and giving those PC’s something to run away from screaming in the next session. Roll 3d6 for me somebody. Thanks – was it more than 9 you got? Ace :)

Re-jigging the Fusion Blog

I am having a re-design of the devblog as you can see and have stitched together the entries into a categorical system that I hope best reflects the fusion approach to mashing rpgs. In doing so I’ve ended up reflecting on the processes that are forming out of the fusion mashing and have discovered that:

the project title formed from system selection part of the rules synthesis and has also been influenced by wider group preferences from joining a rpg club and introducing the system to a group of playtesters

publication issues have stemmed from resource selection and have been helped by being involved in a play-testing process

devblogging helps you to understand your creative process because it tracks what you are doing and enables you to reflect upon your own creative processes

having a good blog system that affords good categorical tagging enables the meta-commentary to emerge