Character Creation: Kidworld

Sometimes, I start reading a game for this project and it's so interesting, well-written, or innovative as a game that even if it's long, I feel like I want to finish the book. This is not one of those cases.

The Game: Kidworld
The Publisher: Vajra Enterprises
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one

So, I want to say up front that one of the reasons I couldn't get into this game is because violence against children is one of those things that I generally request is not part of games I'm playing in. I respect that it's a potentially evocative source of horror and that not everyone has the same reactions as others (which is why I included monsters like the Bloodybones in Chill, even though I'd never use it in my own games), but 90% of the time it's not something I want to include in my RPGs. (I say "90%" because once in a great while I've been at tables where people are willing to treat that kind of horror respectfully and it can make for really powerful stories.)

Kidworld's premise is that a disease killed off most of the adults and struck the rest blind. Children and teens retain their sight, but lose it as they get older and go entirely blind by age 17 or so (and characters start taking sight penalties as they get older). That by itself is a pretty cool post-apoc premise, but then it starts getting a little iffy:

Not a great set of options. The other thing is that adults in the setting can temporarily regain their sight by eating children's eyes. There's a snippet of fiction in which an adult shows up to a kid enclave, convinces them he's OK, then bashes all their kids' heads in with a rock and scoops out their eyes (whether they survive the head bash or not). And like, is that supposed to emulate something that could or should happen in this game? 'Cause I want no fucking part of it. 

Anyway, I'm gonna make a character because rules are rules, but I'm not real interested in looking into this game any further. I can make an adult character or a kid, but I'm gonna make a kid because that seems much more interesting. 

So, Step One, as is often the case, is concept. Part of that is picking an age. Step Two is explicitly "Age." 

Do people not use the chargen system, or have someone who didn't write the book do so, before going to press? 

Anyway, I want to make a kid who kills adults. Fuck it, if we're going horrific, let's do that. My kiddo is aware that some adults eat the eyes of children, some of them want to enslave children, and maybe some of them just have kids' best interests at heart...but those aren't dice he's willing to roll. He's also aware that his vision is going to start fading as he gets older, and when that happens he's planning on walking into the goddamn ocean. (Would that actually happen, or would he, like many people, get more conservative - in this case meaning "willing to literally feast on the young" - as he got older?)

His name is Rollo, he's half white and half Japanese (no particular reason other than I've been playing Ghost of Tsushima). Let's move on to...

Step Two: Age. Important note: the default setting of the game is 4 years after the Plague hit. Kids start taking penalties to sight at age 11. I could cope with my homicidal li'l guy being 10, I think, which would mean he was about 1st grade or so when the Plague appeared. He has very much grown up with this as his normal, then. This means I get 3 "Cognitive Deficits" (I'll rant about that in a minute), 60 Attribute points, and that "points per Attribute" is ~6.5, and Health Attribute Points is 9. Not entirely sure what all that means, but on we go.

Step Three: Cognitive Deficits. 

Argh. There is so much wrong with this simplistic, ageist, "kids r stoopid" bullshit that I can't even begin to unravel it all. Anyway, I have to pick three of these things, so let's find the three least ridiculous ones. Nope, that didn't work, they're all awful. OK, we'll take Injuries are Deadly, Just World, and Evil Strangers.

Step Four: Attributes. I have 60 points to spend. Max is 20, minimum is one, but for some of them, I can't go higher than 10 (my age). Also, there are apparently traits later on that can alter these scores, which I really appreciate them saying up front. So let's see:

Adjustment: How well-adjusted to the fucked-up world the kiddo is. Hmm. I feel like Rollo is functional enough, but not perfectly so. I'll put 5 here for now. 

Agility: Standard attribute, I'll put 10 in. 

Awareness: Basic perception shit. Let's say 8. 

Charm: Likeability and so on. I'll put 2 in for now. 

Endurance: The usual shit. Let's say 5. 

Intelligence: Ah, another game system tries to quantify intelligence. I'd be more forgiving if they didn't just tell me that all children from ages 4 to 15 are "cognitively deficient" in some way. Anyway, I'll put 5 here. 

Speed: Run, jump, leap, 5 points. 

