Character Creation 71: The Laundry

[digitalraven]

The Game: The Laundry
The Publisher: Cubicle 7
Degree of Familiarity: Shitloads with the setting, just enough with the system to know I hate it.
Books Required: Just the corebook.

The Laundry RPG is based on the Laundry novels of Charlie Stross, who has successfully transformed his existence as a standard nerd into a series of fucking ace spy novels with a hit of cosmic horror a la Cthulhu mixed in. I love the books; each one’s tailored as an homage to a specific kind of spy story with integral gribblies, so you’d expect this game to be right up my street.

Unfortunately, the proximity to Cthulhu causes sanity to go right out of the window. That’s the only excuse I can think of for games published this year to use BRP, a horrible outdated mess of a system that causes me to break out in even more swearing than usual.

Fortunately, the book’s got enough meat to it that I can use it without the system, and the magic system is easily removed from the horrors of the core system to be portable with the setting. So it’s still a really good book.

Those of you who remember our previous encounters with BRP-based games will notice a lot of foul language but not much by way of coherent criticism. I’d like to correct that, however I’d still like to do so in a way that I find entertaining. I’m explicitly not bagging on the people who write games that use BRP, only the core system and the people who designed that.

Random stats: I’m sorry, but if you’re going to do random character generation, look at the way the One Roll Engine does it, where every possible roll of every die has an equal, set value so characters made by rolling the same number of dice are equally as powerful. This isn’t the 70s any more, even D&D has moved away from random generation. Yet BRP steadfastly refuses to let me create the character I want, instead shoehorning me based on a handful of six-siders.

Random stats with different means for generating each: Of the eight stats, BRP uses three methods for generating them. Some are straight 3d6, some are 2d6 +6, and some are 3d6 +3. So the stats, which are supposedly the core of the character, don’t have the same distributions as one another. This really annoys me, because if you’re going to have stats the least you can do is make the same scale apply to each. If the range is 3-18, then someone with INT 15 should be more intelligent than someone with INT 10 to the same degree that someone with STR 15 is stronger than someone with STR 10. But the different generation methods means that each stat has its own base and is even more meaningless a number.

Stats that don’t do anything: The eight (ish, depending on version) stats don’t actually have that much impact in play, beyond feeding in to some starting values. Stats do apply to some nebulous “Characteristic Rolls”, but they’re all based on multiplying the stat by five. So why not skip that and have the stats range from 0-100 to begin with? It’s the same problem as D&D faced when it added a skill system—the temptation’s there to make everything a skill, so there’s no real sense of when to use one of the “characteristic rolls”, and while the books have some explanation the sections are always contradictory.

Percentile skills: Percentile skills get rolled with percentile dice. This gets you a flat probability curve. Adherents claim that this is somehow “better” than the flat probability curve found in d20, because it’s finer-grained. Sane people realise that just means the book-keeping’s worse. Plus, it attracts a particular type of player, who desperately has to know precisely how likely it is that his character will succeed, and if he can’t work it out then he won’t play. Dice pools are anathema to this kind of player, because they can’t work out what precise percentage chance they have of kicking the guy with the shotgun in the junk before he uses the deadly weapon in his hands to give them a buckshot tracheotomy, despite the chances being simply “Nae chance, sunbeam.” I design a lot of games that use dice pools, because fuck that guy.

Table Lookups: Unknown Armies demonstrated a brilliant twist on the percentile system that nobody fucking noticed. When you roll the dice, higher is better as long as it’s under your skill. This means that for most instances where percentile games use a degree of success, you don’t need to stop in the middle of the roll to perform a meaningless subtraction. Laundry’s iteration of BRP doesn’t have direct degrees of success, but it does have special success at 1/5th of the skill rating. Which most people will only figure out thanks to the attached table. So each roll requires a table lookup to see if it’s a special success, or a fumble (for which no formula is given). Table-lookups defeat the supposed point of using a roll-under system (speed) by adding a second step. And before you say it’s quick, how many of the non-maths nerds reading this would know what they had to roll for a special success with a skill of 57%?

