QuestWorlds Character Creation Walk-Through

[Shawn Carpenter]

There have been a lot of questions about QW character creation on the various Glorantha related FB pages, so I wrote up a step-by-step walk-through and posted it to my blog. 

If you're interested, you can find it here: https://dscarpenter.wordpress.com

The character I use in the example isn't Gloranthan. She's an Operator that will feature in a small project I'm working on. I think it's still useful for Gloranthan players, though, and demonstrates that QW can handle any genre.

[Archivist]

Good job.

[BruceMri]

This is really good stuff, Shawn. Thanks!

Has anyone done a discussion of the possibilities in allocating bonus points to traits? I'm thinking of questions like...

1. Is it a good idea, in general, to put at least A points and/or less than B points to the concept and other highest trait? What sets up characters well; what is probably going to leave to other traits being under-powered?

2. Same kind of thing for other traits. What should I expect as a player when putting traits up against moderate and other difficulties?

This is stuff I used to be able to manage intuitively and easily, but fallout from an autoimmune disorder gave me a bit of dyscalculia along with some other learning disabilities, so I struggle with it now, and I didn't feel like I could give players good guidance of the sort I might do with White Wolf/Onyx Path games about specialization versus broad coverage, or whatever.

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by BruceMri

[Shawn Carpenter]

20 hours ago, BruceMri said:

1. Is it a good idea, in general, to put at least A points and/or less than B points to the concept and other highest trait? What sets up characters well; what is probably going to leave to other traits being under-powered?

2. Same kind of thing for other traits. What should I expect as a player when putting traits up against moderate and other difficulties?

Thanks, Bruce!

First, the good news: You can't put more than 10 points in anyone ability during character creation and you only have 20 points to spend. You have two traits that start at 17, so if you dumped 10 points into each of them, you'd have two abilities at 7M and everything else at 13 (or +1, for breakouts). Unless your narrator only hits you with challenges involving your two uber-abilities, you're probably going to have a rough time with most contests.

A rating of 13 isn't bad, but the baseline resistance number is 14, so it isn't great, either.

This probably isn't going to be the answer you're looking for, because I'm terrible at optimizing characters and I discourage it in my game, but hear it is, anyway: Don't worry about your scores too much. They can be augmented, bumped up by Hero Points, raised by positive modifiers, improved through play, and brought up in batches by mastery catch-ups.

Instead of worrying too much about spreading points around evenly or most efficiently, pick the key things you want to identify your character and run those up. If that leaves you with 13s in several abilities, who cares? You can improve them through play and your low scores in an ability are giving another PC with a high score in it a chance to shine. 

This is entirely my opinion. I'll bet their are more mathematically inclined folks out there who can give you an answer that addresses your question better.

[BruceMri]

OK.