Van Gogh Character Creation

I'm still fiddling with parts of the system, but I wrote out the steps in the character creation process for PCs. I'm using this as a sort of outline so I don't forget to include an explanation for things on the character sheet. Now that I'm thinking of the character sheet, I think I'll put that up for you, too: Van Gogh Sample Character Sheet PDF

Character Creation Summary

1. Choose any basic template available for the setting: Templates serve as a basic starting point for different character archetypes or species, such as “wizard”, "rocketeer", "bounty hunter", or “lizardman”. The templates aren't classes. I got this idea from the old West End Games D6 Star Wars game. Templates are just a shortcut for character creation. They serve as examples of how certain types of characters will arrange their Attributes and Skills. If you want to play a rocketeer in a pulpy space opera setting, then you can grab the "Rocketeer" template and customize it by re-arranging the stats and filling in the personal bits.
2. Determine Attributes: There are four Attributes (Might, Finesse, Cunning, Will) that determine a character's raw, untrained abilities. Attributes determine how easily the character can learn different skills. Right now, I'm considering a standard PC to be made with 9 dice distributed among the four attributes with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 5.
3. Choose Skills: Spend 15 points on 20 skills. Skills cost 1 point per level equal to or below the linked attributes and 2 points per level over the linked attributes. Skills (and their linked attributes in parentheses): Athletics (M), Bluff (C), Concentration (W), Driving (F), Fighting (F), Healing (C), Helm (C), Intimidation (W), Investigation (C), Knowledge (C), Notice (C), Persuasion (W), Piloting (F), Repair (C), Shooting (F), Stealth (F), Social Circles (C), Survival (C), Taunt (C), Wrangling (C).
4. Choose Talents: You may choose up to 3 Talents. These are bonuses that your character enjoys in limited situations (e.g. a higher Driving skill when driving a particular kind of vehicle). You may gain extra Talents by trading in Attributes or Skills (1D for two Talents).
5. Choose Drawbacks: You may take any number of Drawbacks. Drawbacks are penalties that affect your character in specific situations (e.g. A character from a desert environment may have a lower Athletics skill when trying to swim). Drawbacks do not cost any points and do not give you any points, but you earn a Drama point when they seriously impede your character in play.
6. Choose Passions: Passions determine your character's Dramatic personality qualities. The basic idea for Passions came from the stimuli in Unknown Armies, but the implementation here is different. These qualities can be tapped once per scene to get a free Drama point for immediate use. There are four Passions. Rage is what your character hates most. Fear is what your character fears most. Heroic is what brings out the best in your character (in villains, this is usually called their "redeeming feature"). The Tagline is a short identifying quote that demonstrates the type of action at which your character likes to excel, for example: "You'll never take me alive!", "You have such beautiful eyes...", or "Take that, spawn of evil!".
7. Signs: For each Attribute or Skill of 3 or more, and for each Talent and Drawback, determine a Sign. Signs are outwardly visible indications of those traits. Traits that have a Sign can be used to get a bonus in certain situations so they are both mechanically useful and a much more interesting way to describe a character than listing height, weight, and eye and hair color.
8. Gear: Choose appropriate personal equipment for your character. 

That's it. The steps don't necessarily need to be done. Picking a template (if you use one) should be first to save time. Skills need to be chosen after Attributes, but other than that the order isn't important. Signs can be determined as you go along. Passions and Talents can be chosen first and then backed up by Attributes and Skills and Signs can be determined as you go along. In fact, I might just have to bump Passions and Talents up the list. I think they help to define a character more than saying "He's got Finesse 3" and they might just make it easier to pick Attributes and Skills. 

Van Gogh Basics

So, why "Van Gogh"? I thought of that name when I spent some time thinking about the games I most enjoyed running and how they differed from the ones I didn't enjoy running. I really liked running the old D6 Star Wars game because coming up with stats for NPCs on the fly was really easy. If I planned to use an NPC in advance, I could save time by only making a note of the stats he would use. For example, if I was planning to use a diplomat or a criminal fence, I could just make a note of his bargaining and persuasion skills. If I had an interesting idea during play or if the PCs made an unexpected turn, I could easily throw in a new character or add more stats to an existing character as the need arose. If that diplomat suddenly has a need to pull a holdout blaster from his sleeve and start shooting, I could just say "Hmm, he's more of a pencil pusher than an action hero senator like Leia, so I'll just give him Blaster 2D" and there would be no problem. There wasn't a strong interdependency among stats: that diplomat didn't need to be a boxing champion to also wield a gun.


