Modular Gaming Components 6 - Life Paths

Over the next few posts I'm going to look at a few of my old Game Mechani(sm)s of the Week and see how they might be applied into different games as modular components. 

I kind of started this with my last post about Otherkind Dice, but I'm making it a bit more formal over the next few posts. So now I'm looking at the idea of the Life Path. 

Traveller, Cyberpunk, Mekton, Mutant Chronicles, Burning Wheel, there are a few others too...

The idea of a lifepath system is to show that a character doesn't exist in isolation, they have already connected into their world they have been living and have developed as a response to the events that have happened in the world around them.

Many of the lifepath systems describe a character's life year by year, offering a key event each year that defined their life at that time. 

The thing about a lifepath systems is that it can immediately give context about the world where a series of RPG sessions will be setting their stories. 

Here's a few examples of digital versions. 

• The PBE Games site has a generic fantasy lifepath generator that night be useful for D&D games.
• RPG Aid has a page that seems to have digitised the cyberpunk lifepath system. 
• Tangent Zero has the Mekton lifepath generator which is a sci-fi version.

However, it wouldn't be hard to create a new version, or adapt one of these versions to integrate the characters more adequately into the narrator's world (or the world they've chosen).

This could be done with d10 rolls...following the cyberpunk lifepaths.

For example... 1-3 = standard lifepath stuff from the existing generator, 4-5 = lifepath events relating to the character's race, 6-7 = lifepath events relating to the character's background, 8-9 = lifepath events relating to the character's class, 10 = lifepath events unique to the setting/world. (Yes this is a lot of extra work and a lot of DMs/GMs/Narrators won't want to go to this much effort, but some really love getting into the finer details of their setting, and this is a great way of connecting characters into it)

The other way I was experimenting with lifepaths was to have characters roll different sized dice as they get older, bigger dice reflecting a wider range of influences in the world as they started to explore on their own. 1-2 = racially related  events, 3-4 = background related events, 5-6 = lifepath events from the existing generator, 7+ = class related events. In this case, a player might roll a d4 2 or 3 times for the characters childhood, a d6 for events in their early adolescence, a d8 for events in their late adolescence, and a d10 for events in their early adulthood.

For the events themselves, a list of options might only have 3-4 things on it, or it might have 10 different situations that might impact a character's life. Each offers story potential and hooks that might come into play during the story.