Author Topic: Character Sheets  (Read 1009 times)

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Offline EltonJ

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Character Sheets
« on: April 15, 2022, 10:50:53 AM »
Do any of you GMs take the character sheets away from your players?  If you do so, does that inspire creativity?

When I was on the old Rolemaster email list, one of the patrons said that he took the sheets away from his players.  The players, not knowing whats on their sheets, would get very creative in their actions.  I thought about doing that, and learned that you can't do that on roll20 (har har).

Offline MisterK

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #1 on: April 15, 2022, 11:29:40 AM »
Do any of you GMs take the character sheets away from your players?  If you do so, does that inspire creativity ?
I don't.

However, I once had the players design their character by telling me what their characters were good at. For each attribute, I asked them if their character was poor, average, fair, good, excellent...; and for each skill, if they were untrained, beginners, dilettantes, trained, journeymen,...

They had no limit, except for spell lists which I managed differently. They could say whatever they wanted.

Then, I wrote the numbers and they had their technical character. But a character was not a compromise between the players' wishes and a set number of DPs - it was exactly what they wished for.

And it was fine.

So, I did not hide the character sheets from the players. But the players were playing the character they wanted to play, not the character the rules allowed them to play. Which, in a way, is a bit similar to what you suggest, only it is planned beforehand.

I, however, once *played* in such a game (it was not RM, rather a BRP hack). It works as well. However, after a little while, you know what your character is good at and what he's not good at, and you tend to pick your fights when you can. Which is fine, because it is a natural reaction: if I'm bad at something, I will try to avoid doing it, unless circumstances force my hand or I want to serve as comic relief.

Offline Vladimir

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #2 on: April 15, 2022, 11:44:11 AM »
  I've never seen that happen. Some GMs ask for copies of character sheets at certain levels to use as a snapshot in development and later use them as NPCs.
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Online jdale

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #3 on: April 15, 2022, 01:01:42 PM »
I have some players who don't understand their character sheets, does that count? ;)
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Offline Hurin

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #4 on: April 15, 2022, 02:38:58 PM »
Never done it, but did think about it. I was also going to roll for them too (and not let them know what they rolled). It would be an interesting experiment.
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Offline EltonJ

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #5 on: April 15, 2022, 02:40:45 PM »
I have some players who don't understand their character sheets, does that count? ;)

Indirectly, Jdale.  :D

Offline Jengada

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #6 on: April 15, 2022, 04:33:00 PM »
On the recent thread about rolling perception or other rolls for players, someone noted how much a GM already has on their plate. I would say the same about this - I don't need MORE sheets (or browser tabs) to be shuffling through all the time!
I also think my players would really balk at this. If they have to develop all of these skills, they want to use them. To pull that away from them would really frustrate my group - and I'm very willing to accept it's my group.
As for creativity, I don't know whether I could handle them being more creative. They already go off the rails with novel solutions constantly.
We ask the hard questions here, because they keep us too busy to worry about the hard questions in the real world, and we can go with the answers we like the best.

Offline Spectre771

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #7 on: April 15, 2022, 04:56:15 PM »
I don't take their sheets away from them for gaming.  I'll sometimes take them to see their skills and bonuses so I can plan the NPC's skills and stat levels to balance or to make a session more or less challenging.  Sometimes I'll get some inspiration from seeing what they designed, but I'm usually there at the creation process so I'll have ideas percolating at that period.  The last thing I need as a GM in RM is to have even more papers/charts/sheets to look through.  Let the players look up their own stats and skills ;)
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Offline Vladimir

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #8 on: April 16, 2022, 04:19:20 AM »
  In my gaming circles such a move would be too controlling...and most of us didn't like control freak GMs. I even ran a series of campaigns to parody the campaign run by one of the control freaks and it ran for several years with all the players having a blast and a GM who will never speak to me again.

  Before I retired, I worked at one of the busiest air traffic control facilities in the world. I could game every other weekend and had a life, so I didn't memorize my character sheet, ever.
Most of my fellow players would be more inspired and creative with their character sheet in front of them, especially in a skill-based game without levels or classes. Of course, we did have a few players who devoted their lives to cheesing the rules and would spend hours every day looking for loopholes and exploits to use in the next session.
There are parts of RM my current GM considers broken so some professions, skills and spell lists aren't available in our campaign. Having play tested games before, I fully understand.

  From my own character sheet, there are 4 or 5 skills I use all the time. All other skills are incidental and tertiary, so I usually don't bother committing those details to memory, that's why I have a character sheet.

  I also design my own character sheets that calculates all of the applicable modifiers, so all I have to do is fill in the stats and skills. I've designed these simple spreadsheets for years and they've been popular with a lot of players.   
 
  When I game now I have my character sheet on my computer screen while I game with my friends six time zones away. Since I'm retired, I don't mind the sun rising when we finally wrap up a session -It reminds me of college, when a character sheet was hand written on a blank sheet of paper.

When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
-Lao Tzu

Offline OLF, i.e. Olf Le Fol

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #9 on: April 16, 2022, 06:41:17 AM »
Same as many others said: as a GM, I have enough to manage that I don't want to manage even more! In fact, I let my players manage as much as possible, including the damage (meaning, they have a copy of their weapon's charts and of the related criticals).
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Online jdale

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #10 on: April 16, 2022, 01:19:38 PM »
The one experience I had with this was Matt Hanson running a game at an event (free RPG day, I think?), in which the PCs were all suffering from amnesia. We selected our pre-generated characters on the basis of physical descriptions rather than stats. So it was a way of skipping rules explanations for a group of mostly newbie players and letting them discover their abilities. As it progressed he would hand us various information (e.g. you've remembered this spell list) and we gradually got a sense of what our capabilities were. Not a bad approach given the constraints of the session.
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Offline Grinnen Baeritt

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #11 on: April 17, 2022, 02:06:30 AM »
Due to the fact that I GM RM very rarely now (and actually get to play it even less :( ), when I do GM, most often I generate pre-genned characters for specific scenarios, run at conventions, for players who quite often have never played RM before....  Thus I retain a copy of the character sheet, and give the players an outline front sheet, which basically only contains the aspects of the character that are important... the general information is thus there as to what skills and activities the character is very good at... and only an idea of those they are very poor at.

So, whilst I don't actually take the character sheet away, I never give them the original to start with.. ;)

They get to make "nearly" all the rolls... but don't have to bother with the maths.         

Offline Spectre771

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #12 on: April 18, 2022, 03:58:34 PM »
Due to the fact that I GM RM very rarely now (and actually get to play it even less :( ) ...

<sigh>  I know the feeling :(
If discretion is the better valor and
cowardice the better part of judgment,
let's all be heroes and run away!

Offline Tywyll

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Re: Character Sheets
« Reply #13 on: May 04, 2022, 08:11:15 AM »
Do any of you GMs take the character sheets away from your players?  If you do so, does that inspire creativity?

When I was on the old Rolemaster email list, one of the patrons said that he took the sheets away from his players.  The players, not knowing whats on their sheets, would get very creative in their actions.  I thought about doing that, and learned that you can't do that on roll20 (har har).

Years ago I ran a 2E D&D campaign where I kept the 'full character sheet' (which included things like magic item abilities and current HP totals) while the players had a 'player facing' sheet with all their known details (starting HP, class abilities, equipment, spells, etc). They rolled the d20 for attacks and saves, but just told me the result and I did the full calculation with modifiers. When they were hurt I would describe how they felt. Etc etc. It was an absolute blast. They always maintained it was the most immersive game they played in.