I think my dog just made her saving throw the other day.
We were following a rural footpath that runs alongside a partially fenced-off field when she ran ahead to check out another walker and his dogs coming toward us. She passed me before I saw them and ignored me when I tried to call her back.
Unfortunately, the other dogs took exception to her over-familiarity and chased her into the field as a pack. When she realised that there was now a fence between us, she panicked and bolted across the field in the direction of a busy highway junction. (I knew she was fast but I'd no idea she was that fast!) The pack gave up and I ran after her, shouting her name until I was hoarse, but she was already a speck disappearing over the horizon.
Some time later, as I was puffing my way up to the junction, I received a call from an unknown number. You can probably imagine what went through my mind. The caller asked if I had a dog that matched her description and assured me that she was fine.
It was something of a miracle: she'd run zig-zag into traffic and it was only because some kind people stopped, got out of their vehicles, and corralled her off the road that she wasn't hit. They called the number on her tag and arranged for me to pick her up nearby. Needless to say, we returned home with her firmly on the lead the entire way. There may also have been an unusually large number of cuddles when we got back. All things considered, it was an almost-gentle reminder of how fragile life can be.
Little fly, thy summer's play…
In OSR-style games, character death is an ever-present possibility, even a likelihood. Does this somehow imply that life is cheap and ultimately meaningless? I think it does quite the opposite. To me, it underscores the need to exercise extreme caution in dangerous situations.In the most recent version of dB/dX, I decided to add the following paragraph to clarify the relationship between a player and his/her characters.
A player’s adventurers are effectively his/her pawns: they do whatever the player says they do without thought or (usually) hesitation. Between sessions, they live out their day-to-day lives as normal, nonplussed by the madness that impelled them to take such risks... until once more the thirst for gold overtakes them and drives them forth in search of adventure.
The idea of characters as pawns might sound a bit cynical but it allows us to sidestep a ton of issues. You don't need to think about what they individually know or how they'd act in a given set of circumstances: player agency supersedes all of that.
On the other hand, what you choose to have them do might actually say a little something about you as a person, might it not?
This quintessence of dust
Of course, these are imaginary people we're talking about. I tried to add a bit of perspective as follows.
Characters are simple beings. They’re a handful of statistics, a few meagre possessions, and a detail or two. The world is so much bigger than they are, and they know precious little about it. Whatever their background or former occupation, their existence until now has been unremarkable at best. More often than not, their lives will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
I hope this doesn't come across as glib or callous. There are all sorts of scenarios outside of adventure gaming where you might visualise terrible things happening to fictional people. If you've ever had to write a risk assessment or job hazard analysis, you've probably imagined people of all ages being hurt or killed in a variety of unpleasant ways. This isn't some sick passtime—it can actually be lifesaving!
Meat for the machine
Simply put, character death is likely to occur often in dB/dX and, although character generation is relatively simple, I felt that some sort of labour-saving device was in order. I therefore present for your entertainment a prototype character generator and auto-equipper implemented in Google Sheets. It isn't perfect—some manual adjustments may be required in some cases—but it should serve as a decent starting point. [Edit: New, "lower carbon-footprint" version available here.]
First of all, please don't request edit access. Just make a copy (under the File menu). There is an accompanying script file so you should probably examine to make sure it isn't doing anything nefarious, or else get someone you trust and who knows about such things to check it for you.
The first time you click the Generate New Party button, Google will ask for your permission to run the attached script and will then warn you that it hasn't verified the app, detailing the types of actions you'd be allowing it to perform. The only spreadsheet the script reads and modifies is the copy you made and there is exactly one external service it might use, which I'll describe in a minute. It's your call if you trust some random blogger's code, but if you're happy to take my word for it, click Advanced > "Go to dB/dX Character Generator (unsafe)" > Allow.
When the script finishes, you'll see a list of six shiny new adventurers summarised on the Overview sheet. Go to the Characters sheet to see their cards—if you print this sheet double-sided and cut them out, they should closely resemble 3x5" index cards. The Containers sheet lists the contents of their backpacks. If you're not happy with the loadout, click Re-equip Members—this also recalculates starting XP.
There are a few hidden sheets that you can modify if, for instance, you want a different set of random backgrounds. There's also a sheet of names seeded from behindthename.com. If you wish, you can obtain an API key to generate new sets of names on-the-fly—that's the extermal service I mentioned earlier. See the Overview sheet for instructions on how to do this, or you can just replace the names on the hidden sheet or even directly on the character cards themselves with whatever you prefer.
I'm hopeful that one day I'll find time to create something a bit more polished, but this will have to do for now. Enjoy!
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