Which rules for creating magicians or non-human characters?

[Rourou]

In general OQ have well-define rules for creating a character: 225 percentiles, 50/50/50 for resistances/combat/knowledge, 75 for practical. Then 6 points of personal magic. Besides, 86 points for characteristics.

The problem is how to make a character that begins as a magician. If the character just wants to have a higher skill in personal magic (or any other type of magic casting), the solution seems to be clear: take the corresponding percentage away from wherever you want. But if we want the character to begin with more spells or to make a magician based on divine magic or sorcery, this might be more tricky.

For divine magic/sorcery, a possibility is the ready-made concepts, which gives some ideas: remove percentiles from combat and move them to the relevant magic-related skill (religion/sorcery casting, accounting for the extra +20% in sorcery if we decide to include the "sorcerer's wand" mechanic gizmo), and in the case of sorcery just give them 3 spells (instead of the 6 for personal magic). OQ for Dungeoneers provides a different template, where the personal magic-based magician would have up to 10 points of spells (two within a magic wand), and the sorcery-based magician 5 spells + sorcerer's wand... all of this in exchange for a lot of skill points.

So, is there any rule-of-thumb (so many percentiles within such category in exchange for one spell of a given magic type) that anyone here has followed for creating a magic-wielding character from the beginning?

And now onto my second question, what will you do with non-human characters? IMHO, in most settings they are a great idea and are fun to play and have in a party. But of course they could create imbalances. One possibility is just to still provide 86 points in characteristics and the player is simply required to assign them within the acceptable ranges for the chosen species. Another is to provide a bit above the average for the chosen species (e.g. for humans the average is 78.5, and adding an extra 10% we end up with 86), though this would result in much more or less points depending on species. Would it make sense here to compensate with less or more percentiles for skills?

OTOH, balance in RPGs is not really that important or crucial, more so in games derived from RQ: you might not enjoy your mighty centaur character so much when exploring some narrow caves (or when trying to sneak somewhere).

[1d8+DB]

 

It looks to me like you have a solid plan going forward.

 

 

Edited January 4 by 1d8+DB
Removed irrelevant material.

[Rourou]

If by a solid plan you mean that I might simply go for "dynamical planning" (aka improvisation) as usual, you are totally right!

Yet, I will for sure gain some valuable insight from the ideas of other people 😉

[1d8+DB]

So I assume we're not talking NPCs right? And you're going for a more 'Classic Fantasy' kind of feel?

[Rourou]

That's it, I'm talking about the PCs. Not necessary for a classic fantasy setting (for this I already have OQ Dungeons, which does the job pretty well). I mean, this is not really a problem --- there are several solutions that will work for sure --- but I was rather interested in how other people has approached this issue in their games (and also how did it go).

For instance, in OQ Dungeons the Wizard build ends up having about 55 percentiles less in total than the 225 I was mentioned above, but has either 2 sorcery spells or 4 points of personal magic more than usual. This gives you a very approximate equivalence of twenty five to thirty percentiles for an extra sorcery spell (or two personal magic spells). Provided that this is not abuse, could be a good rule of thumb.

(I also noticed that the thief and cleric get 20 and 30 percentiles less than the warrior, but in the case of the thief it looks like a typo.)

Meanwhile, for non-human characters OQ Dungeons simply provides the average for the species chosen by the player (except for elves, but I am 90% sure that it is also a typo). This works for sure, but others might have tried different approaches.

Thus my interest in alternative character generation methods.

[Andy Bartlett]

18 hours ago, Rourou said:

(I also noticed that the thief and cleric get 20 and 30 percentiles less than the warrior, but in the case of the thief it looks like a typo.)

Meanwhile, for non-human characters OQ Dungeons simply provides the average for the species chosen by the player (except for elves, but I am 90% sure that it is also a typo).

Could do with Newt weighing in on the question of whether these are typos.