One of the things that Hammercalled allows me to do, if I pull it off right, is to allow people to have a really flexible character creation process.
Because of this, I want to try my hand at making a narrative/questionnaire based character creation process for the game. This has been done before (The Elder Scrolls, at least in its earlier installments, provides this option), but I'm not fully sold on some of these systems. In the realm of tabletop RPGs, the game that stands out in my mind is (first edition) Outbreak: Undead, which had a personality test system that allowed you to play yourself (or your slightly "optimized" self) but wasn't really balanced in any way.
Hammercalled is more flexible than this in how it handles things, in part because of Specializations.
The goal I have is to create a sort of mini-adventure or questionnaire that poses a series of problems or courses of action and allows players to intuitively select things.
Characters in Hammercalled have four ways to represent their expertise within the game mechanics: Attributes, Specializations, Talents, and Gear.
Specializations are ideal for narrative character creation because of the fact that they are almost totally narrative in nature: you write them as an "I am able to..." statement, so the solution you think your character would pursue is going to tie into that.
You could also tie this to Attributes and Talents, which would give you the majority of character creation, but to do so you need to tie a relatively free-form system, the Specialization, into a set list of things and points.
In a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure style of play this might go fine, as characters get talents when they would use them or otherwise spend things, but you'd have to be careful not to give too many Talents this way. Attributes could be awarded based on how points are distributed, but we don't have a raw point system for Attributes and you have to figure out which Attribute a particular course of action relates to.
The real concern is that a character's Attributes would come out severely unbalanced unless a player had a very broad concept or was intentionally gaming the system, and Hammercalled doesn't like that. There's no current setup for a diminishing return on investment (except having players convert into XP and then award from that, which wouldn't necessarily be too awful, but would be a lot of math and defeat the point of a narrative system).
Talents are a pretty broad list, and you'd need to figure out a way to map them to responses.
Gear is built by-hand, though there are pre-mades. If you have characters in a very uniform setting (like a military setting), you could probably hand out these pre-"compiled" Gear pieces during character creation, but for the standard setting it would be difficult to do. You'd probably want at least ten or so pieces of gear, so that you have ~720 possible Gear builds.
The upside of all these systems is that having one system done in a system that doesn't closely align with the character concept is probably not going to make it impossible: it can be fixed after the fact or simply made into part of the setting ("What knight doesn't have a sword and a lance?") but this is still less than ideal. You don't want to cripple yourself in character creation.
I'll talk about some of my ideas to solve these issues in a bit, but first I want to look at examples of scenarios for the questionnaire/adventure that would be a player's introduction to the system.
Here are some examples of the sorts of scenarios I'm considering:
You find yourself in a seemingly featureless room, with no doors or windows, and you have to leave.
This encourages lateral thinking and problem solving, since no obvious stimulus will be useful. It also highlights one of the issues with this system, which is that if you ask the wrong questions or provide the wrong scenarios you will get characters that act very similarly.
A man approaches you; he is clearly hostile, but not currently holding a weapon.
This example shows this aforementioned issue. I'd want to make sure that I have some things that encourage players to move in a direction that builds a character that fits in the game, but I also want to make sure that I'm not predisposing them to certain courses of action.
At the same time, you don't want absolute anarchy. My intent if I do a questionnaire based system is to say "Now group these things into similar responses and build an IAAT around it" (or a slightly more eloquent version of the same), and if your questions don't have some overlap you're going to wind up with someone who can't specialize, which means that your Specialization isn't.
You're in the middle of a long ocean voyage and your transport breaks down; it's not sinking, but you are adrift and low on supplies.
This is an example of a question that I'm really not sold on. If players approach with a character concept, they might come up with some interesting responses ("I coordinate resources and people to fix the boat" or "I use my survival skills to catch fish") or really boring ones if they don't ("I fix the boat").
I want things that are a little more open-ended, and not enclosing and situational. At the same time, I feel like having a solid number of 15 or so questions is important, since that way players can really get an idea for who their character is.
If I go for a CYOA route, I'm not quite sure how it would work. I guess I could say "If you solved with X, go here!", but that seems to be risky since it's the whole one-word dialogue box problem. Maybe "Polite" means "I really appreciate your feedback," and maybe it means "Response noted."
With that said, I think that there's room for this in a single-player experience, as long as you make clear to the reader what the expectation is of who their character will be: you are X, doing Y, in Z. That's limiting on the tabletop, but it's about as good as we get in solo gaming (or, dare I dream, video games).
The first big obstacle in narrative character creation is balance. I don't think that this form of character creation, at least if it centers on Specializations, is unbalanced. Actually, the better way to say that is "I don't think it's more unbalanced than Specializations tend to be," because there are some minor balance issues inherent in player-defined abilities (namely, skill and ambition lead to more power, where ignorance or low expectations can lead to less).
Fortunately, Hammercalled lets us be flexible, and making such a change is simply changing the wording of an IAAT instead of rebuilding a character. This is even encouraged in the GM section, where I basically tell GMs "Let players rewrite their IAATs if their concepts change."
Talents are another sore-spot. Since Talents are list-based unique qualities that a character chooses from, they can be very difficult to properly allocate with emergent events and dynamic processes.
In practice, Talents are just more specific IAATs, but since they're more fluid I don't necessarily encourage people relying too heavily on creating new Talents. They're also heavily tied to settings. However, a player and GM could work on new Talents during the character creation process, and in solo experiences nothing prevents a player from defining a Talent to fit their characters' unique traits.
Attributes can be given via template. I like Eclipse Phase's method of doing this; it feels right and doesn't take too much time. This could be done before the questionnaire, as a means of encouraging people to think about their concept and constrain it to particular game terms (whether this should be done is another question, but my gut says yes and I'm a fan of gut judgments, at least until playtesting says otherwise).
Gear is the hardest part. If you know what players want, or you're willing to railroad them, you could just say something like "Along your journey you acquired a prized possession: what was it?" and have them choose the item type then build it from a list of prompts.
This works in an adventure, but might fall apart in a simple questionnaire.
The thing that I like about Hammercalled is that nothing about the narrative character creation process I'm thinking of adding as an option treads on the core mechanics of character creation. This was a happy accident as much as by design, but it reflects the goal of a narrative-based mechanics-driven system.
I really want to see how this turns out. It could be interesting, or it could flop. We'll see. I kind of want to do a solo gamebook using the Hammercalled system at some point, and I want to avoid too much focus on a pre-made character.
Of course, going too far from the pre-made character would mean that the scenarios may not make sense, and it'll make it a lot harder to write, but I've done IF before and I'm willing to take a stab at it.
