27 Sep How to Roll Up an Infected Character!

So I’ve been tinkering, again! One of my good mates wanted to try out rolling up a character for Infected, to see how it went.

At first we tried rolling 1d10 for each stat, but after he got an extremely persuasive drooling idiot, we decided that was just a bit ridiculous.

So then we tried rolling 2d4 – and, magic! It was a really simple, neat system of character generation.

How it Works:

Roll 2d4 for each Attribute and Skill. Just roll for each stat, keeping the result each time. You don’t get to choose where the numbers go, it’s the luck of the draw.

Players get an additional 10 points to allocate anywhere (though it’s advised to put it on Circumstances).

However, Players still need a Narrator’s approval to put a statistic up to 7 or 8 (9 or 10 would be pretty ridiculous, so they’d need a really good reason for this).

Advantages and Disadvantages work as normal, as do all the other stats like Health, Morality and Base Initiative. Though you could also roll 2d4 for Morality (and add extra points if you had them spare… if you wanted to make a saint, or save your character from being completely mad).

You’ll find that the most common number rolled is 4, which is an average stat level.

Optional: Narrators may choose to allow players to re-allocate several stats. You could change up to 2 Attributes, and up to 4 Skills, but only between themselves (i.e. you could swap around your Brawn of 4 and your Intelligence of 7, but you couldn’t swap your Brawn of 4 with the Skill Melee, which is at 6).

Optional: If you want, you could allow players to allocate where their rolls go, but even then I advise separating Attributes and Skills.

Higher Level Characters: If you want your characters to start at Experienced or Veteran levels, then you can simply give them more additional points to spend. Experienced should have 30 points to spend, while Veteran should have 50.

The Advantages of Rolling Up a Character

• It’s fun! I’ve always been a big fan of allocating points to a character sheet, but I must say there is something inherently fun about rolling up a character.
• Players don’t need to know much about the rules, statistics or how to make characters. It’s very, very simple.
• It’s really fast. It took us about 5 minutes to handle the Attributes and Skills (and then 15 minutes to agonize over the Circumstances, Advantages and Disadvantages).
• The character sort of creates itself. You get an immediate idea of who they might be, where they might be from, and their strengths and weaknesses – from there it’s simple to make a backstory and get involved.

What Type of Games Does This Suit?

This type of character creation particularly suits games with new players, or where you don’t want to really think out all the parts of your character. It’s really easy to customise this method to suit any style, and it can even give you ideas for how your character should take shape.

The games that it won’t suit quite so well are ones where Players and Narrators have a definite idea in mind of what sort of characters and story they’re going to tell. If they really need to make a particular type of character, the points-based system works better. And, in fact, if you’re familiar with the points-based system, you’ll find you have far better control over the outcome.

Try it out, see how it works for you, then let me know! I’d love to hear on whether it works for you or not 🙂

~Oliver

Want to know more about Infected? Check it out here!

Image from Pinterest.