Seth Skorkowsky
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Early Peek at Backstories 201
🕑 Added 2021-10-13 01:10:36 +0000 UTCHello Patrons, I finished up my next video (still need to do subtitles). It's adding to my Character Backstories video I did in 2019. I plan to post it to the general masses Thursday morning, but you can watch it early. Hope you enjoy it.
Outside of that, the only notable thing I can think of is I can finally announce that Q-Workshop is making a Seth Skorkowsky Icons set of RPG dice. Essentially I'm working with them to have a dice set that looks cool to my particular tastes, fit my play style, and I also fully stand behind. We're currently finalizing the designs and negotiating some of my unusual requests (such as three D00 and no symbols instead of numbers on the faces. Ease of reading is essential). I can't say more about it until they announce more, but it's a fun process getting to work with their designers. After finishing this post, I'll by putting on my suit and posing for several Jack images for their artists to work with. Hopefully we'll have some finalized designs soon that I can share.
I have zero doubts that my players will personally blame me for every single bad roll they have when using them, while giving me none of the credit for their good rolls.
That's it for now. Thank you all for you support.
-Seth
Comments
Who the character is is always so much more interesting than what the character is.
Cyberpunk 2020 was the first game I played that spent time on backstories as part of character creation. Before that, I'd only played games that didn't do anything at all. We pretty much ignored it for a long time until we realized how useful backstories could be. We were always having trouble with "What's my motivation?" and other stuff that could easily have been cured had we just paid attention to the backstories. With Heroic games, characters are pretty much assumed to be heroes and their motivation is "be heroic" which worked well enough when we were young and just wanted to do dungeon crawls and kill monsters. Once we started getting into more story-focused campaigns, and games where the PCs were less heroic, less focused on how much money they could get to do a job, and alignment was a thing of the past, Backstory became much more important for us.
Funny, a lot of the advice you give about making a PC are things that are built into the rulebooks for Mutant: Year Zero and Earthdawn, both games I've mentioned to you before. Just goes to show how good your advice is when it meshes with what I consider to be some of the gold standards of rpgs.
Tell me about it! I like a die to be instantly readable. I've banned those ones made to look like potion bottles and other items from my table.
Skemono
No need to apologize. I was mostly kidding and basically agree with you. I have a D6 where one of the faces, instead of being a numeral or set of pips, is something like an asterisk / starburst design. Which is close enough to a single pip that any time I roll it I have to look at the opposite face to verify what number I actually got. So, yeah, readability is good and appreciated.
Sorry. With games where symbols are used instead of numbers (Conan, Star Wars, Alien, etc.) the symbols are fine. That's part of the game and they use special dice are made for that. But with most RPGs (and all of my favorites) it's only numbers required on dice. I personally hate regular RPG dice that either hide the numbers among a bunch of artistic designs, making them difficult to read in-game, or replace a (usually the highest) die face with a symbol or something. It drives me bats. There are dice that look good on a shelf and ones that are good for playing. My goal with them is they're good for playing. Given the current designs I'm seeing, they'll still look great, but ease of readability is one of my key requirements.
Skemono
No symbols instead of numbers? So we won't get images of Jack or Mike like your Conan dice? Bummer.
And just like that the Dice Gods have their human avatar…