Sanity Points: Flavourless mental-health hit points that do nothing to reflect the specific sanity-troubling situations that might come up in the game. Not to harp on or anything, but Unknown Armies beats BRP into a cocked hat with the use of madness metres, with specific consequences for becoming hardened to things as well as to going loco, and a reasoned means of restoring sanity by removing both kinds of notches, because surviving too much weird shit makes you just as mental as someone who hears the printer talking to him.

Smart people will notice that’s the third time I’ve pointed to something that Greg Stolze had a hand in designing that is objectively better than BRP’s way of doing things. This is because Greg Stolze can game-design his way out of a wet paper bag, and he works with a lot of very smart people who can do likewise.

Right. Having scientifically proven that the system used in this game is awful, I suppose I’d better make a character.

Step One: Identity
Choose a name and gender. Which is nice, but I don’t know anything about who I’m making until the next stages when I roll the damn dice. Err. Terry Boyd. He’s a bloke.

Step Two: Characteristics
Str, Con, Dex, Pow, and Cha are all straight 3d6 rolls. Save me, random.org! 12, 13, 8, 16, 12. So Terry’s in decent shape, very strong of will, but slow-moving, possibly because of an old wound.

Int and Siz are 2d6 + 6. 5 and 7 make 11 and 13 respectively. Not too bright, probably military or police in background and saw something that he shouldn’t.

Edu is literally your years in education, and is 3d6+3. 15. So he learned shit, got through an HND or equivalent, and out into the working world.

Y’know what would have been nice? To decide that for myself. Fucking random chargen. Oh, if I don’t like it, I can distribute up to 3 points. Whoop-de-doo. Or I can scrap it and roll a new set. Or I can find a game that is actually fun.

Step Three: Age
Starting age is 17 + 2d6, or EDU + 5, whichever is higher. The dice tell me that Terry is 23. I don’t believe them. I see him as being a lot older, creeping up on retirement age, but still very dangerous. I crank him up to 63, adding 40 years to the base. That increases EDU by 4, thanks to the joys of the School of Hard Knocks. At 50 and 60, I have to subtract one from one of Str, Dex, Con, or Cha. I’ll lose one point from Dex, and one from Cha.

Step Four: Characteristic Rolls and Base Skills
This is a basic bit of maths, turning the dice-generated numbers into things that might one day have an impact on play, I guess, maybe. Every stat gets multiplied by 5 except Size. Also, the Dodge skill starts at Dex x 2, and Own Language is Edu x 5.

Step Five: Derived Characteristics
Oooh, more maths. Move is 10 for all humans, Damage Bonus is from a lookup table. How modern. Damage bonus is +1d4 for a combined Str + Siz of 25. Sanity is Pow x 5 (or exactly the same as the Luck thing we worked out in the last step, but let’s not remember that we did that). HP is the mean of Con + Siz, rounded up, or 13. Major wound threshold is half hit points, rounded up. Experience Bonus is half Int.

Step Six: Personality Type
I’ve half a mind just to choose “nutter” and be done with it, but Terry doesn’t sound like a nutter. He feels more like a Leader. Which gives me 20 points towards a bunch of skills. I choose Firearm (Pistol) for the Combat skill, Espionage for the Knowledge, and Russian for my other Language.

Step Seven: Profession and Skills
Right. Now, we pick a Profession, and distribute Edu x20 (380) skill points among that Profession’s skills. I’m going to go for Spy. Terence (he hates “Terry”) was an old hand in the Dustbin, until something untoward drew the attention of Things that Lurk on Mahogany Row. There’s a lot of skills listed, but it’s mostly in the “three of the following” list.

I start with Dodge, Fast Talk, Hide, Research, Spot, Stealth, and add in Knowledge (Espionage), Knowledge(Politics) and Tech Use (Surveillance). Since starting skills can’t go above 75, I dump 30 points into each Skill to start, and have 110 points left. Drop 30 into Stealth, 20 into Spot, 20 into Tech Use, 20 into Fast Talk, 10 into Politics, and a further 20 into Espionage.

I also note the Wealth Level as Average.

Step Eight: Assignment and Training
Terence is assigned to the Counter-Subversion Unit. As such, he’s got an extra ten points in Insight, Knowledge (Espionage), Knowledge (Politics), Research, and Tech Use (Surveillance).

