Fumblin’ around with The DMG – character creation

Dan Dan The Power Game Man™ has been scratching to get out of the house. His wife just had another kid last week, and his Mulholland manse is chock full of relatives from around the globe. After a hard partyin’ Christmas weekend, I was not totally up for a full game of any kind. But with only Dan and Andy available anyway, I thought why not sink some Newcastles and do character work for the new campaign, and maybe a little combat encounter or two.

With a return to more BTB game play in this 1st edition campaign, I wanted to be strict with the character creation. Strict for me, anyway. Racial stat and level limitations were in play this campaign, and with none of us being DMG experts (despite my recent ongoing efforts), there was quite a bit of fumbling through the beloved tome to try and make sure our bases were covered. I have a pdf of OSRIC I printed and bound to serve as a backup play aid in this campaign, and it was a little useful. It would have been moreso, but here’s another book I need to read and familiarize myself with. It’s better organized than the DMG, but it ain’t perfect when you need a particular piece of info. Nothing I wanted to look up in OSRIC was listed and easily found in the index's, but that may have been more bad luck than anything else. I am going to take a better look at it though (it is, like, a 400 page thing).

Before delving too deep, we did that stat rolls so they could start formulating ideas on what to run. So I had them both do up three full sets of stats, each with roll 4D6 use best 3D6, in order. This is a tightening up of my usual assign to taste preference. There would be no stat dumping here. You get three full sets to make a choice from, and that still seems fairly generous. I allowed only very minor tweaking, and only in cases I suggested. I took ZERO player suggestions on stat swapping and such. Nope. Mr. Tough Guy. Despite that, they came out pretty above average in most respects. Dan even got an 18 in strength for the set he chose.

So harsh restrictions in the book popped up only once or twice to burn players. Mostly in Dan’s case. He wanted his fighter/MU/cleric to be a full grey elf, but the rules say he’d have to be half elf. He was fairly disappointed for some reason he could not be the full elf, and I almost caved. But Andy chimed in and kept me on the straight and narrow. I’m happy for that, because hell, full elves are these immortal dudes. There should be reasons to make it harder to be one. Despite being all over the place, 1st edition does have some balancing acts going on, and I don’t want to do my usual willy nilly houseruling to mess with it. So it’s a half-elf for big Dan.
So after fumbling around to get characters properly created by the book, I set them up with a little giant rat killing at a city tavern to stretch the combat muscles for the pair.
New characters getting done up is always big fun for me, and I’m glad we’ll get to stretch it out when the other players are there to roll up. I had to admit, it was kind of refreshing to “go by the rules” for character creation. We’ll soon hopefully see how that goes for long term gameplay.