Starting Anew

We've reached a stopping point in our current campaign, and are setting it aside to start a new adventure! The allure of Chult has gotten in our blood, and we're finally acting on it.

For a different experience, we decided to run a "session zero" to build and introduce characters. In the past, we've all made characters on our own and brought them to the game. At most, we've talked beforehand to say "I'm playing a wizard... you should play a rogue... is anyone playing a cleric?" That has worked well for any of the games we've run before, and isn't necessarily a broken system, but one of the parts of fifth edition that we all were struck with immediately when it came out was the background feature of character creation.

Choosing the different traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws was enormous fun, and showed so many promising avenues of play to develop in our campaigns... but that never seemed to pan out. Occasionally someone remembers some element ("wait, I'm a former member of the city watch"), or dismisses their silence at the table as roleplaying ("my character is antisocial"). This falls short of the envisioned potential. We thought it might help to develop those elements together, so that we could share that excitement with the entire party, and to allow better cross-development among the characters, and within the adventure.

In order to speed up the number generation, we opted to use arrays to fill in our character stats. That way they would all be roughly equivalent in ability, easy to adapt quickly at the table to fit the desired class or party need, and far less time consuming to do as a group. We know from experience that in the time one person might take to roll up a character, another person might roll up 5. And, for it to work well to have four people making up characters simultaneously, the process needed to be streamlined. The hope was also that by taking the ability scores out of the process as much as possible, we could put more effort into developing the other aspects of the character, from skills and equipment to backgrounds and motivations. Ideally creating more fully formed and well-rounded characters.

To compensate for the homogeneity of the ability scores, we opted to use a variant character creation to start with feats. That would allow some individualization and give more interesting play options from first level. Treating the feat selection in the same way it is at fourth level, players have the option of taking a feat, or adding two points to their ability scores. That smoothed a feather or two balking at not being able to roll 4d6 to fill out their scores (and re-roll ones... and probably twos... and, oh, hell, just starting them all at 15... or something similar).

I'm sure we'll still end up with an anti-social outlander just coming out of their cave to join a party in this exotic, jungle city, but that's ok, we'll all know why they're grunting instead of contributing once gaming gets underway...