The Walkabout Life Path

I've got this vision in my head of a lifepath system for this game, players basically don't have a lot of choice over their character's destiny leading up to the point where their Walkabout story begins, 

The things I'm seeing as most important about setting up a character in this way, is balancing some choice but making ti feel like the character has been shaped by outside forces before they had the chance to take destiny into their own hands. I'd also like to have the players gradually be introduced to concepts in the game as they develop their characters....starting simply, but gradually adding in a few of the more interesting elements of the system as the character grows from childhood through adolescence and into young adulthood. 

I'd expect the character development to play out in a session zero, where the players identify the elements that they'd like to see as recurring themes and ideas, and where everyone can understand how their characters fit into the larger setting of the narrative.

Most of the rest of the system is already in place, so this is just a case of tying different threads together neatly. I'm still working through this, but will hopefully have something concrete in the next week or two.

The vision basically starts with characters rolling gradually ascending dice. The first dice would be d4s, then d6s, d8s, and d10s (and possibly d12s) at the end. So I'm basically looking at a 4 stage system, probably divided into 6 year segments of the characters life. 0-6 Infancy > 7-12 Childhood > 13-18 Adolescence > 19-24 Young Adulthood. Some rare characters might begin their adventuring during adolescence, but most will start their walkabout journey as a young adult. There might be scope for characters to start their journey at a later point of their lives too (which will come with more life experience, but possibly injuries and problems that have been acquired over their lives so far).

Basic results start with the characters origins in their family and gradually expand, and they will generally fit the pattern of die results from the rest of the system. 

• 1: You learn nothing from others and have to rely on yourself.  
• 2-3: You learn cultural benefits from your family.
• 4-5: You learn cultural benefits from the other adults around you.
• 6-7: You learn benefits from the environment around you.
• 8-9: You learn benefits from a basic occupation.
• 10+: You learn the ways of the wayfarers.

So, if you're rolling a d4, you're limited to results that you learn from yourself, your family, or some of the other adults in your life. Once you start developing yourself, and move up to a d6, you increase the chance of learning from the adults around you, and also gain the opportunity to learn things from the environment. 

But we've got a multi-die system, and each result is read on a few axes. So the first die will be generated by the character's age (let's call it the age die), a second die will be generated by a character's willingness to push their own boundaries (let's call it the experience die). A second die to read and allocate means a new allocation table.

• 1: Gain a new relationship (level 2) and increase your experience die on the next roll. 
• 2-3: Gain an ability aspect and either a reserve, a relationship (+1), or an extra ability aspect.
• 4-5: Gain two common items (all cultures and occupations will have a range of typical equipment and items associated with them...I'll need to work these out.)
• 6-7: Gain an attribute level (I'm thinking that a character may start with a single attribute at a maximum score of 4 levels [d10], or two scores at *** [d8]. During the story, an attribute may be increased by one level. If a character would gain an attribute beyond this, they gain a reserve instead.)
• 8-9: Gain a the bonus associated with a progress path (this usually activates during play once a character has mastered the basics of an occupation, or has achieved acceptance in a community), they might gain a signature item with it's own bonus die instead.
• 10+: Gain a level of agency (the bonus die that impacts every roll made by a character. You may only ever start with this bonus once.)

So we've got two factors with each lifepath roll... one indicates where the character bonus comes from, and one indicates the specific type of bonus. I'm interested in adding an idea where every set of die rolls has a chance of adding a complication or problem to the character. I'm also considering the idea that each step on the lifepath journey needs a bit more depth to it, to really tell more of the story of the character in the session zero before we wear their skin in the journey through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. What prompted their learning? How did it occur? Did that learning alter them in any unexpected ways? After all, it's said that... 

“We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects.” In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply “accept” imperfection when it is revealed to us – we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.”— Ron Perlman. 

 ...and while I agree with that, because the flaws can really make a character interesting and more fun to play.It can lead to players being forced to deal with characters they struggle to empathise with. There's also a bit more to think about here, such as whether characters should begin roughly equal to one another (with something like a point value system ensuring balance between them) or we can handle variation in power levels between characters. This kind of goes back to some of the things I've discussed in various posts this year, such as cooperation and application of the Red-Amber-Green system to ensure spotlight time is evenly distributed and the story is impacted by everyone regardless of their power levels. However, experience has shown that psychologically a lot of players will feel badly-done if they are playing a character whom they feel to be objectively inferior to other characters in the group. A lot of players are going to struggle with the idea of random characters and not getting the chance to specifically play the idea they envision, so random character levels might be a bridge too far. 

I'm certainly not finished here...