A quick warning this is my first post, so bear with me....
The Setup:
My GM for the Dresdenverse game, myself, and one other player (so 2/4 players) recently got together
to work with the character creation process. The GM and I are "experienced" role-players, while the other party is fairly new to it. Also, the GM and I have read the Dresden series, while the other has not.
We decided to work with the full blown City/Character creation process. The power level the GM wanted was "Chest Deep".
Down to Business:
First we started creating a city, we're using Columbia, MO where we all either live or have lived at some time. I had already done some leg work for information about the town and it's history, which helped speed some of the process up. The book is right, having a computer readily available is incredibly beneficial during this process. We used the City Creation sheet from the site, and filled it to it's entirety.
This process took an unexpectedly long time. While picking the things we wanted to implement into the city was "easy", picking themes, aspects, and threats is where our group struggled. We wanted to make sure (like the book said) that these themes were usable in the game. All-in-all creating the city took between 2-3 hours.
Next we started the character creation process. Thankfully my GM and I had already done most of the work for my character (a WC Wizard Apprentice*, who's been Marked by an unknown (to me) entity), so we didn't have too much to do for me. The other player decided he wanted to play a Pure Mortal. The player began with the concept he wanted (a Silver-Spoon baby, who decides to get into property crime for the rush) and we as a group (though mostly he and the GM) bagan hammering out his character using the 5 Phase method (we only did up through Phase 3 due to time constraints). He seemed to really enjoy his character, and agreed he already felt more connected to this char than he had any previous chars from his limited rp experience. This process took approx 2 hours.
The Rub:
The amount of time it took to get through the City and Character creation was unexpected. The process was also a bit daunting to all of us. While the experienced rp'ers were able to get past the original difficulties and enjoy (immensely) the process, the less experienced player was nearly scared off by the task. We have some concerns of the time it would take with a full compliement of players to perform a full City/Character creation process. The least experienced player had these thoughts about the process. You need: 1) Players that WANT to participate in the process; 2) Experienced RP'ers; 3) Creative People. I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with this, but I wanted to post it for your input.
The Grand Finale:
At the end of the "session" we had a really exciting city, and characters that we were both very excited to play! We're just curious if the on-the-fly creation process creates such a full character/city to play with. Also, if anyone has any advice to speed up a full city/character creation process we would be glad to hear it! We're all very excited to get into the actual mechanics and gameplay of the system. Basically, I want to hear other peoples experiences with the process, what their concerns were, and what ways they solved them.
Thanks for reading!
*To create an apprentice feel we used the Focused Practitioner template, Bought Channeling, Ritual, Wizards Constitution, The Sight, and Soul Gaze. The idea being that a major milestone would be his jump to full wizardry, creating fun RP potential.
