God damn it! I had a thought of what I was going to write here and then I fell asleep. And then I woke up and forgot what it was. It’s still buggin’ the shit out of me! What the hell was it?! Meh, whatever. Alright, I guess I feel like talking about TTRPG stuff. One of my favorite parts of TTRPGs is character creation. I’m sure most players are familiar with the process in Dungeons & Dragons. I have a few preferences in that game but I prefer random generation to avoid repeating my preferences and biases. I don’t think I’ve seen a good random generator for D&D or at the very least, I can’t think of one at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night. My favorite game however, the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, had the best character system baked into it. I put together some screens to further expedite the process. I even have it saved on all my devices so it can be easily copied into the notes app. Then one can simply throw dice and mark the results on the note images. Then you just jump onto behindthename.com to randomly generate the name and biographical information. I’ve been using this process to create NPCs for years. There again, the character creation in that system was designed for randomization. Most games are a little bit trickier to this end.
The new Marvel Multiverse RPG (MMRPG) is a great system overall. I’ve acclimated to the power system in this game. I’ve been vocal about my feelings on the super powers of this game, which were not so much positive at first but I’ve worked out how to do some things that were more nuanced from the older game. I’ve worked out a method for randomly generating characters for the MMRPG system. I use an app called Characterize. It lets you make your own generators. You make an item to generate and within that item you type in all the possible results for that item. For example: the item is a four-sided die. You name the item d4. And then within that field you enter: 1,2,3,4 . So, you tap the button and it randomly selects one of those digits. The generator I put together for this game I built with four fields; Rank, Origin, Occupation, and then I added to that the first power set. I’ve found that randomly choosing a power set to kick off the character’s powers is more efficient for me to branch out and try other powers I don’t often use for my characters. And then I use behindthename.com for the rest normally. There are still numerous factors that can’t really be generated randomly and active decisions need to be made so, the process still takes some time to complete the character. All said and done, It works very well and is fun for me as I create numerous NPCs.
Feel free to reach out with questions, suggestions, or just to chat. I’m going to set up a discord server connected to all this. I guess that would be more accessible for things like this. Until next time.
