Forum

Now that the game has been out there for a while I am wondering how people are liking the lifepath system. I have played the game for a bit. my character used one of the archetypes, but others group used the life path. I will say the life path character had a lot more advancements (skills and attributes) then archetype. I have also been watching the forms for information, there was a post where they generated 1000 life path characters and it seemed like the variations could be extreme. The extreme variations being things like, xp differences of 255 xp (with an average of 3 xp per session that is 85 sessions) and a higher average age of 33.

Post with statistics
viewtopic.php?f=127&t=8916&hilit=life+path&start=10

Just wondering peoples thoughts and if they took any steps to deal with it. One thing I was thinking was a team role to determine the start of the war, so everyone gets the same number of terms but that seems to stop the variation of ages.

Or does it not matter? Maybe I am over thinking it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I let my players roll the "lose an attribute" and "start war" dice together and let them choose which one they wanted to go with if either failed. I don't like the idea of forcing my players play a character they don't like, so I mostly let them choose specialities etc. where it would normally say "roll for". Easier to give them some flexibility during the creation than let them get whatever and then have them re-roll another character because the first one was utter crap. Brings it a bit closer to a point buy system. Not that I don't like the lifepath system, but yeah you might have to bend some rules in order to get the group have comparable characters instead of someone playing a demigod and another a disabled liability.

I like your idea of just rolling a single d8 for both aging and if war breaks out and letting them pick. I might use that for my players.

Part of the whole allure of Twilight 2000's life path (all versions), for me, is the randomness of it. You have plans for your character but then the war breaks out to derail them. I also absolutely love how different the characters are after going through life path. Having owned and played all versions of Twilight 2000, I believe that Free League did an outstanding job of striking a balance in how the life path system works. It may feel "off" to those that played and used the second edition system or might feel extremely unbalanced to someone that has used a point system. But to me, I feel it's a good system and the chance of reducing a stat or the war starting randomly is core to the Twilight 2000 system character generation. I have enjoyed how players have come up with reasons for their characters reduction in a characteristic; my guy was injured doing X, I stopped jogging every day because of the promotions, I stopped hitting the books cause of the job transfer, etc.

Of course all of this is just my opinion. So far I have been lucky and the players in my games have enjoyed role playing whatever they created through the life path system.

So to answer your question, I don't make any modifications and actually require players to create using life path.

But in the end, it's your game, run it how you want.

If a player rolls up their character and doesn't like it, maybe just allow a redo to scrap it and start again but they have to keep the second one even if it's worse.

I like your idea of just rolling a single d8 for both aging and if war breaks out and letting them pick. I might use that for my players.

Not a single d8, just the two of them together.

If a player rolls up their character and doesn't like it, maybe just allow a redo to scrap it and start again but they have to keep the second one even if it's worse.

That seems like a lot of wasted time to me. Of course you can allow for this if this fits you and your players, but I prefer going through the process once with more choice rather than re-rolling characters.