Quote from: One Horse Town;937902I think someone has already mentioned Beyond the Wall as a similar kind of thing.

Maybe i should have just called the thread - 'Pre/Post Gens, not Classes'

Didn't catch that, sorry. I guess I'd have to see an example of what you're shooting for to give you some decent feedback.

Quote from: One Horse Town;937902I think someone has already mentioned Beyond the Wall as a similar kind of thing.

Maybe i should have just called the thread - 'Pre/Post Gens, not Classes'

Beyond the Wall is very much NOT like what you are suggesting;).

This is sort of taking a page from popular video games and board games.

Think Overwatch and Decent/Imperial Assault.

Quote from: Piestrio;937942This is sort of taking a page from popular video games and board games.

Think Overwatch and Decent/Imperial Assault.

Exactly! You pick the character you want to play - if Cherry survives long enough they get a + whatever to thingy, get the special ability wazzoo, and a letter from X giving them Y, meanwhile Jenny picks another character and if they survive long enough they get that musical thingy, a penny chew, and that drawing that does that thing.

Quote from: AsenRG;937930Beyond the Wall is very much NOT like what you are suggesting;).

By itself, no.  But what he's suggesting is a kind of cross between an Archetype, a Playbook and a full 3.5 build.  A self-contained unique character "class" (if you consider Wolverine in FASERIP to be a "class", that is.)

Quote from: Piestrio;937942This is sort of taking a page from popular video games and board games.  Think Overwatch and Decent/Imperial Assault.

Good observation.  I think there's also parallels to some miniature games with set characters like Malifaux or Helldorado.

Have you seen this? It is the Pathfinder NPC Codex. It comes close to what you are describing and functionally, it was great for being a source of ready-made templates/complete NPCs for your games which saves a lot of prep time. The downside is that they become stale very quickly as your players get used to Street Vendor instead of Gustav the Street Vendor and the Harlot instead of Ariel the Vicker's Vixen. There are advantages and disadvantages to having templates too.

Are you thinking of creating a product? Or is this just brainstorming?

Feng Shui 1 and 2 pretty much do this, I don't see why it's such a big deal...  And the Feng Shui game is one of my all time favourites.

Great to revisit Dragonlance, or any other novelised property...!

And then you can splat it out every business quarter to cover famous pieces of lit, now for your own RPG! If zombies can invade Pride & Prejudice and get a movie out of it, why not this?!

In fact, I think we could easily do an exercise on any famous piece of literature. Let's try Wuthering Heights or Little Women!

When a Beth "levels up" she contracts scarlet fever and dies... this will be useful power for a Call of Cthulhu conversion.

Quote from: jeff37923;937953Are you thinking of creating a product? Or is this just brainstorming?

Mainly brainstorming, mate.

I remember writing a module for an old 3.5 Living campaign where the tiers went from 3rd to 13th or thereabouts. I had to Stat up each NPC at every odd level so it was ready for the GM at whichever tier his particular group played it. Jesus, it was tedious and the Stat blocks took up at least as much of the final page count as the actual adventure text. So deciding how many versions of each character to do would be one issue (and obviously be game system dependent).
Engine publishing have done a big book of Stat free PC/NPCs (Masks I think - not got access to my books just now) - might be fun to pick an example from somewhere like that and see what different people come up with?

Is there any particular system you were thinking of doing this for?

It wouldn't necessarily be a dealbreaker by itself, but it would strike me as unusual and possibly gimmicky. Smacks of "IP building."

Funnily enough, HoL is the one RPG I recall doing this.

Quote from: CRKrueger;937952By itself, no.  But what he's suggesting is a kind of cross between an Archetype, a Playbook and a full 3.5 build.  A self-contained unique character "class" (if you consider Wolverine in FASERIP to be a "class", that is.)

Yes, I know. But it's still a cross between them, at best, and Beyond the Wall has Playbooks that generate hundreds of possible "builds" for the same Archetype.
And I must note that while I like the idea of pre-generated characters, I dislike the idea of being unable to customize their progression. Now, if you make the progression as "at next level, pick and add 1 of the following 9 items, and keep doing it until level 10", I can live with that.
After all, seeing characters develop in answer to the game is part of it. Not all characters can or should develop the same way no matter the campaign.

I could see something like this being very handy for situations with players who aren't interested in learning rules and character building. Just grab a character and start playing. Over time though, I don't see this producing the same kind of player investment in the campaign that you might see if the players had characters that were wholly their own creations.

I haven't seen anyone new bothered by taking a pregen character in D&D, but most have their own character ideas by the time they get to their next character. And I think they would be bothered if they couldn't customize some aspect of the pregen character (name and gender, in particular).

On the plus side, it would be nice to have artwork and a well thought out theme/background for a character, and nice for the GM in avoiding some predictable combinations of a more general character generation system (not quite charop, but just choices that work well together - high elf wizard, wood elf rogue with archery feat, etc). I suspect the main use would be for GMs to come up with unique/interesting NPCs at different levels.

Would a given character have any options on leveling up that could reflect history to that point (that is, choose something more related to combat, or to magic, or to crafting, or to other kinds of skills) rather than always getting the same thing no matter what sort of adventures there have been? Is a backstory or relations to other characters (PC or NPC) included? How many characters would you expect an initial book of this sort to have?