d20 Character Icebreaker Questions

-

When playing Trophy Gold with my friend Alex of To Distant Lands as the referee, I was delighted at how he subverted a classic D&D trope. Instead of "starting at a tavern", going through the motions of meeting each other and stumbling onto some quest or other prospect—Alex asked us each how our player-characters act when drunk as part of introducing them. Are they a raging drunk, or a sleepy one? Do they go all out or do even they drink at all? The icebreaker was like alcohol, distilling and exaggerating our characters' personalities to their very base.

It was so fun! After introductions, we had a good idea of our characters, and could go straight into the adventure proper. Whereas the tavern starter feels very played-out and insincere, the icebreaker hones in on what is really important for a first session: getting to know each other's characters and how it feels to play with them. It could also serve as a prompt for role-play if characters already know each other, like "Ziggy always blacks out and needs Hellbie to drive them home."

I wrote these icebreaker questions based on my experience. Initially they were all tavern-inspired, but I liked the idea of them being broader as well. So, maybe try d10 for tavern-specific questions and d20 for more general ones!

  1. What's your character's favorite cocktail (or other drink) and why?
  2. What does your character try to hide from others? Do others find out?
  3. How does your character act while drunk versus sober?
  4. What's the craziest thing to have happened to your character one night?
  5. Whom does your character trust to take them back home?
  6. What genre of music does your character dance to?
  7. What attracts your character? How would they like to be approached?
  8. What's your character's favorite street or tavern food?
  9. How does your character dress to impress? Whom do they want to impress?
  10. What kinds of places does your character seek out? Why?
  11. How does your character start their day? Do they like coffee or tea?
  12. What hobbies does your character have? Do they share them with others?
  13. What unsubstantiated things do your character believe? Do they want to?
  14. What does your character want, or expect, out of old age?
  15. What is your character's family like? With whom are they closest?
  16. What about your character is invisible yet conspicuous?
  17. Who was your character's childhood friend? What happened to them?
  18. Does your character like to read? If so, what?
  19. Who was your character's role model? What was good or bad?
  20. What one word describes your character's motive? Why?

I think it's fun to consider, too, that a "tavern" doesn't just have to be a literal tavern—why not a cafe, a club, a tearoom, a hookah lounge, a temple, or any other place for social gathering? I remember starting one campaign in a sort of alcoholics anonymous meeting, although I think I made it an arcanics anonymous because there was some sort of magic drug?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

-
Image
Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as ...
Read more

OSR Rules Families

-
Image
So, here’s the thing: originally I wrote this like a fucking research article with a hypothesis, a methodology, and all that stuff. I’m not even a scientific research person. That’s my partner’s job. Not mine. So, instead of walking you through every single step I took, I’m going to take the journalistic approach and start with the big picture before I zoom into it and tell you about the little details. I read, reviewed, and statistically organized 38 different rulebooks considered to be OSR or OSR-adjacent. These include four rulebooks from TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons , as well as ten rulebooks from the 2000s and 2010s. The remaining 24 rulebooks postdate the closure of G+ in early 2019. Please refer to the bibliography at the bottom of this post for more information. After having collected and organized a dataset with ~90 variables, I found the statistical similarity between each pair of rulebooks based on that data. Finally, I ran an algorithm to determine clusters of these bo...
Read more

Bite-Sized Dungeons

-
Image
Workbook Now Available On Itch! Bite-Sized Dungeons by Traverse Fantasy Edit: This whole time, I said that a first level dungeon hoard had 100 times d6 gold pieces when it actually has just 10 times d6. This means the average hoard has an XP value of 70 without gems, or ~110 with gems. By extension, the eighteen-room dungeon only has 350 XP without gems, or ~550 XP with gems. That is downright dismal and I don’t think works out with modern play sessions and party counts, so let’s pretend it said 100 times d6 anyway. I just read an article by Yora of Spriggan’s Den about extrapolating a scheme for an eighteen-room dungeon from the procedural generation rules in B/X (1981) [1]. As Yora points out, eighteen rooms is a great size for a mid-to-large dungeon or for a floor of a multi-level dungeon, and the checklist of rooms makes it easy to make sure that the final product has a variety of interesting play interactions. But, being as large as it is, it can still be a tall order on the ...
Read more