Charred: Starting the Burn

The idea of "Life Paths" is a fairly novel concept in RPGs.  It's the idea that to make a character, you don't just get a single background or description, you basically plot out major chunks of your character's life.  You get to see them grown up, learn skills, and inherit traits: for better or worse.  You pick a number of these paths, and in the end you get a pretty deep character, who has stories to tell about how they got to where they are now.

Spending four hours pouring over books, charts, maps, and grids is basically my idea of a good time.  But when it's just creating a single character, perhaps there's a lesson to be learned from the sheer amount of content The Burning Wheel presents it's players.

The Burning Wheel gives players the options for literally hundreds of different life paths to choose from.  This quickly becomes tiring as you skim even just the titles of each path looking for something that fits together, something that will lead you to your higher level character concept.  Instead, what I've taken away from the "Burning" process (that's what they call character creation, for whatever reason) is that clearly too many specific examples and options actually detracts from creativity.

But the idea of "Life Paths" is very intriguing; it throws "balance" out the window (see Shadowrun: Run Faster for "balanced" examples) in order to boost the creativity of the players.  Instead of bogging us down with hundreds of examples, however, a game should give us a simple, straightforward set of tools for us to tinker (still for hours mind you), to come up with unique stories and chunks of time for our characters.

It's like digging through a giant box of legos and never actually finding that one perfect piece.

I'd like to take character burning and shake it up, literally, with dice.  What if we give each section of a character's life a gamble - spend X number of years to accomplish Y thing, but risk it all on a die roll that results in different ups and downs for that chunk of time?  I think this keeps the random skill & trait point spread that BW provides, but lets the players be a bit more free in determining what actually happens.  Rather than having to choose specific examples, I picture an Apocalypse World style move for each life path choice:

Gamble X years for X skill points on skill Y:

On a 10+, choose 3 boons, 1 bane

On a 7+, choose 2 boons, 2 banes

On a 6-, choose 1 boon, 3 banes

Boons:

* General Skill Point

* Beneficial trait

* Resources

* Positive Relationship

* Positive Affiliation

Banes:

* Flawed trait

* Loan/Debt

* Flawed Relationship

* Flawed Affiliation

Of course I'm being a little too general here. I'd probably try to make at least a few different types of moves for different types of themed life paths that I'd like to see in my game.  For example, a combat/dangerous lifepath would likely have different boons, banes, and skills than a scholarly or tradesman path.

Well - that's all for now.  I'll be exploring more of Burning Wheel in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!