At one point, I also ran a 3E D&D game that I really enjoyed for the interaction between the PCs, the interesting NPC organizations I made up, the fun set pieces, and the relationships that developed between the PCs and NPCs that were originally thrown in for background extras (it was a Spelljammer game and I gave each of the NPC crewman on their ship a different identifying feature and personality quirk). What I didn't enjoy was making up stats on the fly and having a player ask "Why can't he do X if can do Y?" It made sense to me that a character wouldn't know a feat like "Improved Haberdashery" without knowing the prerequisite "Haberdashery", but the system often linked things in chains that didn't really seem necessary. Thinking back on this, I realized that I really prefer to GM in broad strokes, so I wanted to make a system that would allow that. By coincidence, I was studying the works of Vincent Van Gogh at the time of this realization. I particularly liked his dynamic brush strokes and the way he makes such evocative scenes without using excessive detail, so I decided "Van Gogh" was a good name for the project that would keep me focused on those goals. But other than working in "broad strokes" for easy statting on the fly, what are the design goals of Van Gogh? These are the initial notes I jotted down when I started:

• Each stat is a dice pool of one to six D6s. But a score of 6 should be really unusual.
• No more than 6D6 need to be rolled at once. The result is determined by counting successes to keep the addition simple, quick, and visceral. Players can read the results at a glance. Each die that rolls 3+ is a success and 6s are two successes. This means that the average roll of a dice pool is very close to the number of dice in the pool, so it's easy to roughly estimate one's capabilities. 
• For non-opposed actions, the difficulties normally range from 1 to 5. Matching the difficulty is a basic success. Exceeding the difficulty brings additional benefits (extra damage in combat, extra details on a knowledge roll, etc.).
• For opposed actions, compare rolls. The winner is the one with more successes. The winner enjoys extra benefits for having more than one success over the loser.
• There are 4 Attributes (Might, Finesse, Cunning, Will) and 20 Skills (not all of which will be needed in every setting).
• Skills are their own standalone die code (i.e. it's not an “Attribute+Skill” system). Skills are cheaper to purchase at levels below their relevant Attribute, so people with a lot of natural talent can more easily achieve a given level of skill but someone with more skill than them will be better (even if they had to work harder to get that superior skill).
• Drama: Giving 110%. Tapping into inner reserves of willpower. Being in the zone. Using the Force. Whatever you want to call it, most of the settings I enjoy playing in have some situations where characters go above and beyond their normal limits for the sake of an exciting story. These extra resources are represented by Drama points. When a Drama point is spent before a roll, then all successes are doubled, not just the 6s. Drama points can be earned in play as a reward for good role-playing or as compensation for trouble caused by a Drawback or other unfavorable circumstances. The most reliable source of Drama points are the character's Passions, personality traits that indicate which situations would drive them to try a little harder than normal.
• Drawing on experience: Experience isn't just recorded as faceless “XP points” that can be spent on anything. Some games (like D6 and Savage Worlds, two of my favorites) have experience points that serve as a resource that can be spent on temporary boosts in play or as a permanent boost to buy new skills and abilities, but they can only be used for one or the other and they don't necessarily get spent on abilities that make sense considering how they were originally earned. In Van Gogh, that's not the case. Experience is recorded as “exploits”: a single sentence that describes a significant event (success or failure) in the character's adventure which can serve as a learning experience. In future adventures, the character can draw on these previous experiences by tapping an exploit and explaining how it helps their current predicament. “Drawing on experience” in this way gives the character an extra die for a roll. For example, a fantasy warrior is fighting a minotaur and struggling to land a telling blow so he draws on his exploit “Cleaved a troll chieftain from shoulder to hip in a single blow” and says “I cut a damn troll lord in half! Butchering a stupid two-legged cow is nothing!” then rolls his next damage roll with an extra die. Exploits can only be used once per session and they are checked with a slash as they are used. They can be checked permanently with an X to buy a permanent increase to the character's abilities. For example, the trollslayer in the example could cross out that exploit (along with a few others that demonstrate his strength) to buy another point of the Fighting skill or the Might attribute so he can hit all of his foes harder.
• It’s all relative. Numbers are relative to the rest of the world. For example, movement is a number without units and combat rounds do not last a specified amount of time. In a gritty modern urban setting, a movement of 1 may mean jogging 10 meters in a 5-second round. In a high-flying, high-kicking kung fu epic with bullet-time combat sequences, it could be jumping dozens of meters in a one-second round. In a game set inside a computer where anthropomorphic programs struggle to defend their system against viruses, it could be 1 drive sector in a microsecond. Likewise, the attributes and skills are relative. In a game where the PCs are humans (or something on a similar scale), the average person may have a Might of 2. In a game where the PCs are giant alien robots, even exceptionally tough humans will have attributes resembling tissue paper and will need special equipment like power armor to have Might 1.

Every blog has to start somewhere...

