Chargen Fun, Game not-so-much

[Remathilis]

Ever play a game where MAKING a character was more fun than running him?

Now, I'm not talking about that bad DM scenario where the game is so bad the only fun you had was rolling 3d6...

I'm talking about games where the rules for character generation are more fun than the rules for PLAYING the game!

My own example is T.M.N.T. The rules for creating your own mutant animal were a creative masterpiece! Pick (or roll) your animal type, decide how many humanoid features you have (each cost from a pool of points) and what mutant features you keep (keen eyesight, claws, fangs) and then you picked a class and a profession. It was great...

... Cept for the fact it was the Palladium system; and it fell apart as soon as you got into a combat.

What system is it for you; where you'd rather gen up a PC for a session than actually PLAY said session!

 

[megamania]

Using 3.5 rules I am currently working on epic level characters. Takes hours to build and they may only last ten minutes in a battle but they are fun to do.

Why?

I am creating "none" fantasy characters using dnd rules. It is tricky to create characters that are "superheroes" or "sci-fi" types.

Currently just finished is peter Stanchek aka "Sting" from Valiant Comics and Igoo the Stone Ape from the Herculiods cartoon.

So yeah- I do have fun creating the characters over the play of them.

 

[Cadfan]

Given five or six consecutive sessions, I experience this in a lot of game systems.

Temperamentally, I am a competitor gamer. I don't mean that I compete with the party, I just mean that I want to win. Whatever the goal is, I want it to be challenging and I want to win at it. If we're playing a game where the goal is to figure out who murdered the Duke, I want to win at that. If we're playing Paranoia and the goal is to pin all failures on my party members and stab them in the back without getting caught, I want to win at that. And so on.

Combat is a sort of sub goal in most games. You want to win in combat.

And my problem is that most RPG combat sucks. All too frequently it boils down to making up a description of what your attack looks like, then tossing a dice. Its got all the challenge of playing a slot machine, albeit one with an imaginative element.

Now, I generally can have fun for a while describing combat with a particular character and a particular game system. So this problem doesn't crop up instantly.

But over a period of time (a shorter period the more fighting in the game), I stop having fun with combat. This doesn't mean that the whole game starts to suck, there may be other fun things to do besides combat. But inevitably we get back to combat, and there I sit, finding my combat descriptions more and more repetitive as time goes by, and finding a significant portion of the game to be actively unpleasant.

In contrast, character building isn't a thing you can "win." At most, "winning" in character creation, for me, is effectively tweaking the system to make whatever it is I'm imagining. So I might still have a lot of fun making characters for a game system that I've grown sick of.

And with a break, and some time spent in another game system, I can usually go back to the one I've grown tired of and have fun again. Its not a permanent thing.

Ultimately that's a big part of why I like 4e. Combat is sufficiently tactical that it provides a challenge, even if the challenge is just to demolish a particular set of enemies as quickly as possible in a fight that I, looking at the board and understanding the game as I do, know I will inevitably win. And meanwhile the stuff in between combat is just as freeform or rules based as it is in most games.

 

[Crothian]

Heroes Unlimited.

It was the first super heroes games my friends and I ever played or even knew about. That summer we literally made a thousand characters. That's all we would do and occasionally have them fight each other. The generation system was very random so we never knew what we would end up with. And then we would figure out how that hero or villain would act and what his origin story was. We were just kids so it was not very in depth or creative. But it was a lot of fun.

 

[Remathilis]

Heroes Unlimited.

Ironically, another Palladium game.

 

[Crothian]

Ironically, another Palladium game.

TMNT which I played before HU we made characters and ran campaigns. We had a lot of fun with that game. But for some reason the super hero genre just had us creating characters. Maybe we needed ritalin.

 

[Mark]

Creating a mutant in Metamorphosis Alpha could be more fun than playing the game.

 

[Jasperak]

Car Wars.

 

[Vicente]

Mechwarrior 3e. Making a character was really fun, but playing the game not at all...

 

[Glyfair]

Spawn of Fashan hands down.

During one convention I played in our table finished quite early. A well-known player pulled out his copy and we created characters. The game is unplayable, character generation was hilarious.