Author Topic: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books  (Read 2312 times)

Offline Theonlyspiral

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Hey All,
My group has a game starting up in January, and one of the players is planning to run a "Chi Healer"...so basically a focused practitioner with Spirit healing. Now he's kind of flaky and while he wants to play with us, doesn't want to read the books. He knows that it's a mythic realism game but that's about it. Now, if you had to do up a 1 page summary of what a character like this would know about the game world, what would be in it?

Besides the Laws of Magic and the Wardens I'm not 100% sure what needs to go in.
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Magicpockets

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2012, 08:21:33 PM »
I'd add in this:
-Magic comes from within you as a manifestation of your beliefs.
-Healing with Magic takes just as much effort as healing via mundane medicine.
-Many supernatural creatures out there. Most of them way stronger than he is. And they consider him prey.

Offline JDK002

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2012, 08:33:15 PM »
I'd add in this:
-Magic comes from within you as a manifestation of your beliefs.
-Healing with Magic takes just as much effort as healing via mundane medicine.
-Many supernatural creatures out there. Most of them way stronger than he is. And they consider him prey.

Beat me to it.  The first thing it to get him to understand how healing magic works in this game.  I could see a nightmare scenario where the player thinks he can just wave his hands around and heal the groups consequences mid combat instantly. 

You can do some really neat stuff with healing magic, but most of it seems to be pre and post combat, not during.  Make sure he understands that.  Beyond that I would just give him a basic run down of the major factions.  Vamp courts, denarians, outsiders, white council, the sidhe courts, ect.  The details can be given to him as needed.

Offline Richard_Chilton

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #3 on: December 06, 2012, 08:36:18 PM »
Here's a link to an old thread
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,22372.msg966827.html#msg966827
that has an intro to the setting and a bit about the game.

Richard

Offline Mr. Death

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #4 on: December 06, 2012, 08:49:29 PM »
A lot of it is going to be on a case by case basis, and depend on the character's relationships with the others and whatever organizations are in your game.

Aside from the broad "this is how the world works" stuff, I'd mostly wait for him to ask things like, "Do I know what a White Court Vampire is?"
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Offline blackstaff67

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #5 on: December 07, 2012, 05:40:51 AM »
Ooh ooh ooh ooh!  Let him have the Stunts he wants, but make his Lore=0 or 1 to represent his general cluelessness about the paranormal.  Or give him the Aspect: Clueless about the Paranormal and Occult.  At least he can pick up some Fate points that way...otherwise, point out to him that he just ain't gonna be the party's cleric.

Failing that, just give him a rundown on the flora/fauna that populates the local area...and you're done.
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Offline JDK002

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #6 on: December 07, 2012, 03:43:55 PM »
Another neat idea would be to tell him nothing of the canon.  Make his trouble aspect related to knowing next to nothing about the supernatural world at large.  This would suggest a person with a lot of raw talent, but also very ignorant of the going on's in your city, and allow your player to learn about the canon as his character does.

Offline Haru

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Re: In Character Knowledge for a Player who doesn't want to Read the Books
« Reply #7 on: December 07, 2012, 03:57:33 PM »
Another neat idea would be to tell him nothing of the canon.  Make his trouble aspect related to knowing next to nothing about the supernatural world at large.  This would suggest a person with a lot of raw talent, but also very ignorant of the going on's in your city, and allow your player to learn about the canon as his character does.
This, basically. Most characters can be played pretty easy, without knowing the world too well. One of my players in my RL campaign never read the books and probably never will. I created a werewolf character for him, who will slowly gain knowledge about the supernatural world, but for now he basically just knows that werewolves exist.

I could see something similar for your character. Since magic is based on your believe, you don't have to actually know about magic. There are "chi healers" in our world, too. Granted, they can't actually do anything, but if you go into the DV and someone with a little bit of latent talent learns from one of those, his own magic could be channeled through this believe system and actually acomplish things, even though he doesn't know the damndest thing about magic.
If you want to stress that aspect a bit more, make it ritual(chi healing), and have him use empathy instead of lore and performance instead of discipline, which to me seem fitting skills for chi healing. Channeling would probably be too fast for something like this. I'd imagine it to be similar to Elaine's Reiki healing spell, right?
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