"Black Dougal gasps 'Poison!' and falls to the floor. He looks dead."

Monday, June 22, 2009

Why B/X Is My Favorite #11

11. It takes about 5 minutes to make a character.

This is more than B/X being a rules-lite system. It also goes hand-in-hand with how fragile characters are. Mortality rates of B/X characters are high so it is important to have a system that quickly generates new characters.

Even with a very quick character generation process I still remember a handful of my early characters and their stories and exploits. Gundar the dwarf who vowed vengeance on the goblins who resided in the Caves of Chaos, Fingolfin the elf who met with a certain hermit and many others.

It isn't a long complicated character generation process or long elaborate character backstories that make these characters stand out but instead what they did after I quickly rolled them up.

3 comments:

  1. Hooray! Why B/X is my favorite" has returned for more!

    Agreed on the length of time a character takes to generate. I've noticed that these newer games that have character generation take up a session tend to give them near invulnerability to counter that. Yawn!

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  2. Agreed.
    T&T rocks in this regard, as well. :)

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  3. It took me very little time to generate 24 viable characters for use as pre-gen PCs or henchmen NPCs...including purchasing equipment for all. B/X is definitely king of light character gen.

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