Your Character's Old Job

Following up on my earlier post, here are the are some of the background occupations for adventurers I plan on using in my own upcoming Weird Adventures game. These backgrounds suggest the broad, noncombat skills character’s will have. For skill checks, I plan to use a "Target20" sort of mechanic, wherein d20 plus appropriate modifiers must be greater then or equal to “20” to succeed. Using a skill within the purview of the the background will garner an additional +1 in addition to the pertinent ability score bonus on the skill check.

All of this will require a good deal of GM discretion. I will probably allow two background occupations if a player had a real good concept. Bonuses in that context wouldn’t “stack” though, if they happened to have similar skill sets.

It should also be noted that, with a few exceptions, I view any class as able to take any background occupation (though some would be a better "fit" for one or another), though that will modify the nature of that occupation somewhat. A Tough Guy scientist is a “Two-Fist Scientist” while a Magic Man amateur detective becomes a “Occult Detective.”

Anyway, here are a few examples:

Academician [requires Int 12+]

The Ivory Halls of Academia didn’t hold enough excitement for you--or perhaps your hunger for knowledge ran to topics not considered appropriate by those in your department. When you’ve proved your theories, they’ll have to listen.

Skills: Academicians will have a primary field of study, and some knowledge of related fields. They’re probably just well-read in general.

Big Game Hunter
You’ve tracked tigers through Lemurian ruins, and bagged woolly mammoths in the snow-bound wastes of Borea, but some of the biggest, deadliest beasts can be found closer to home...
Skills: A hunter will know the habits and characteristics of animals he follows, and be able to follow their tracks and sign.

Dilettante
There’s only so many hours you can spend at the club or charity events before the ennui becomes unbearable. It’s adventure you crave! That and another glass of single malt.
Skills: Etiquette and savior faire. The dillettante (unlike the socialite) has dabbled in various subjects and has a good chance of having a superficial knowledge about an array of topics.

Gangster
There are guys who are good to have around in the event there is a need to get physical, but guys like that are apt to get other guys sore at them. And when those other type of guys get sore, morticians get busy. Sometimes, guys of the aforementioned first type maybe oughta decide a change of career is in order. You, my friend, are a guy of the first type.
Skills: Gangsters are likely to known the prominent criminals in town, and locales related to criminal activity.

What I Like

In this DIY rpg world, there are a lot of factions, cliques, theorists, declarations of movements, manifestos, categorizations. I'm not really adherent to any of these except in the loosest since of being an rpg enthusiast of a certain vintage, preferring games of a more traditional tabletop lineage (in which I would include most rpgs) rather than strictly story games, and being a member of the Hydra Co-op and enjoying the gaming material written and run by my fellow Hydra heads. I do have things that I like in games and try to produce in the games I run.

It should go without saying, but to make it clear, I don't necessarily think these things are better (though sometimes maybe I do!), they just happen to be my preference. Starting loosely with a list that gets quoted a lot in Old School and related circles that I believe was created by Scrap Princess allow, here's what I like:

1. Interact with the world. I want players to approach the world as if their characters are inhabiting it, not as a gloss over a rules set or just flavor. The world, however, isn't merely composed of (imaginary) physical objects and locations but of (imaginary) social relationships, and conventions of genre or setting.

2. There is nothing that is supposed to happen, but some outcomes are more likely given (1). The story is in the hands of the players, but the world is going to dictate some more likely outcomes of actions. To give absolute, unfettered agency is to violate the first principle, but there is always a high degree of variation within a broad outcome, and the player actions and preferences are going to determine how it all turns out.

3. The player is an actor but also a participant in a social activity. I don't mean actor in the arch sense of the stereotyped thespian behavior, but I mean that the player has the roll of portraying a character, but also in considering (in a somewhat metagame fashion) what makes sense for that character within the larger context of the "story" unfolding. (And by invoking "story" here, I don't mean in a preconceived way. I mean: given the inputs of character, setting, situation, and genre, what seems cool to the player to have happen?)   This differs from the stance of strictly playing the character, wherein the player gives no consideration to the big picture, which can lead (in my view) to a player becoming too involved in the character and viewing the character's losses or setbacks as a loss or setback for themselves. Also, "it's what my character would do" can lead to disruptive behavior at the table.

4. It's the player's job to make your character interesting and to make the game interesting for yourself and others. This follows logically, I think, from (3) and (1) and leads directly to (7) below. The GM is also a player in this regard.

5. The character sheet is the mediator between theory and result. Plans and actions should be conceived in line with (1) and a lesser extend (3), but the mechanics of the game should support the actions players are likely to engage in. The character sheet as the rules-based abstraction of the character's capabilities ought to have some role in that, otherwise why not just play pretend and dispense with it?

6. Player skill/talent is important. The way I see rpgs as "winnable" is not primarily in character survival or successfully achieving goals (though those things are far from insignificant) but rather in making the experience more fun or cooler. I like skills and related systems some old schoolers dislike, but I think good, clever roleplay and tactics--defined as ideas that are not merely sensible or logical in the abstract but are also entertaining, spur/inspire players, and show clear consideration and interaction with the sustained, consistent, imaginary world we are involved with--are crucial.

7. Sometimes your character will die, but it's seldom interesting to die pointlessly. Death can be an important possible outcome in rpgs and I don't generally favor removing it as an option (though perhaps some games make a case for this), but I don't find pointless death as a result of computer game style "gotchas" or super-swingy rolls fulfilling. It's more gamey perhaps than I typically want. Often, another sort of setback other than "start over" is a better option to me.

8. It's fun to try new things. New settings, new mechanics--all worth a go. I don't think there is a particular formula of the type of game I want to spend all my time with. To me, it would be akin to eating the same thing every day for lunch. It gets old. Sometimes that even means sampling something you already know you aren't going to like most of the time to see if you enjoy partaking of it rarely.