Several players and I are working to get another session of Yeld scheduled. In the meantime, I thought i would post character stats and descriptions to give you a sense of what The Magical Land of Yeld is all about. Several of the players compared character creation to "Best Friends," where characters stats are based on how much everyone else at the table hates you.
With Yeld, all of the players take on the rolls of children between the ages of 5-12. You roll two 6-sided dice to determine your starting age, create a name, decide if you are a boy or girl, and then everyone else at the table decides what kind of Friend you are. These can range from Big Brother to Brat to Know-it-All to Princess (which can be a boy). Some have restrictions based on age or whether you are a boy or girl. All of them come with Special Dice, which are extra abilities, and bonuses to your Core Dice, your basic stats.
7-year-old girl
Type of Friend: Brat
Core Dice
Strong: 1
Smart: 1
Tough: 3
Brave: 1
Special Dice
Break: 2
Fight Dirty: 1
Davey
9-year-old boy
Type of Friend: Princess
Core Dice
Strong: 1
Smart: 3
Tough: 1
Brave: 1
Special Dice
First Aid: 1
Sew: 1
Girl Stuff: 1
Mac McCreedy
10-year-old boy
Type of Friend: Bully
Core Dice
Strong: 3
Smart: 1
Tough: 1
Brave: 1
Special Dice
Trip: 1
Bullseye: 2
Chase
8-year-old boy
Type of Friend: Liar
Core Dice
Strong: 1
Smart: 2
Tough: 1
Brave: 2
Special Dice
Liar: 2
Letter Writing: 1
In the Yeld campaign you don't get a Heroic Job until a couple of sessions in. However, we all looked through the various jobs to get an idea of what we thought we might want to pursue with our characters. Several of the jobs lent themselves really well to our characters and concepts.
For Violet, the Soul Thief seems like a good choice, mostly because the player loves thieves and darker characters, and the Soul Thief strikes a lot of chords with her. A bratty Soul Thief capable of destroying your armor and wearing down your strength strikes me as a terrible foe indeed.
For Davey, the Shepard is a likely job, because it is a solid class that provides a lot of support to other characters, such as providing first aid and repairing armor (sew).
For Mac, the Oath Breaker is a natural fit, because it prizes strength and is a defiant role, perfect for the group's headstrong Bully. Plus it gives him lots of reasons to hit things.
For Chase, my character, I think I will go with the Freelancer, a nice cross between a jack-of-all trades and a scout.
These are just a couple of the possible jobs, and things might change by the time we get there, but these were the ones that jumped out at us.
We've got a couple other players who plan to catch games when they can, and there are eight basic Friends types, so we already have been talking about possibilities for their characters. i really want to have one of the characters be 12 so we can deal with the storyline of one of the kids turning 13 while in Yeld (which has dangerous ramifications for the rest of the group and is a very cool story device, in my opinion).
It seems like for the first few sessions, I will be the game master. One of the ideas of the game is to rotate who is GM to give everyone the chance to come up with a session idea and influence the course of the story, but my players really want to be players at this point. Once they are more familiar with the rules and gameplay, I'm sure they are going to want to step up and take the GM's hat for a session or two, but until then I will fill the role and keep Chase mostly in the background.
I think I've come up with the first adventure, or at least the story hook/title: "Goblins in the Stacks." It will be set in a comic book shop in the Mall of America.
ME
Page Summary
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chasethestars
Comments
I figure by the end of the campaign, when you are ready to confront the main bad guy (you work your way through his seven minions, like boss fights in video games) I have a feeling the characters will have much larger dice pools and lists of Special Dice abilities.
Personally, I tend to like my games more simple and narrative based anyway, so this is a nice level for me.
ME
One of the ways to avoid the early party wipe with non heroic friends who have only 1 Tough die is to have a lot ofnon-lethal adventure. Adventures where the point isn't so much a fight, but other things. Finding a lost pet, exploring some ruins, digging up a treasure, learning to sword fight. These are fun things that totally won't be sending you to the ghost world every time you fail! I'm working on expanding the text to make they way you go about these adventures more evident.
I hear what you are saying about the players wanting to be players. But don't let them get away with it for too long! Do a few games as GM, then say "okay, so who's turn is it next week". Don't let them argue. By that time at least one of them should have some cool ideas for a game. And once they try it, they'll probably like it enough to want to do it again.
The tough thing... yeah, I was looking at that too. I really wanted my character to rock at Brave rolls, because I liked the idea of him fighting critters as a ghost (and by critters I mean ghost critters. I love the idea of killing a monster only to have its ghost attack the ghost of one of your Friends. That absolutely rocks).
And I think we are going to try to come up with some non-combat oriented adventures, where smarts and brave might be more important than tough and strong (but we are new to the game and naive like that :)
One thing I would mention is having more clearly defined outcomes for Friends or monsters who suffer damage to other stats. We have several characters who can attack things other than Tough, but not really sure how that actually will affect critters in fights.
I think after a session or two they will start coming up with their own ideas and wanting to GM.
I'm working on rules and guide lines for using this kind of stuff in non-combat conflicts as well. That's coming soon.
While you always sent people on missions on FFT(A), you didn't actually play them out, only the combats. Hm.