Re: Problems with a player's 100 words

From: Andrew Solovay <asolovay_at_...>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:04:53 -0000

wrote: >
> Octavian is a Darra Happen, humakti katchari swordsman, sometime
> leader, politician, duellist, tactician, combat analyst and judge of
> people, with a talent for savoir-faire and obfuscation. Divinely
> gifted, Octavian is empathic, charming, diplomatic, fearless,
> honey-tongued, handsome, alert and disciplined, therefore
> inspirational and persuasive. Octavian's eidetic-memory, lightning,
> reflexes, great endurance, keen senses, strong will and subtlety mark
> him as a prodigy. Octavian benefits from a symbiotic ancestral
> possession and the ancestral memories of his line. Strong,
> ambidextrous, double-jointed, agile, fast, sneaky and elusive,
> Octavian confounds enemies with feints and evasions from his lightning
> footwork, his magical longswords, gauntlets and weightless armor.

I'd give him the keywords implied--"Humakti", "Dara Happan", and "Officer" should cover it (with "officer" implying both political skills and military ones). For the rest of the list, I'd give him strong starting levels in "self-satisfied" and "full of crap". Which could actually be pretty useful, and might be fun to play... ;-)

Or if you don't want to be quite that harsh, I think you can sum up almost all that list as "charming", "agile", "strong", and "clever". So give him those four skills, aside from the keyword ones implied above. The rest of the list is used just for flavor and for fleshing-out--e.g. if he's in a situation involving diplomacy, let him use his "charming" skill for diplomacy without an improvisational modifier.

But me, I'd go with Plan A above...