Your Characters - Part I

Those of you familiar with Palladium FRPG already know that there are many types of characters (O.C.Cs) that you can play, as well as many different races. And, per player suggestion, Rifts elements will also be incorporated, so the palette of possibility is very large (although I will have to clarify how the Rifts elements will work in a later entry). I encourage diversity, so take some time to browse through the possibilities! Down at the bottom you will find some links to sites that provide things like character sheets for all OCCs, and "complete" skill lists which you might find useful for creating your character.

I do have a couple of rules regarding your characters, though. First, no one in the party can be of an evil alignment. Selfish alignments are okay, and obviously, good ones are just fine. I know, it seems like it might be a cool idea to have that one diabolical mastermind in the heart of the good guys team, but it really won't work, to start with anyway. Truth is, as I've found it, whenever you have good vs evil in the party, someone's going home in a body bag and it becomes a drag for everyone else caught in the middle.

Second, I urge you to create balanced characters that have both strengths and weaknesses. They are more fun to play, and I can tell when you cheat on your dice rolls. I am a mathematically inclined person (nut) so I've actually calculated what the average attribute scores are for most of the major races; and then I found a program that some like-minded OCD individual made that does it for me. The point is, I can tell how unlikely your character is based on their attribute scores. So, if you rolled a super-awesome character with all 16 to 18 stats, be prepared for me to be skeptical.

To help you figure out this attribute score issue, let me paint an example. If you played a human, which gets 3d6 for all 8 attributes, then the total sum of all attribute scores would be between 72 and 80 most of the time. Or if you are a percentile person, the 50th percentile, roughly speaking, is populated by people with a sum score of 76. That means that each attribute individually would be either a 9 or a 10 out of 18.

So, I am likely to believe a human character whose attributes' sum is 88-92 or less. That equals a score of 11 across the board, which is definitely an above average character. So, if you want to create a human character, you could just give yourself 88 to 92 points to spend and distribute them across the attributes however you desire. This could be very helpful if you have your heart set on a particular OCC that has heavy restrictions. If you want to play a different race and do the same thing, let me know and I'll give you the numbers. Of course, you can always do the traditional die rolls; I am really less concerned with how you get your attribute scores than the fact that you have fun creating your character and that the character has a good balance between strengths and weaknesses.

Why balance and weakness? To give you room to grow and to provide some challenge, and to force you to make tough decisions about your character and...need I go on? Starting off with a power-character isn't fun, at least not in this campaign. You will need to become that power-player through the fiery forge of the campaign.

And you might want to create two characters, just to have a back up ready to go. I'll probably say this again elsewhere, but, your first character (or second, for that matter) could quite possibly get killed. It's a dangerous world out there. The dice roll the way they will, and there are some really tough opponents out there. If there wasn't any real danger of your character getting whacked, you probably wouldn't feel the appropriate sense of fear, terror, and dread when you realize the sleeping dragon whose lair you're in isn't asleep! To soften the blow of having become a tasty snack, I allow everyone to bring a back-up character into the campaign near the same level as the one lost.

This site has a lot of interesting information, including Palladium religions and skills. The custom character sheet downloads are at the bottom.

Here you will find the official published character sheets for Palladium characters.