My son came over last night, wanting me to help him build a HARP GM screen, a new player's guide, have some idea for layout of stuff he'd want to have on hand, etc.
It was an interesting evening, mainly because of how far I had to think back in order to contribute anything useful to the process. I mean, I played RM for decades, realistically all I
needed in recent years was for the player to have a character sheet and both of us to have a pair of d10s. Everything else was fairly well in my head, having books and tables on hand was
convenient, but hardly
necessary. Same went for him, he's 26 and started on RM when he was 11.
Well, that hardly applies to HARP, for either of us. I'm not lost and neither is he, but very little of it is so deep in the subconscious that we can do without having tables to refer back to. So in thinking "what do you want at the table, and what goes on your 'heads up display'," I needed to cast my mind back to RM1 in the early 80s or AD&D in the late 70s.
And yes, that gave me a recent lesson in how
But I've played in games where the GM had no real idea about either the system or how they wanted to use it. That can kill a RM game in particular because the system is SO open. Sometimes I think we forget that because we're so used to it.
Dunno about you, but
I certainly had.
Along the lines of "for Dummies," he prefers creating characters starting from the concept, as I do. To that end, my suggestions for building a "newbie player's guide to character generation" were mostly about changing the order of things:
1. The GM must provide the players with enough background in depth about his world setting so they can make intelligent choices about their character concept, to ensure that it fits well within the setting. If the player can do that, most of the other choices become comparatively obvious.
2. The player defines his character concept, meaning
who the character is, rather than
what the character is. "What's my motivation for this scene" and all that. At this point I don't care if you want "a half elf ranger," I care about if you want "the child of a rancher and an herbalist, spent most of his childhood in the woods or working with animals, parents wiped out in an orc attack, one sibling presumably still living but he hasn't seen or heard from them in years, has a major chip on his shoulder now about orcs, family and trusting people, not comfortable with large groups of people."
3. Choose race, culture and talents to fit the concept. Don't buy a talent unless your concept outlined above doesn't make any sense without it.
4. Then, and only then, do I care about stats and skills.
5. Once stats and skills are done, go back to talents and see if there's anything you wanted but wasn't vital that you can still afford.
However, please note: Because HARP, like RM, is so wide open and just begs to be tweaked to fit the GM's setting, none of this works without the GM defining his setting well enough to be able to explain it to the players
first, before the players ever crack a book or decide anything at all about who and what they are playing.
2cp, hope it helps.
