Day 23`Thalaias, Worlds Without Number

 Welcome back to day 23 of the Character Creation Challenge! This time, I had a much better time with the game, thankfully! I went with Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number, the Fantasy branch of his "Without Number" pseudo-OSR series of games! I find that I enjoy these kind of OSR games much more fun and interesting than the "Mad at D&D 3e" sort of OSR. Let's not go back down that road though, shall we? As with the other games this week, this is one I've never created a character in, but I did read a good chunk of the system previously, so I already had a good handle on how it goes. It's another of those game where there's a split in the mechanics between combat and out of combat, not in a deep way like say Lancer, but in the way where fightin' is D20 based and not fightin' is 2d6 rolls, but at least in both case you add a number and try to reach or exceed a target number. Then you have saving throw where instead of getting a bonus to de D20 roll, your stat directly improve your chances of success in general rather than on the roll itself. After a few brushes with old D&Dism, I find interesting/weird that the difficulty is always determined by the victim, with the cause of the effect demanding a saving throw apparently has no relevance to how dangerous it is. The source determining the target number and the victim's skills then improving their chance of success is just more intuitive to me, but what do I know, I'm not a hot shot game designer with multiple successful kickstarters!

Art by Violencya on ych.art

Anyway, made an elf again and I won't apologize for it! They are a proud and noble race, able to serve many versatile role in a party. Not this one or yesterday's though, both of them are melee fighter with good AC. As I knew what general type of character I wanted to do, I used my usual rule with those 3d6 down the line system where I allow myself to swap one set of stats! Actually, it's been a couple of days since I made the character, so I'm not sure if I even needed to do that. Anyway, character creation starts like most OSR by rolling 3d6 down the line, because someone had the idea that bad stats=good roleplay and that's a curse that TTRPG players have had to carry ever since. As is usual, I'm not really seeing a strong logic behind the modifier that result from the stats, but it's weighted so you mostly won't get modifier unless you have really high or low roll. There's also not that AD&D weirdness of getting different modifiers to different aspect of a stat, so that's nice. We even have an array we can pick, but rolling randomly also lets us set one of the attribute to 14. I ended up rolling decently, getting a 16 and either no or just one stat under 8, I turned my Int to a 14 because a previous iteration of this character was a Fighter-Magic User in For Gold & Glory. After stats, I should normally move on to Background, but I knew I wanted to play an elf and I had to skip a few step to make it so. You see, the default assumption seems to be human only, but we do have the option to use one of our Foci to be a non-human. We also have the option to be a non-human with no actual mechanical representation, but I like when my flavors have some mechanical bite to it. I had a few options for elves, including what is basically High-Elf, Half-Elf and Wood Elf, plus the sample setting Elves who are reincarnated human or something? I picked High Elf, giving me -1 Con and +1 Dex or Int, which I put in Int. It also gives Magic and Know as trained skill and some nightvision. Nifty!

Back to the correct order, we get to pick or roll our background. I actually overlooked that there was a table to randomly decide the background, as I was mostly going down the Summary of character creation and jumped straight to my choice of Soldier. Looking at it now, there is no benefit to rolling stats like there was for the stats. Or for the next choice in our Background Pick! Choosing a background gives us one skill at level 0, Any combat skills for soldier so I chose Stab, the local armed melee combat skill. Then we can either pick a set of two skill predetermined by the game two options from the learning table of our chosen background, or the much better option to roll 3 times in the Growth and/or Learning table. I chose the latter option, getting the Exert and Notice skills, then a +2 to my physical stats! Thanks to that and being an Elf, Thalaias her got to a big 18 Dex and her Con went back to 8 after dropping to 7 from elvishness, narrowly evading taking a penalty to it. As you'll see at the end, that was a very good decision! Then it's time to pick the class out of Expert, Mage or Warrior, or Adventurer which is actually combining two of the other classes, losing out some of the specialized benefit for a broader character. You can even combine Mage with Mage, as there's several flavor of magic user that are all Mage but are really different class. I chose adventurer, becoming a partial warrior and partial mage. Rather than picking a more magic tradition, I saw something called a Duelist that seemed really cool, it's the partial class to push for a more swashbuckly, lightly-armored melee kind of fighter. We do lose out the +2 HP of the Fighter, but we gain the best To-Hit bonus out of everyone with a specific weapon. We also get to pick a special move from a list, I took a passive bonus that gives a really strong AC bonus when unarmored, especially when you rolled 18 dex!

 Onward to picking a Foci! As a Partial Warrior, we have one free one to pick from any and one that must be a Warrior Foci. Of course, our free pick is already spoken for so we can get those nice pointy ears and that tasty 18 to Dex. Curiously, despite Experts and Warriors having to pick their bonus Foci as an Expert or Warrior Foci... there's no actual list or indication, the game just tell us to basically pick something that's related to our concept for the class with GM approval! Now, I picked Close Combatant, so I don't think that's ambiguous! From it, I gain any combat skill, which I put in Stab to get a +1 to swording. Oh yeah, I should say, getting trained in a skill gives you +0 on the 2d6 roll, otherwise you get -2 on it! The max you can get as a starting character is +1. Close Combatant also lets us throw small weapons in melee with no penalty, but more interesting is the ability to ignore Shock damage from Melee even unarmored! Shock Damage is a feature that lets you deal a small amount of damage even on a miss, as long as the target AC is under a certain threshold. As you will see later on, that's absolutely something Thalaias needs to not immediately die in her first fight.

 With that done, we get one free skill to represent special interest or other background info that's not necessarily covered by your background. I almost picked Riding, but an elf gotta bow, so I took Shoot instead. Then we roll HP, everyone use D6 with a bonus or penalty for your class, Warrior and Partial Warrior should get 1d6+2, but Warrior/Duelist only get d6 instead. So I got a 3, meaning that without her foci, someone with a +1 in strength and a great hammer would just kill her even on a miss. At least, this game doesn't kill you outright when a PC goes down, it gives you 6 rounds to hopefully have someone save you. Thankfully, I got that +2 Physical attribute, otherwise that would have been 2 HP! Then we roll our starting wealth and I'm so happy that I get my melee weapon for free (from duelist) and don't need armor either, cause I didn't roll great! Enough to get a big bow, a shield and some adventuring gears at least, but not enough for a gear package! I then get to pick starting language, getting a native one and Trade Cant for free and one extra from having the Know skill at 0. With that, I jot down my various modifiers and pick three goals! There is one last step, which is making sure you have some ties with the rest of the party, but I don't have that so I leave it up in the air.

I like this game and I like this character! I hope she manages to not get killed instantly when she tries going on an adventure! She's pretty hard to hit at least and she's as good with a blade as a level 1 character can hope to be, so that should help!