Early Peek at Backstories 201

Who the character is is always so much more interesting than what the character is.

Cyberpunk 2020 was the first game I played that spent time on backstories as part of character creation. Before that, I'd only played games that didn't do anything at all. We pretty much ignored it for a long time until we realized how useful backstories could be. We were always having trouble with "What's my motivation?" and other stuff that could easily have been cured had we just paid attention to the backstories. With Heroic games, characters are pretty much assumed to be heroes and their motivation is "be heroic" which worked well enough when we were young and just wanted to do dungeon crawls and kill monsters. Once we started getting into more story-focused campaigns, and games where the PCs were less heroic, less focused on how much money they could get to do a job, and alignment was a thing of the past, Backstory became much more important for us.

Funny, a lot of the advice you give about making a PC are things that are built into the rulebooks for Mutant: Year Zero and Earthdawn, both games I've mentioned to you before. Just goes to show how good your advice is when it meshes with what I consider to be some of the gold standards of rpgs.

Tell me about it! I like a die to be instantly readable. I've banned those ones made to look like potion bottles and other items from my table.

No need to apologize. I was mostly kidding and basically agree with you. I have a D6 where one of the faces, instead of being a numeral or set of pips, is something like an asterisk / starburst design. Which is close enough to a single pip that any time I roll it I have to look at the opposite face to verify what number I actually got. So, yeah, readability is good and appreciated.

Skemono

Sorry. With games where symbols are used instead of numbers (Conan, Star Wars, Alien, etc.) the symbols are fine. That's part of the game and they use special dice are made for that. But with most RPGs (and all of my favorites) it's only numbers required on dice. I personally hate regular RPG dice that either hide the numbers among a bunch of artistic designs, making them difficult to read in-game, or replace a (usually the highest) die face with a symbol or something. It drives me bats. There are dice that look good on a shelf and ones that are good for playing. My goal with them is they're good for playing. Given the current designs I'm seeing, they'll still look great, but ease of readability is one of my key requirements.

No symbols instead of numbers? So we won't get images of Jack or Mike like your Conan dice? Bummer.

Skemono

And just like that the Dice Gods have their human avatar…