Character Generation

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Characters in Shadowrun Awakened are built from Attributes and Skills and represent the players in the game. At the beginning of their experience, players will have to make choices that build their initial character. This character generation process will setup the character's long-term realization through Character Advancement.

Game Rules Description

Compared to a lot of pen & paper games, characters in Shadowrun start their life in-game fairly established. While they do need to make trade-offs, they are able to buy most of the gear in game and learn any skill, spell or adept powers. They will start as trained professionals with sufficient resources to move directly into a dangerous business. Also, Shadowrun characters are about finding one's place on a continuum of roles in the group, not choosing a single class.

Character generation is a player's first experience with the game. Also, players will likely repeat the process many times over the course of their time playing the game. It's important to make specification of character appearance and statistics streamlined and straightforward so they can easily get into the world. Of all aspects of characters in the Shadowrun P&P, gear management is the most contentious and may need the most work ensuring it is simplified.

Players will have different levels of skill understanding and exploiting the character system. This means we must offer generation options that fit different aptitudes and inclinations. Just like in the core manual, we will offer selection from a list of pre-generated archetypes which distill the obvious and useful possibilities for a character in SRA. Starting with an archetype, or from scratch, it will also be possible to customize every aspect of the character's statistics and equipment.

Another possibility would be to integrate parts of the character specification into a beginner's tutorial. Aspects such as race, gender, and appearance may still be set using dialogs; however, the character would enter the world having only partially chosen their attributes, skills, and abilities. Much like in Oblivion, the player would be led through in-game situations where they defined themselves to NPCs in the game. The tutorial would convert those interactions into statistics and synthesize a character fitting the description. This approach would be asset-intensive, but likely an excellent introduction for Shadowrun: Awakened.

Technical Implementation

Fundamental aspects of the character, such as race, gender, starting skills, attributes, and abilities are set at generation. Just like in SR4, characters will be given ample initial resources to start as a complete concept that is honed over time. This will likely reflect the same starting resources as in SR4, but with tweaks for game balance after testing.

Providing for multiple routes into the game world would be a requirement for a variable character generation system, especially a tutorial-based approach. Assets allowing, creating many introduction points into the game world, be them many different locations or even many different standalone missions that introduce the world would add a lot of variety to the game. Players will have many characters over the course of playing MMO and out Death and Retirement mechanics would cause even greater emphasis on having multiple characters.