Fantasycraft character

[breakinglight11]

Jared and I were discussing character generation last night, as he is trying to come up with a character for lightgamer's forthcoming four color superhero GURPS game. That lead me to give more thought to the character I'm building for captainecchi's Fantasycraft game.

I'm not great at figuring out what sort of build I want to play in tabletop games, mostly because in general rules systems are not interesting to me and most of that stuff is mechanically decided. So I just kind of grabbed a pre-gen off the table at random, a whatever-the-Fantastycraft-version-of-halfling-is "social assassin." While I can make excellent characters within a game I have completely designed, I have a hard time coming up with interesting personas in other people's scenarios because I have no idea what would fit in with the story and the world. (Thus my preference for pre-gens, not just built but characterized.)

So it took me a long time to figure out who I was going to be. For the first fifteen minutes or so, I just kind of responded generically to any in-game stimulus, kind of embarrassed that I didn't really have a character yet. Then suddenly it hit me-- I would have no filter. I liked the idea of a stealthy-social character that said whatever popped into her head, believing steadfastly in the idea that the best lies are the ones that have as much truth as possible in them. I named her Ophelia, partially because after playing so much Brutal Legend recently it was the only name I could think of, but I actually think the irony of it works. As it happened, Ophelia actually turned out to be really fun and funny to play. When it was clear that she was getting on the nerves of other party members, I dropped out of character for a moment and checked to make sure she wasn't annoying the players-- an indelicate, somewhat difficult personality like that can make it harder on other party members to get things done, and I wanted to make sure nobody felt like I was mucking up what they were trying to do. Fortunately, they seemed to be amused rather than annoyed.

So I think some version of this Ophelia is what I'm going to go with. I'm not sure what I want to do with her build, but some variant on the stealthy assassin character interests me. I like the idea of a blabbermouth assassin. :-) Of course, with her tendency to say whatever she's thinking at the moment, the "social" aspect of the character may not work as well as perhaps designed.

Comments

[lightgamer.livejournal.com]

Parker from Leverage might be a good inspiration here.

Parker (to Sophie): Wait, you did the lift? Why wasn’t I involved?
Alec: Because somebody decided to jeopardize the mission when a certain somebody shish kabobbed a certain mark.
Parker (smiles): Yeah, that was me.

[in-water-writ.livejournal.com]

I love this moment. Then again, I love almost everything about Parker. <3 <3 <3 Now I can really never play Spycraft, because I know I'll just recreate her.

[electric-d-monk.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I'm not entirely certain I see the problem with that.


Actually, I just realized that certain parts of the Parker->Everyone else in Leverage Inc. dynamic hold true for most of my favorite moments from the Brandeis Spycraft games.

The totally skilled and expert in their little niche character, that is at least a little off-center in a way that is somewhat counter to the 'covert' nature of the business going overboard in some hilariously inappropriate way and the others having to react appropriately (whether it be snarking and face-palming, or having to leash in a frothing lunatic... *g*)

[in-water-writ.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I really try to make my RPG characters their very own people, and not base them too heavily on any one influence, but if you put a Spycraft book in front of me and tell me to make a character, I'll start trying to make an original one, and about five minutes in go, "But I want to play Paaaaaaarker!" and just make a carbon copy instead. And then the creator side will glare at my fangirl side, who will just ignore her and dance little circles of joy.

You know what? You're right. You guys ever still run it? Park... I mean, uh, my original character (that is not in any way named Parker) wants to play!

[electric-d-monk.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's a bit of a zombie at this point in time.

There was some murmurs of running more stuff... Bernie managed to run one session this semester early on, and Jared has a few things he's written(or begun writing, at any rate) and wants to run, but he's been swamped this semester so hasn't been able to do anything.

I'm partially to blame since I had been doing a lot of the GM-ing, but when it came to the point that we were running out of new material from the pre-written missions, and I hadn't gotten to play much anymore... Well, I started getting greedy about not running anything new without getting a chance to actually, y'know, play a few of 'em. Greedy bastard that I am.


Though, if we have another new player... that would open up the opportunity of me running some of the missions that have already been run. *grin*

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

Yeah, now that I think of it, that's pretty much waht I'm going for. Though slightly less of that hunted-animal thing than Parker has going on. :-)