Deathfire Character Generation Blog

Guido Henkel has published another blog on his current RPG project, Deathfire, this time covering character generation and the many elements that come into play when considering its design. Here’s a snip:

How should character creation work? Should the player roll attributes which then decide which kind of character he can play, or should the player be able to pick archetypes himself and we fit the attributes around that?

The first approach is the one we used for the Realms of Arkania games and upon replaying Shadows over Riva, I felt that forcing the player to re-roll a character in its entirety over and over again in order to make it fit the necessary class requirements just didn’t feel user friendly enough any longer. Therefore, I opted for a different approach that seemed a little more accessible to me. After all, the key to this entire project is (fun.) We don’t want to typecast the game in any way. We’re not making a hardcore game or an old-school game, or a mainstream RPG or whatever other monikers are floating around. We want to make a role-playing game with depth that is fun to play. It is really as simple as that. Anything that smells of tedium will go out the door, which includes things such as click-fest combats. But that’s a subject for some other time.

So, when getting into the character generation, the first thing the player will do is pick a race he wants to play.

Naturally, we allow players to decide whether they want to create male or female heroes to add to their party. Therefore we have male and female counterparts for all six races, the Humans, Wood Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Snow Elves and Tarks.

Most of them are pretty self-explanatory, except for Tarks, perhaps, which we created as another kind of half-breed class. Think of them as half-orcs. Not quite as ugly and single-minded meaning stupid as orcs, Tarks are incredibly strong humanoids with tremendous instincts and roots in nature. At the same time, however, they are not the most social, charismatic or intelligent of sort. But if brute strength and endurance is what you need, a Tark may just be the answer.

The next step in the creation of a hero is the selection of a class. Players can pick from eight available classes in Deathfire.

It is here that you can decide which role your hero should play in the overall scheme of things. Again, most of the classes are pretty standard fare to make sure anyone with a bit of role-playing experience will quickly be able to pick their favorite.

Both, the race and the class, affect a character’s attributes and they will be internally adjusted as you make your selections.

Once this step is completed, you will finally get to see the character’s core stats. At the base, each character has a Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma attribute. These are the very core and will be used to calculate a number of additional attributes, such as the attack and defense values, among others. They will also affect the damage the character can do, the amount of magic points he has, and the armor rating. Also included here are the Weapon Skills, controlling how well the character can handle and use various types of weapons.