What we can learn from Everway

January 15, 2008 · Filed Under Conventions, Dungeon Mastering, Dungeons and Dragons, Me and My Gang

Fine, I’ll fess up.

I once played a diceless role-playing game.

I know, I know. It goes against the core of everything we believe. But, I was young, and naive, and I thought that, somehow, if it was being run at GenCon, it must be a good game.

Honestly, it wasn’t bad.

What brings up this fond memory, you ask? Well, Jonathan Tweet, of 4E and D&D Miniatures fame, recently blogged about his Character Creation essay from the original Everway game.

I have to say, looking back on that hazy summer in Milwaukee, the best part of that Everway session was, indeed, the character creation. Essentially, we were all given cards with artwork on them, and told to design a character concept around something from each of the cards. Once we had a basic concept, the GM asked us a series of leading questions to help flesh out our characters’ personalities. Without a doubt, I felt connected to the character I played in that session more-so than any character I’ve played in a one-shot.

I think that asking players to imagine their character, to choose things that represent their character, and then helping them to more narrowly define their character is probably the best way to go about character creation in D&D. I know some DMs prefer to flesh out characters as time goes on, but I like a lot of data up front. As a DM, it provides me with a lot more material in terms of campaign hooks, and while I have been known to abuse character backgrounds from time to time, I have found that the most successful campaigns I’ve run have had these sorts of details worked out during or even before the first gaming session.

For my next campaign, I’m going to bring in some of these ideas. I want the first session to be a bit free-form, with a lot of 1-on-1 activity. I’ll hook up Guitar Hero for the players not currently involved, so they don’t get too bored :) I don’t plan on quizzing the player until they are blue in the face, but rather devoting maybe 30 minutes to background, and then running some small background-type scenario for each. I think the combination of question and action will probably work best for my particular players, but we shall see!

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Consonant Dude on March 22nd, 2008 12:20 am

Hi,

Jonathan Tweet has an amazing resume with Everway, Ars Magica, Over the Edge and D&D 3rd edition. Can it get better than that? I wish he had been more involved for the upcoming 4th edition but oh well.

I’ve always found Everway to be a splendid game. It’s a strange, alien game but pretty liberating in some respects. The onus on interpretation demands from everyone at the table to use different “roleplaying muscles” than what they are used to from a more traditional RPG.

I agree with you that Chargen kicks butt but for me, the best part in Everway is the concept of Karma, Drama and Fortune. It literally changed the way I think about gaming and its applications have found a way even when I run other games such as D&D.

Take care,

FJFJHFFFJF

Consonant Dude’s last blog post..The Chromatic RPG project