Making a character in Neoclassical Geek Revival RPG

Making a character in NGR

             The game designer really has your back as a player.  As a consumer, he’s just not that into you.  As a player, he designs with a good experience in mind for everyone.

 He designed a co-op board game that occasionally has a traitor in the group.  He partially did this so dominate players wouldn’t be able to bully others at the table.  If you can’t trust anyone, you don’t have to worry too much about others telling you what to do.

 He also doesn’t want anyone to make a sub optimal character and I think he does a pretty good job of doing that. 

Characters in NGR are put together using ‘pie’ pieces.  Generally, you get three pieces to put into the five classes.  Warrior, Rogue, Mystic, Fool, and Bard.  Three in a single class, mix and match, or spread out.  An Arch-mage would be M/M/M.  A ‘Spellblade’ might be W/W/M.  A dashing scoundrel might be R/F/B. 

Each class has six powers and a personal ‘item’.  Each class is connected to a specific bonus.  If you dump your pie into one class, you get all six powers of that class and a fatty bonus to one area.  A 2/1 pie split, say R/R/B, will get you three powers in Rogue, one power in Bard, Medium bonus in Rogue and small bonus in Bard.  A 1/1/1 split will get one power per class and a small bonus in each class.  Feels like a ‘power’ imbalance with six powers with a W/W/W vs three powers for a W/R/M.  The difference is made up with class ‘items’.

At the end of each session you can roll to gain or increase you class item.  Only one class type, only one opportunity to get an item.  Three class types you get three separate opportunities to increase three different class items.  An Arch-mage only gets to role for their one class item if they did cool wizardy shit during the session.  The dashing scoundrel can get/increase three items for three different types of activities.

Pretty cool.

            Each class bonus is important.  Each class power is pretty potent and also informative to the world and style of play.

             So make a character that is optimal and min max or make a character that’s more of a concept and seems cool.  Either way, the mechanics can handle it. 

             At some point when your Sir Nighthawk the Badass is desperately try to punch in the face of the charming fop before he can disgrace you and drive you from the city and the wizard is frantically scanning the bushes trying to cast ‘Fizzgig’s Improved Can of Whoop Ass’ but he can’t spot the jackass that keeps planting devastating shafts in his torso… At some point you’re going to regret not putting points into that other thing. You’re going to have to work together.