[Rq-rules] Character Creation Rules

[Gary Sturgess]

> The discussion was about character races, and half breeds, and how most of the time, when we talk about half breeds, we mean half human. My thought was that MOST RPG settings are human centric, with humans being the most frequent race; the race that holds dominion over most of the land, makes the rules and enforces the law. Over the years most RPG settings I have played in are that way. There was one small series of adventures where we played a Halfling Family, and another where our characters spent a lot of time in Elven territory, but by and large, most of the time, the local law is human. Then my imagination started working...

Well, here's my counter argument: most of the time, when I'm running a
new campaign, I will make every effort to expunge all non-human
intelligent races from the setting.

The reason I do this is because - in my opinion - having lots of
nonhumans running around actually DECREASES diversity,
counterintuitively. It is difficult to have multiple different elven
societies, for example, if there are gray elves, high elves, wood
elves, dark elves, wild elves, and valley elves as distinct
subspecies, let alone the various types of dwarfs, trolls, orcs, and
whatnot. So races tend to become very stereotypical by necessity -
unless you play your (eg) gray elf as snotty and superior, how do we
remember that he's not actually a high elf?

I realised that the reason all of these nonhumans existed - at least
for me - was to basically represent various aspects of humanity. Orcs,
for example, are essentially violent bad smelling humans; elves are
effete slender woods loving humans; dwarfs are claustrophiliac short
humans, and so on. I don't mean to denigrate anyone who is breaking
away from these stereotypes at all - my point is that the more
intelligent races you have, the harder it is to not fall into a
stereotypical pattern. Nonhuman races should be ALIEN, and the problem
with aliens is that they need to be rare - a "familiar alien" is a
contradiction in terms.

So I tend to just ditch nonhumans for the most part, and just have a
human setting (though there's no reason you couldn't make your base
race elf, dwarf, Aslan, or pink furry creatures from Alpha Centauri,
if you liked). I still use a few nonhuman intelligent species, but
these are rarely encountered and generally meet my "alien" requirement
(D&D's illithids, for example).

To be fair Gloranthan nonhuman species typically ARE alien in most
senses of the word - they are distinctly different from humans in
mindset, and they don't generally interact with humanity or each
other. But D&D was the example used, and D&D elves, dwarfs, and so on
are typically just humans with the serial numbers filed off - which I
see as a basically inevitable consequence of the profusion of
intelligent species. Off the top of my head, there are at least 7
species in D&D that qualify as potential player character material
(humans, elves, dwarfs, halflings, gnomes, orcs, goblins, kobolds),
and that's without counting subspecies, Monster Manuals 2 or greater,
or anything with a level adjustment. Few medieval nations are going to
have meaningful relationships with 7 other nations, so where is the
room for orcs that aren't brutish, or elves that don't like forests?

> Which leads me to the CHARACTERS. I don't like to roll characters, as such. I like to think up ideas and use some point system or non random method of charcter generation. So - What Non random methods of Character Generation are people here using for non Humans? What suggestions might people come up with for BRP character design?

I love Nikk Effingham's system, though you'd have to modify it a bit
for non-Gloranthan settings:

http://www.crashbox.com/nikk/chargen.htm

His entire site is excellent.
-- 
GAZZA