A Game of Ice and Fire, Part 2: Character Creation

Alright, already a week behind on my weekly blog posts, but that's ok, we shall forge ahead.  Following House creation, our group went to make their characters.

Character Creation

In any roleplaying game, it is important for everyone to be on the same page character-wise.  Roles the obvious coordination groups focus on, someone to deal damage, someone to take damage, and someone to heal the damage  That's easy to figure out and largely depends on the mechanics of the game being played.  What I have been focusing on more recently are the backgrounds and histories of the characters.

Recently in my games I have started trying to implement character relationships more.  Having a general idea the characters' motivations and attitudes will help avoid possible awkward, party-splitting confrontations.  It also helps you tailor scenarios and adventures in such a way that the players should rarely say, "Why would my character care about this?", have their character walk off, and possibly a session you spent days planing out.  When making characters, I like to ask the players, "How do you know at least one of the characters and why would you be traveling/adventuring with them."  Playing in A Song of Ice and Fire, these area two really important questions, but they are also easy to answer.  The characters are members of the Noble House and can fill the important member slots of the House.  With our group, a lot of these relationships were created easily.  Let's look at the generic character concepts;

Elan: archer and scout
Lucius Hill: a bastard born assassin
Zoren "The Fort" Fortunus: a towering knight
Terrance Trevayne XVI: heir to the house

Based off these ideas, we easily got everyone a solid role in the House.  Elan would be leader of the Shadowkin archers that patrol the lands. Lucius is only about 14, the bastard of Lord Trevayne and being trained by the house assassin.  Zoren actually started as a sellsword, but we thought it would be fitting for Lord Trevayne to have bought his services and then have him knighted for his person guard.  Terrance is sort of the lynchpin for the other characters relationships, a la Paul Atreides in the Dune Novels.  He had his trainers and council members and mimicing that with the characters was easy to do.

So we have Elan, a master archer and scout who will travel with Terrance in a damage role and Zoren, a knight in full armor traveling as Terrance's protector and essentially a tank.  Those are the main combat characters.  Lucius doesn't really fit a combat role, since if he gets seen, he's probably dead.  Also, he's 14.  He will be useful in other scenarios, such as facilitating the removal of some of Trevayne's enemies while they are "safely" asleep.  Terrance himself is a talker, not a fighter, so that is another non-combat role.  However, just as Elan and Zoren are both combat oriented, Lucius and Terrance will be working together, mostly to further Terrance's positions in bargaining and power struggles.  All in all a fairly solid group concept-wise.


Next week, we get into a rather important point in the game, the first session.