Would this work

[Gandalf970]

Doing a one or two shot adventure and I had an idea.  Would it work to start the players with 50 points and give them 10 points every 30 minutes to build their characters?  Basically they have amnesia so they don’t know who they are?  Any other different ideas would help?

[Duke Bushido]

Would it work? 

Yes. 

 

Will it be memorable? 

Certainly. 

 

Will it be quick and exciting? 

Probably not. 

 

Now if your players are fairly new to the system, it might not be too bad:  you'll have an ongoing "I buy ten points worth of X".   That's easy enough, and not likely to slow things down too much. 

 

If your players are more familiar with the rules, and like tweaking their builds with Advantages and Limitations, well, that's all going to get done every ten minutes, and it's a lot more I volved that "gimme two dice of Lightning Blast!" 

 

If they are absolutely insufferable, they will then start comparing potential builds, realize they could save two points on seventy doing things an even more complicated way, erase half their character and rebuild their entire powers suite, look at their skills and realize that if the sell back one point of a specialty skill they can crest the 14-of-less-hump on a generalist skill that sort of touches that first area, and blithely start reworking that, too.... 

 

And of course, if they redo their characteristics real quick, certain rolls will break a little better, so let's stop and do that, too, and that only adds two points to our characteristics total, so I will take those other eight points and put reduced END on the first couple of inches of Flight...... 

 

Etc, etc. 

 

Shirt version is that, since you know your people better than we do, you can answer that better than we can. 

 

Remember though, some people are just insufferable enough to rework half a character in the middle of a session anyway, even if you aren't giving them points every few minutes. 

 

 

[Tjack]

   What might be more episode friendly is to start them as 50 or 75 point normals and as the session ends give them that extra 10 points as a bonus. It gives them the opportunity to role play someone who’s dealing with powers exploding out of control, but doesn’t slow your game down to a crawl.  Now you have a week (or what ever time between sessions) to work out with them some proper write ups.  Keep doing that every episode until you get to the point level you want.

    Are you going for a “white event” or “Heroes” kind of thing?

[Gandalf970]

These players are not insufferable so it will be fun.  Still tossing around this idea, or maybe I just build them characters which they will be fine with.  They have never played Dark Champions so not sure.  I have until Friday to figure it out.  Thanks for all of your help, if you have other ideas or thoughts shoot them over.

[Thia Halmades]

8 hours ago, Gandalf970 said:

Doing a one or two shot adventure and I had an idea.  Would it work to start the players with 50 points and give them 10 points every 30 minutes to build their characters?  Basically they have amnesia so they don’t know who they are?  Any other different ideas would help?

 

To quote the above, “Would it work? Yes.” Would I do it? No, never. I think you would be better served by holding onto their characters, and waiting to see how each person starts to play with their “50 points,” then as their personalities become clear, hand them the pre-generated character that fits best. 

 

Alternatively, draft up a series of cards (similarly to what you might see in Descent, Gloomhaven, or the like) and when it comes time to “level,” offer them one of two or three cards, if this is Dark Champions, you can have the hacker, thief, street samurai, etc. (depending on the era) they pick a card and the other two go back into the class stack. This would be using a fairly stripped down, fast and loose implementation of the rules, but it would be fun and if you have enough cards drafted out with various powers, both from the supplements and from your own head, you could end up with some surprising and entertaining builds.