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).