Character Creation
Instructions on creating a character for FG-RPG
Making your character is half the fun in FG-RPG, and while it is pretty free-form, there are a few guidelines to help you detail and describe your character. The character sheet is divided into two main sections, attributes and skills. Skills are about what you can do, attributes are about what you are.
Attributes
Names
What names do you introduce yourself with, sign your email with, respond to, go by on irc/aim? Whatever they are, list them here.
Title
For staff, we're assigned a title to represent what kind of work we are meant to do. For volunteers, we're titled by what program we're in, or what email lists we're members of.
Race
What were you born into? How did you grow up. What undeniable social traits do you possess? You can be a half-breed, but racial bonuses are only given for up to two races.
- geek: These people obsesses over obscure and very specific areas of knowledge, and are possessed with an autisic thoroughness for this study. This description, while based off of the geek's stance toward a particular subject, easily dwarfs their regular life. Bonus: Double the effect of specializing in a skill.
- dork: These goofy characters were never liked, but in all but the most extreme cases of persecution, never cared. They know how to enjoy living, and honestly express themselves as they are moved to do so. Bonus: Attempts to disturb dorks should be considered extra difficult.
- iconoclast: Being cool can mean, in very rare cases, being genuinely original. They don't really fit in, but noone can deny their timeless sensibilities. Bonus: No negative racial modifiers can be applied against iconoclasts in social situations.
- hippie: Only love can change the world. Through communal living, nomadic abstinence from consumerism, good drugs and yoga, hippies attempt to make some small change for the better. Bonus:
- punk: Fuck the bozos! Fuck the ineffectives and failures! Fuck the quiet, the soft, the unmoved! Fuck the punks! Fuck the fuck! Bonus: Punks have an assured, if somewhat violent, way to get rid of gremlins.
- norm: While growing up, you maintained a balanced, healthy perspective on things. Uninteresting, yes, but in the chinese proverb meaning. Bonus: Society supports you in what you do. Feel good about yourself.
- child: You haven't nearly grown up, but that only stops you from buying alcohol. Well, and from having the perspective that comes with experience, but how important can that be? Bonus: You are expected to be less responsible, and usually have a caretaker to clean up things that get out of hand.
- retired: You're done with doing things for the pay, it's time for you to do the things you really want to do. Bonus: Wisdom allows you to ask questions of the game master before making your decisions.
- crazy: Similar to iconoclasts, crazies are original, they just do so without regard for sanity. Well, okay, without regard for anything. Don't expect much of a survival rate amoung crazies. Bonus: Gremilins can be converted into followers with a great deal less difficulty.
Major/Minor
These two share the same boundaries, and are, simply put, where you spend your time in free geek on a day-to-day basis. Pick things like 'recycling', 'giving tours', 'teaching build', 'organizing', 'email', 'selling things in the store', 'selling things in the alley behind freegeek', or whatever else describes your primary uses of time. A major is such a category that takes up half of your time.
Goal
This is your motivation, your reason for getting up in the morning, what you want out of life and why you haven't just ended it all. This is completely interpretive, with no guidelines but to pick something meaningful.
Alignment
Your alignment is a way of describing how you see yourself as fitting in with the world; it is about what your moral decisions should be based on. There are two axes, both spectrums open to personal placement anywhere inbetween their respective ends. Some notable points are described below.
Source Code Axis
What terms of use would you place on something you created?
- Software Libre: An individual life is valueless without the community that surrounds and supports it. Never forget this: create for the good of the many.
- Open Source: Let others benefit from what you do, but not at the expense of your own well-being.
- Freeware: It's yours, but people can use so long as they don't bother you about it.
- Closed Source: Your creations are precious to you, and moreover they will make you a lot of money when you sell them.
- Trusted Computing Alliance: Your creations have an ideal use, AND NONE SHALL BE ALLOWED TO USE THEM OTHERWISE.
Life-Base Axis
What sort of lifeform is best? Who should rule the world?
- Organic: No intelligence can understand the universe, no designer can encompass creation. Life has grown up out of the churning seas of chaos to achieve a balance more valuable than anything.
- Cyborg: The beauty of both flesh and chrome should be appreciated; all live and die, all hunger.
- Machina: The robots shall rule all! Evolution is more like vomit than design. Give it up, meat creatures, and allow those with purpose built in from the beginning to have their reign.
