Just had an odd thought about a way to run a recruitment. I'm not actually recruiting right now as I'm not taking on a campaign, BUT...
Imagine a recruitment where you submitted a character that SOMEONE ELSE would play.
Those who have made complete submissions then get to vote on which characters they would like to play, not including their own. 4 points assigned to their first choice, 2 points assigned to their second choice, and 1 point assigned their third choice.
When voting is complete, the player whose submission gained the most points gets to choose a character from the roster to play, but they may not choose their own. Then the second scoring player chooses a character, and so on.
Do you think this would work? And would it be worth doing?
I wouldn't want to do this. I'd be annoyed at how the other person was mishandling my character. And if you get lower on the list, you might not find anything you wanted to play.
Yeah. Let’s say 20pt buy...
“Ragnar the Red is an Str5 Dex 14 Con12 Int14 Wis14 Cha18 halfling Barbarian. He has at lvl1 skill focus Bluff to make people think he is strong! He maxes out Bluff and intimidate, scaring enemies in combat instead of fighting.”
Sounds funny when you don’t have to play him....
Though I suppose you could do 20 submissions and choose 5 players. That’d give the Chosen enough choices to get rid of the chaff. But you’d need a big enough pool.
It seems to me that if you make a character that you wouldn't want to play, other people probably wouldn't want to play them either. Nobody is going to vote for "Ragnar the Red."
So you are making a character that will be a teammate, and so you want to make a character that will play well alongside you.
Remember that if your character gets lots of votes, then you will be in the game, but it also means someone is likely to play the character you have designed (since a lot of people voted for it).
The "flavour of the month" issue is dealt with mainly in the limitations of the recruitment itself, since for example if you are allowing drow in your game you will get drow applications whether people are playing that character or submitting one for someone else.
I suppose it probably depends on the players, really. But that's true for any game.
I mean, I would submit a character to the recruitment just if someone would play it. It's also sort of a group "show your character," just with actual stakes. I think posting the full statblock but allowing some leninecy (perhaps allowed by the creator?) would be fun.
It might be a good experiment for a one-shot adventure, though I can see how it might not be the best idea for a long campaign like an AP.
it would be interesting to try but has the limitation of not appealing to possessive close-minded players. (though looking at that isn't really a great loss.)
Instead of submitting a complete character, submitting a concept or backstory might really be interesting.
Yeah, possibly a general build that the new owner could tweak once he chose it provided it fell within the general concept.
It's also sort of a group "show your character," just with actual stakes.
Yeah, this is exactly what I am getting at.
I never played in the RPGA, but I remember the ads. And I remember that tournament-style modules always used pre-generated characters.
I wouldn't mind running a game with pre-generated characters. You know in advance that the characters are going to be relatively balanced against one another.
At least in theory. I recall that in the old modules they always gave the fighter classes the most levels to start. You could be in a game with a 5th level fighter pre-gen and your pre-gen thief was only 3rd level. That never made much sense to me.