Welcome to Wooden Pencils Studio's first blog post. I just created the blog earlier today after procrastinating for months. This blog is primarily to chronicle the development of my RPG products. I started working on a new game a few years ago. The core idea was sort of inspired by "Don't Rest Your Head", but I decided that rolling so many dice was too cumbersome. I started to adapt it to a more traditional game inspired by Savage Worlds and D6. The goal was to make a game that could do anything either SW or D6 could do, but with only 6d6 or less.

I like Savage Worlds for the simple generic attributes and the way characters are detailed more by their Edges and Hindrances than by their attributes. I like D6 for the simple resolution system that works the same way for everything and the way more skill means more dice. (I really like dice pools but I'll talk about those in a later post.) The thing I liked most about D6 was being able to GM the game in broad strokes. I didn't have to worry about calculating anything or adding anything up. One of the things that really bugged me in my last D&D 3E campaign was when I would make up NPCs on the fly and then hear questions from players like "How can that character perform action X with feat Y when they don't have ability Z?" I missed running Star Wars D6 and being able to grab some dice that felt about right and say "This guy is this good at this ability" and it's perfectly all right with the rules. Nothing breaks.

I started a Word document on my laptop and pasted in my notes on stats and abilities from the dice-heavy game I mentioned above. I wrote out a set of skills that I thought were comprehensive without getting too repetitive. There was a time when I would have made different skills for different weapons, but Savage Worlds opened my eyes to the simplicity of just Fighting and Shooting. I carried that "usefully broad skills" idea through and wrote descriptions of how they could be used in different genres. Why have a "Running and Jumping" skill for pulp action and a separate "Run up walls and jump over houses" skill for wuxia action? If those skills won't be used in the same game, then they can both be "Athletics" in the core rules and applied on a different scale in different genres. I wrote a long list of Talents, my version of Edges/Feats/Advantages/etc. and then promptly forgot about the game when things became very busy with my day job.

I got the game out again in late 2009 year and started fiddling with it again. I decided to give the system the working name of Van Gogh to help me keep the "broad strokes" impressionist concept in mind. I have a tendency to get too detailed when I'm writing game rules, but I never use those details in play. Writing them would be a waste of time and counterproductive to the kind of game I wanted: a game that consists entirely of what you see in play rather than lots of fiddly bits that exist only on the character sheet but are only used indirectly if at all. I don't really like games that feature a bunch of primary stats that aren't used for anything other than calculating the derived stats you use in actual play. I sent my long document of notes and ideas to a couple friends to get their take on it. Then I got distracted by the day job again and Van Gogh went on the back burner.

When I came back to designing, it was to work on 3 other projects. I was inspired to work on some cool setting ideas, so the Van Gogh system languished in the depths of my hard drive. Then my hard drive inexplicably died. I lost everything I had written for my 3 setting concepts. After I got my hard drive replaced and spent a few long afternoons reinstalling software, I remembered that I had emailed Van Gogh to some friends. I recovered it from my Sent folder and looked at it again with fresh eyes.

Van Gogh was still too complicated and fiddly. Each Talent had its own unique rules for what it did. The rules weren't complicated to use because they were all based on the same core resolution system. I had no doubt that a player would be able to remember what all of their character's Talents did, but I wouldn't want to be the GM that has to remember what all the Talents of all the PCs and NPCs do. So I set about streamlining the Talent system. My old friend Addison at Zombie Dojo helped me to bounce some ideas around about tightening up that section of the rules. Since then, I've been hacking and trimming Van Gogh into a sleeker and easier to use form. A lot of vague ideas I had about subsystems were fleshed out with this tight focus in mind. Specifically, the "subsystems" are just examples of how to use the core mechanic for different things: all of the subsystems for combat, social situations, vehicles, etc. all work the same way.

Van Gogh is still not finished, but I'm starting to get really excited about how it's coming together. By keeping all the components simple and easily connected to each other like DNA amino acids or Lego bricks, it's really easy to combine them in a wide variety of ways without having to twist or break anything. I first noticed this emergent complexity while writing up the rules for using social skills. I went back and looked at earlier parts of the manuscript that I had postponed finishing and suddenly realized how simple it would be to finish the parts I had struggled with.

I intend to finish the Van Gogh system, lay it out with some art, and make a nice PDF. Then I'll release it for free. I have a lot of ideas for interesting settings that I want to develop, but there aren't any systems I'd really enjoy working with to make them (but Savage Worlds and Mini6 come close). That's one of my main motivations for making Van Gogh. I want a universal system that I can use to produce gaming settings without having to force them into someone else's system that will make me think about fiddly bits rather than the world itself. I think I've rambled enough for now. In future blog posts, I'll start detailing the system and my design goals and inspirations.