Personality
This is a description of how you generally approach any given situation. Feel free to mix and morph the suggestions given, or come up with completely new flavors of behavior.
- pioneer: These people like to come up with new ways of doing things, to find things as yet undone, and to lead their community in new directions.
- settler: This type enjoy finding something good and making it better through their continued efforts and dedication.
- agitator: A good agitator will point out the problems that noone noticed but that were tearing apart the world. A bad agitator points out things everyone knows about and that were never a problem.
- conservative: We have to protect what's worth protecting, even if that means protecting everything else.
- meta: The specifics of what's going on are far less important than what they mean in the big picture, and how specifics such as these are capable of affecting a big picture.
- do-er: These folks really just want to do something about they problems they see, not talk about them.
- reformer: Making something better is of primary concern to these people, through whatever means necessary.
- slacker: No, I'm not going to descibe these guys. Can't you see I'm busy not doing anything?
Followers
For whatever reason, whether hard-fought or accidental, you have convinced someone or something that you are worth helping. These, like gremlins, are both specific individuals and a chance of finding one when you need them.
Hours
How many hours can you spend at free geek each week? One of these is enough for an instant success in most situations, although you will know that it was anything but instant. You will still have to describe how an hour of work allowed you to succeed, or you can expect hour usage to result in tickets.
Tickets
These are things you have promised to make a priority. They will take that priority, if ignored for too long.
Gremlins
Computer bugs and time-sucking leeches, consistent glitches and pestering questions. This is both a count of specific problems that follow you around, and representation of the chance that you'll encounter one without warning.
Skills
Skills are descriptions of how well you can accomplish tasks, both general categories, and fairly specific tasks. For each skill, you should pick an adjective that describes how well you can do the general things, and optionally pick some specialty or another to express your specific studies. The adjectives you should choose from for describing your skill should come from the following list:
- Superb
- Excellent
- Good
- Fair
- Mediocre
- Poor
- Terrible
There are five major categories of skills: Social, Physical, Brainful, Spiritual and Quirky. With the exception of Quirky, each of these has four subcategories under them. Treat both the major categories and the sub-categories the same: describe and specialize. For Quirky, you can pick up to four subcategories from the list, or make up your own. In addition, you should keep your Quirky skills folded into your character sheet where other players can't see them. Possible specializations are in parentheses, but are optional.
Social
- conflict resolution: (ad hominem, ego petting zoo, leadership)
- schmooze: (beer, getting donations, getting-hardware-granted-to-you-such-that-noone-is-mad (GHGTYSTNIM pron. 'figtistinim'), gossip, partying, telephone answering, tours)
- consensus: (hand-raising, hoodwink, facilitation, note taking)
- working: (delegation: (outside organizations, volunteer skill tracking), intimidating, intimidating, invisibility, look busy, stealth)
Physical
- combat/dance:
- find: (dumpster diving, stealing, car)
- gaming:
- gizmo transport: (doohicky organization, handoffing, monitor tetris, forklifting)
Brainful
- answering: (freegeek process and lore)
- tech savvy: (assitude, hacking, buildation)
- disaster awareness: (doomsaying, first aid, putting out dumpster-fires)
- intarweb: (google, literacy, reply-fu, wikiki, schedtracking)
Spiritual
- morale: (calmness, empathy, empowering, humor, inspiring, warmth)
- coping: (florescence resistence, humor, internal conflic resolution, non-attachment, poverty tolerance)
- self-esteem:
- teaching:
Quirky
- weird, uncomfortable jokes
- physical tics
- silent
- over-communicative
- anti-listening
- hygiene problems
- physical boundary ignorance
- willful ignorance
- proslatizing
- condescending (without knowledge)
- arrogance
- ticking time bomb
- unusual dress choices
- one-ups
- captain obvious
- painfully esoteric technical knowledge
- painfully esoteric technical knowledge and overly willing to share
- sexist
- argues with everything
- smoking/cell phone
- addiction
- dietary restrictions
- unnecessarily helpless
- night watchmen
- volume control
- nasally voice
- jack of all trades
- technofetishist
- crap hound
- racooning
- pack rat
- anachronistic
- neat freak
Charted
Here are tables with all that info.
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Character Sheet
To make a character sheet, see The RPG Character template