Strength: Muscles, punch damage, etc. 3 points. 

Willpower: Resistance to emotional manipulation. 10 because it's capped. 

Still got 7 more. I'll bump Strength to 5 and Agility to 15. 

And then I get 9 points to split up into Health attributes. 3 across the board, I don't care that much. 

Step Five: Character Class. Oh, goody. Well, there's no "killer" class, so maybe Feral? Let's check. Nope, that doesn't work, that's for kids who have basically never been part of human society. I think Radical makes the most sense. 

Dunno what a lot of that means yet, but on we go. 

Step Six: Skills. Ah, I see. I get 100 points for Skills, but the costs are set by my class. Maximum for a skill is 5. Well, let's see how best to murder! 

OMG, there are too many Skills. Well, let's see which are cheap for me as a Radical. Athletics and Naughty are relatively cheap, while Scholastics, Sensory, and (fuck) Combat are hella expensive. Dammit. Well, I'd like:

Climbing 2
Prowling 2
Archery 2
Shelter Making 1
Traditional Crafts 1
Trap Making 1
Knife Fighting 3
Read/Write 1
Knot Tying 1

That all puts me 1 point over. Maybe I can get more Skill points with Disadvantages? Yes I can, so I'll just leave myself one point over for now and fix it when I get to that step. But first:

Step Seven: Equipment. Well, not making it the last step makes it more likely I'll do it, I suppose. I have 25 cans of food (which is the currency nowadays), and 10 cans of food (CF) worth of weapons and armor. I know I want a bow, so let's see if I can do that. I can! A bow is 6CF plus 1CF per four arrows, so let's just blow the 7. Three more cans for weapons, and I want a knife. A hunting knife is 5CF, that's fine. I have 23 CF left. Three for 30 feet of climbing rope. Backpack (1CF), boltcutters (5CF), duct tape (2CF). 12 left. Anything else I really want? Not really.

Step Eight: Ads/Disads. I can take a max of 30 points of disads. I don't know if I will, but I would certainly like more Skill points. 

Well, I'll take a deadly allergy to shellfish, why not. That gives me 8 points (and I'll spend 5CF on an epi-pen, while I'm thinking about it). Enemy: Community, shit yeah. We'll say that Rollo killed a member of an eye-eater community and now they're looking for him (well, I say "looking", but y'know). That's worth 9BP.

Aw. Lonely. It's only worth 1BP, but I like it. That gives me 18. 

OK, I'm not gonna take it, but there's a "Stutterer" disad that has an accompanying skill that you can take called "Not Stuttering," and apart from the fact that it should have been called "Fluency," that's about the most realistic depiction of a stutter I've seen in an RPG, I think. So, cool, they got that right. 

Anyway, I'll take Shy (3BP) and that gives me 21. That should be good, I think?

Each BP gives me three Skill Points. I need one Skill Point to get me out of the hole, and then obviously I'll need to throw some more around. I'll put 3 BP towards Skills, which gives 9 Skill points, one to put me even, and then 8 more and I'll buy a level of Tracking. 

OK, with that in mind, I want to look over Advantages. Oh, yeah, Done-It-All. Basically Rollo doesn't risk an Adjustment check for doing shit to survive because he has already. And...no other Advantages I really want. Cool. So I have 17 more BP to spend on Attributes and Skills. They're one-for-one for Attributes, so let's check my Skills against the Attributes and see what I need to be better at. 

Well, many of my Skills rely on Intelligence, which is only 5. I'll bump it to 10. That's 12 BP left. I'll buy up Awareness to 10 (10 BP left), and then I'll dump the other 10 BP into Skills, which gives me 30 Skill points. I'll spent 15 to buy Archery up to 3, and I'll bump Climbing to 3, Prowling to 4, and buy two levels in Running.

Oof, that's enough of this. Rollo is only 10, but knows that within the next couple of years his vision is going to start to go. He plans on keeping other kids safe from adults as long as possible, and he'd really like to find a better bow in order to make that happen. His inclination in a normal world might be to be a little more bookish, or at least more intellectually curious, but in this awful world, all he knows is that some adults murder kids for their eyes, but an arrow in the throat takes care of that.