No kidding about writer’s block ^^^^^
And related to that, I’m looking at retracting the character introduction I posted late last week. That character could be great in a lot of on-line games, but after trying to write him some more I concluded that he wouldn’t be particularly enjoyable to write for at the length that is appropriate for this game, especially for the solo introductory parts. I found myself thinking “I wish I could do a quick slight of hand and slide Birch into ‘Shaking Down the Shadows’, and pull Forty--my character from there—into this game. Both would be perfect fits then”. Which got me thinking about why I find it so easy to write at length for some characters and not for others.
I concluded that for me, the negative qualities are key. They need to be something I can work with and weave into the story on a regular basis. I may hate the mechanical penalties from some of them, but I need them for writing purposes. So I went looking at negative qualities that I thought could be interesting, and another character idea gelled for me. I think I can have a lot of fun writing this guy, but before I sweat the details I wanted to check out a couple of things, because he could be demanding from the GM point of view. If one or both turn you off, I’ll look at other options.
The basic concept is an adept with the ‘adept spell’ ability, and that spell is Shapechange. He will have enough Focused Concentration to sustain it without penalty. And he has (surface) amnesia – he held onto rat* form for too long and went feral for he-has-no-idea how long. Eventually a rat shaman happened to asense him and chose to dispel the spell, returning him to human form. The prolonged period as a rat has led to memory and identity loss, and some other ‘quirks.’ (and, errr, this would definitely be one of those ‘has to learn to be a shadowrunner’ characters)
* Probably rat, as I work out the story in more detail that might change.
The two things that I see as putting a lot of load on the GM are:
- Shapechange. First there are all those critter stats, with no current reference for them. There is a free download from 3rd edition that listed a number of animals, but of course attributes have changed since then. And second a lot of deciding on things like whether being a squirrel improves your climb checks or whether one can take the exotic skill of ‘fly’ for use a goose ….
- Amnesia. I’m willing to help on backstory, but part of the point of amnesia is that as a player you don’t know a lot of things for certain either, so this again puts more load on the GM.
Given the demands of the number of characters you are running, if one or both would be a problem for you, let me know. I can juggle around ideas again and come up with something else.
Figuring out an explanation for the free contacts could be a challenge too, but at least that would be mostly me. No doubt there may be a few other questions of 'can I spend points on this but not define it yet' coming up in character creation too.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit to clarify: if you’d rather not mess with shapechange, I’ll look at a different character. If you’d rather not have to deal with amnesia, I can probably work around it, using other qualities to give the same ‘don’t fully remember what it is like to be human’ bit.
