I have one question about starting a new physical game (as opposed to a game via chat). How would you organize the logistics of character creation? In all other PBTA games it is dead simple as you only have to pass around the playbooks and there are no doubles.
In Uncharted Worlds nothing hinders a player to select identical careers or origins. Passing around a copy of my GM book does not seem like a real option. As I am trying to show/teach my players this game, they do not have copies of the rulebook themselves.
Do you plan on creating a player set with just the steps for character creation and the careers/origins? Would it be okay if the GM distributed a printout of those at the table? If yes, how many would you print? One for every player (waste of paper) or just two or three?
I want to gm a one-shot session at the end of the month, and it seems to me that the mechanical part of character creation takes much longer than in any other PBTA game. Would it be a good advice to hand out the careers and origins beforehand so that the players can get aquainted with them?
Character creation is pretty lengthy so for a one-shot I would either have them choose careers, origins and assets (!) beforehand or use pregens. For my campaigns I used printouts of the relevant sections of the rules for every player – which might be a waste of paper but beats the back and forth of sharing one copy.
For a one shot use the pregens
Are the playbooks available to download? Can you get the players to agree their intended characters in principle (and in advance) and then you come back with options?
Pregens for one-shot. For a campaign of four players I printed out four copies of every career and origin, so that each player could go through their own stack. It was, yes, quite a stack of paper, but luckily UW isn’t very ink intensive and I can reuse everything I printed. Character Advancement, and definitely future games — since you don’t write on the playbooks, printing them once serves you for as long as you don’t lose them.
Ok, the answers so far seem to solidify a fear of mine. I actually LOVE the interactive character creation of PBTA games, but I see that with so many options as in Uncharted Worlds, we could be bogged down so fast that we would not see any action in our time slot.
What do you think of fixing the mechanical parts (careers, origin, moves, assets) before the game and have the fluffy parts (backstory, debts and faction) discussed right before the game? That way we could have the best of both worlds. As far as i see the factions don’t have too much influence on the choice of moves.
I think that’s a great split.
Late to this, but I’ve got the book yesterday. What I was thinking about character creation in my next game is to provide individual groups of cards: a 10-card deck with Careers, and another 10-card deck with Origins.
Divide as evenly as possible the Careers among your players.
Using a Draft mechanic, each player selects one Career, passes the others to the player to her left. Repeat. Now each player has 2 Careers and there’s no overlap.
Do the same with the Origins cards. I suggest allowing them to hold 2 Origins and only then selecting which one she really wants.
It worked nice when creating a DW party. I believe this will work well here too.
That could also be a nice idea. Do you print the cards yourselves and cut them out, or do you use blank cards with the careers written on them?
In our game two players made the characters in the beginning and the third chose a pre-gen because it fitted her idea perfectly. We had about 6 hours (more than anticipated) so it worked out. We will probably continue playing anyway because the players really enjoyed the game! It was really refreshing to see my old friends have fun with an RPG again, after many years of rules-heavy games numbed the fun out of it…
Blank business cards (I’ll print some basic info on them). At least this is the initial idea. Haven’t tested it.
Btw: The One Shot was so well received that we now play a second game. I am so happy that I got my old crew together with this game! Thank you very much, Sean Gomes! Today we will have another player and old friend join in who had to drop out last time due to illness.
So we get another chance to do some world building, and then I have to introduce his character. Thanks to Larp Wellington I have 21 Jump Points ready to spring the action into life!
Awesome man. Glad to hear it went well