The final training course includes increasing a host of skills by 5. I include them on the sheet below.

Step Nine: Possessions
Terence owns a number of suits in a range of colours from charcoal grey to black, and shirts that range from white to, well, white. He’s also got a disturbing number of ties. His one concession to his new, more relaxed situation is that he will often not wear a tie. He normally carries around fifty quid in cash, and a high-end smartphone (not loaded with OFCUT, he wouldn’t know what to do with it). He’s also got a personal ward and his warrant card. When on duty, he carries a Glock-17 in a shoulder holster.

He carries a poker chip from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the only casino to ever throw him out, in his breast pocket. In a drawer, as a reminder of why he doesn’t wear a noose by habit, is his old school tie. It’s not the sort of old school tie that opens doors, in fact, it probably closes them. But it does remind him of what he’s spent a hell of a lot of time getting away from. His vice has always been poker; he’s a known face at the Vic (the home of British poker in London), and his office computer has a setup for playing his chosen poker league. He’s never played on duty, of course.

Step Ten: Personalising your Character
If anything, Terence should be played by Trevor Eve. His hair and short beard are both white, and have been for a while, and he walks with a bit of a limp. Anyone who calls him on it gets shouted down—and he can really shout. He was caned at school, and one particularly harsh strike broke his right leg. The bone set badly, and he’s not walked properly ever since. He walks with a cane, because it makes him seem more harmless.

He was smart enough to go to a grammar school in the arse-end of nowhere, and jumped at the chance when a recruiter asked him to join what would come to be MI5. He infiltrated groups thought to have links with the Soviet Union, and was damn good at it—gathering a lot of information that closed some security leaks. Occasionally, his superiors told him he was paranoid. Far more often, he turned out to be right. He could talk the necessary talk, and when that didn’t work, he could bullshit with the best. But with the cold war winding down in the 1990s, he had nothing left. Already in his 50s and with no real marketable skills for the civilian job market, the Laundry offered him a job in counter-subversion—watching the Laundry to ferret out moles. It’s taken him this long to get bored, and that’s why he signed up for field duty.

Old spies don’t die, they just get filed under a higher clearance.

Terence Boyd

STR	12	CON	13	SIZ	13	INT	11
POW	16	DEX	7	CHA	11	EDU	19

Effort	60	Endure	65	DB	+1d4	Idea	55
Luck	80	Agility	35	Inf.	55	Know	95

San 80
HP 13, Major Wound 7
Experience Bonus 6
Weapons: Brawl 25%, Dodge 44%, Firearm (Pistol) 60%
Skills: Appraise 35%, Bargain 25%, Bureaucracy 10%, Command 25%, Computer Use (Gaming) 10%, Etiquette 25%, Fast Talk 75%, Fine Manipulation 10%, Hide 40%, Insight 35%, Knowledge (Accounting) 15%, Knowledge (Espionage) 85%, Knowledge (Law) 10%, Knowledge (Occult) 10%, Knowledge (Politics) 60% Language (Russian) 20%, Language (Own) 115%, Perform 25%, Persuade 35%, Research 65%, Sense 30%, Spot 80%, Stealth 70%, Tech Use (Surveillance) 65%
Wealth Level: Average

Comments

[nelc]

BRP's a bit of an old dinosaur, and it shows in its design-DNA. And it was never as popular as D&D, so there was never much pressure on it to be streamlined. So it has random char-gen because OD&D had random char-gen. Point systems take a lot of work to develop and debug, and there's always somebody complaining about point balance.

I gave up on D&D in the late '70s because of random char-gen, amongst other things. But there is this about it, it does spur creativity. And I'm an old man, my imagination needs geeing up occasionally.

For instance, I recently played in an on-line game of The Laundry. I'd made a casual remark before char-gen that I was going to play a buddhist nun. I was going to go with the concept, but when I rolled up the basic stats, she wasn't what I'd had in mind at all.

But I thought about it, and asked myself what kind of person would have these characteristics, and... came up with Tomoe Gozen, a much more interesting character than I'd first envisioned.

But you're right, BRP really should have an alternative point-buy system in this day and age.