Yesterday I spent some more time trying to plan out my RPG for my Spanish History and Culture class this coming semester. I want to focus at least the first few weeks of class to having students research their characters, and I want their characters to be unique and believable.
I spent some time working in my favorite mind mapping app, MindNode Pro, and I was able to come up with the following system for setting out a character profile.
My biggest question right now has to do with gender and class. I have taken a basic D&D list of classes and modified it a bit so that it will favor the historical nature of our game. These are my current classes:
- Warrior
- Merchant
- Rogue
- Cleric
- Healer
- Hunter
I want to be open to the idea that there have been women of each of these classes in each of my time periods, but I don’t want to create a false sense of gender equality where there clearly was not. I’ll have to think about this some more.
But for now, with a simple six-sided dice, I can have students roll and come up with some interesting character profiles. For example, I rolled for six characters yesterday and I came up with this:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Birth Year | 1600 | 1600 | 1912 | 1474 | 1600 | 558 |
| Race | Basque | Castilian | Catalan | Jew | Jew | Visigoth |
| Religion | Catholic | Catholic | Atheist | Jew | Jew | Arian |
| Religion Modifier | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 6 |
| Gender | M | F | M | F | F | F |
| Class | Warrior | Rogue | Cleric | Healer | Warrior | Warrior |
The religion modifier tells the level of faith or commitment to one’s religious system. This will be used to calculate their ability to use their faith to act in the game. A religion modifier of 1 would mean that the character has little faith in their religion, a modifier of 6 would mean that they have the highest level of faith in their religion. I plan on having students be able to use religion in much the same way that it is used in D&D, but I want students to do the research and design how that will work.
Finally, yesterday I spent some time playing World of Warcraft, and I really enjoyed it. My character is a Panda, so I’m in the Mists of Pandaria. I love how clear each mission is, and I love watching my character develop over time. I want to mirror both of those things from the first day of class. I think that will be very important.
My WoW character Tunlang