Diaspora: Character Generation

There's a running joke in our gaming group that all of my characters are fundamentally the same person: this is perhaps a not uncommon occurence in gaming groups. noisms provides a helpful summary of things that my characters have been involved in (and I follow with a rebuttal of some of them). Given the crazy worlds that my characters are in, their actions seem fairly sane and logical to me!

However, when setting up my character for Diaspora it occured to me that it might be good to steer things from the start so that the character has a different direction, a lifepath that might take things beyond what is typical for my characters. Adding details of this in yesterday's post would have made the post much too long.

I like the way that Diaspora sets up characters; noisms ran it really well, leading us through each part. Essentially, you detail five phases of the character's life up to the present, and from each phase you get two Aspects, defining features, details, locations, weapons or characteristics for the character. We didn't get to any proper play yesterday, but we were told that you essentially invoke these Aspects when relevant in play to help influence the outcome of situations.

So this is what I wrote for my character, Silence Arizona.

New Worlds, New Ideas

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with Patrick and noisms to start world-building and character generation for a game of Diaspora that we will be playing over the coming months. noisms is going to be DMing, and he has the Diaspora pdf so lead us through the generation part. It took us about three hours to get up to the point of having characters, and it was a really interesting process. noisms has already posted about it over on Monsters and Manuals, and one thing that I'm 100% totally behind is his assertions about creativity through constraints. Creativity is not straight-jacketed by constraints, it thrives in them, in the sense that being completely open to all possibilities leaves us swamped and unable to see the wood for the trees.

...I was describing one of the worlds, in one of the systems we were creating, as being a water world, populated by Melnibonean-esque decadent epicureans. One of the players cut in, "Do they live on the surface in big floating cities, or under the water, or what?" And I was forced to think, "Well, where do they live?" And in answering the question more detail was added to the setting: creation by question in action.

There is a lot of power in this, and it applies not just during shared setting-creation type games like Diaspora: it applies in any kind of game...

It's something that I see a lot through work as well: you ask a totally open question and people look really stumped, and inevitably give vague and general answers. Follow up with more focused questions and they say a lot more; having to think about things which are deep beneath the surface can be really valuable. In games - especially story games (I think) and with world-building it can go a long way.

I'll write tomorrow about the character that I ultimately generated (and the process, which has given me a lot to think about), but I'll finish by saying a few words about some of the cluster of systems that were generated. First, I really thought that the random generation (using a Fudge dice system) was great; it's amazing how generating three numbers (relating to Technology, Environment and Resources in a system) can then go such a long way to detailing what the system is like.

Second, I liked how the layering on of details really started the ball rolling - and like lots of creative endeavours, started connections forming. Humans look for patterns. We have no choice, we try to make sense of the world. For example, one of my systems, Feynman, has neighbours which have either better technology or nicer worlds, so as I start to think about the political and social structure there it makes sense to think that they would be jealous of their neighbours. My other system, Temperance, has extremely high tech but environments that are slightly hazardous - which lead me to think that the citizens might be dispersed in artificial habitats throughout the system, rather than mostly residing on a particular world.

Now we have to make the time to meet up and play!

Upcoming

I have a Games Night and a Games Day to look forward to in the next week. I had to take a week off because of work - and worse luck, it seems like I might have to do the same next week - but tomorrow I have another session of Lamentations of the Flame Princess - after the great session a few weeks ago - and then on Saturday there's a group of us getting together to have a full day of Diaspora.

I'm interested to see where LotFP ended up during my absence (as you might recall, previously I was at death's door, and barely hanging on after being slashed open by a big lizard man). I've heard bits and pieces from a play summary; I wonder how quickly Charley Shortbread can get back in to things?

Diaspora is going to be interesting too. I know next to nothing about it, the keywords in my mind are space opera, Fudge dice, big universe, space travel. All of which combines to make me want to play it on Saturday!