As seen on http://www.fudgefactor.org.

When I'm baking up a homemade batch of Fudge, I'm always tempted to tinker with the recipe a little, to find that something extra that can take it from being Good Fudge to Great or even Superb -- to add a little richness to the mix, as it were.

Metaphors aside, I've often struggled with a balance between the structured and the conceptual, particularly with character generation. The subjective character generation method is nice to a point, but ultimately I find I prefer going objective, and letting my players do a lot of the driving there. I'm also interested in providing the players a strong sense of connection and ownership with the campaign setting, a sense of their place in the world, and an idea of how they have come to know one another prior to game start. For that, I've turned to the game world's history to help me out.

By making use of a game world's timeline, splitting that timeline into "phases", and then allowing players to perform only a fraction of the total character generation process in each phase, I've found that the richness and involvement of the characters with each other and the game world is about right. And as a pleasant side-effect, it helps to model age and experience too, while still allowing for characters that are "balanced", in the points.

Come Together

Before we get into the particulars, I want to take a moment to promote the tried and true practice of a character generation session. Get all of your players together, have them all build their characters at the same time.

Since you're going to be doing this in a step by step "phased" approach, the players will be building their characters' histories together in increments, and will get a kind of "fast time" view of their relationships over the years.

When we did this for my Fudge Amber game, the results were staggeringly effective; there was a kind of three-dimensionality and involvement in the characters' relationships even before the game itself actually started, and, to boot, it made sure that people weren't stepping on each others' toes conceptually.

This kind of session is a win, and it's practically a necessity when going for a timelined character generation approach.

Drawing the Line

Deciding on your timeline -- at least as it's relevant to the character generation process -- means that you must at least decide how old you'd like your characters to be. This doesn't necessarily mean your characters will start character generation in the crib, though you can do that if you'd like (as I did with my Fudge Amber game).

Let's suppose a game that's set just after a group of kids have gone through high-school and college, and at game start will be heading out into the "real world", only to discover there are darker powers afoot behind the shadows. Shades of Buffy and Cthulhu, if you like.

This initial pitch suggests that your character generation timeline should cover at least the high school and college years. If you're talking the real world for this timeline, you'll have some specific dates to tie to those years, and some potentially formative events that occurred during that time. (Not that you have to use them; if these kids encountered the supernatural prior to the start of the game, it'd make sense to have those events in the timeline as well).

Once you've got an idea of your timeline, you're ready to divide it up into phases.

Going Through a Phase

In order to decide exactly how to divide your timeline into phases, you need to understand how many phases you want your characters to go through. In order to decide that, you need to set a few "configuration options" for your phase actions.

The idea for a phase is that players decide what their "focus" was for that phase -- either focused around a key event or activity, or the pursuit of a particular goal.

Each character gets a certain number of skill levels for each phase -- that's your first of those options -- and can spend those levels only on skills which naturally follow from their chosen focus. As the GM, you arbitrate what skills are outside of the scope of a given focus.

Next, you should decide if you want any kind of restrictions on how far someone can go with their expenditures in a phase.

For simplicity, I've decided to describe this for skills, though you can work Gifts, Flaws, Attributes, or Aspects into such a system if you wish it. In my tabletop game, I let players either take a level of an Aspect or three skill levels per phase. You could pursue a similar either-or method, an "all things in parallel" method (e.g., every other phase, get an attribute level, with skills proceeding normally), or a mixed method (e.g., you can have one aspect level and one skill level, or three skill levels, per phase).

Getting in Shape

I like to force players to have their skill tree fit a particular "shape" at the end of each phase. There are two (or three) shapes I have in mind:

• Column -- At the end of each phase, each skill of a given level must be "supported" by at least one other skill of one level lower, down to the "default" level for skills (usually Poor). For example, if you had one Great, you'd have to have at least one Good, one Fair, and one Mediocre. This tends to allow people to be exceptional in a few things, while avoiding the "Four Superbs, and the rest are Poor" syndrome; I find it fits cinematic, heroic characters well.

• Pyramid -- This is a bottom-heavy version of the Column shape, and well suited for creating characters that have a more "realistic"-style skill distribution. Mandatory pyramids mean that the number of skills of a given level must be supported by the same number of skills, plus one, of one level lower. For example, if you had one Great, you'd have to have at least two Good, three Fair, and four Mediocres.

• No Shape -- If you don't particularly care for picking a shape, then pick no shape; then, the players can max out a particular skill with no "support" from other skills. This tends to get you characters with Superbs and then a precipitous drop down to their other skills, which can come across as unrealistic or at least distasteful, but might suit you all the same.

Keep in mind, since characters have to fit the "shape" at the end of each phase, what shape you decide on (and what the default skill level is) greatly determines how skilled your characters can become in a single given skill.

For our example, I'll decide on three skill levels per phase. Suppose someone wanted to play a character that was a track athlete in high school. On the "column" shape, they might start out like this, getting to Good in two phases:

• Phase 1: Running - Fair (2 levels), Weightlifting - Mediocre (1).

• Phase 2: Running - Good (+1 level), Weightlifting - Fair (+1), Swimming - Mediocre (+1).

That's a valid column. However, it's not a valid pyramid -- that Fair would have to be supported by two Mediocres. If they wanted a Fair in Running when a "pyramid" shape was called for, it would take two phases:

• Phase 1: Running, Weightlifting, Swimming - Mediocre (1 level each, 3).

• Phase 2: Running - Fair (+1 level), Football, Basketball - Mediocre (1 each, 2), Weightlifting, Swimming - Mediocre (+0). He can't take two skills at Fair this phase, because that would result in two Fair, two Mediocre, which isn't a pyramid. Time to branch out as an athlete.

• Phase 3: Running - Fair (+0 level), Football, Swimming, Basketball, Weightlifting - Mediocre (+0); Biology, Mathematics, Spanish - Mediocre (1 each, 3). He couldn't go up to Good yet, because promoting two other skills to Fair left him only two Mediocres. Time to study.

• Phase 4: Running - Good (+1 level), Football, Weightlifting - Fair (+1 each, +2), Swimming, Basketball, Biology, Mathematics, Spanish - Mediocre (+0). Finally, there's enough skill-tree structure to "support" getting Good at running. Guess all that time as a member of the Football team finally paid off!

The differences in the shapes should be very clear. Pyramid style makes it very difficult to "spike" your skills, creating broad and somewhat diverse skill trees.

Column style lets you spike your skills, but it has breakpoints too -- just at further on up: If our guy wanted to be a Great runner, in column style with three points per phase, he'd need three more phases (he'd need to get another trio of skills at Good, Fair, Mediocre -- two phases -- before he could promote his first Good to Great on the next phase). Broad skill trees are still possible, but it's possible to "go narrow" if so desired, without spiraling up to Superb inside of two phases (which you'd get with no shape).

Time Slice

After you've decided on how many skill levels characters get in a phase, and what shape their tree has to fit each phase (and, implicitly, the starting zero-cost level for any skill, and the breadth or specificity of your skills), you can start to have an idea of where you want your characters to max out skillwise, and how many skills you'd like them to have. See the above examples to get an idea.

Keep in mind, a phase is a period of time in which a character can develop. Each phase doesn't have to be identical in length. If you were doing a game based on Glen Cook's Black Company series, you might divide your phases up into military campaigns from the Company's past; if you were doing a game based on Highlander, they might be decades or centuries.

In my example game, school is an important, central environment to the characters' pasts. Using school as a mechanism for defining the phases makes good sense, here. I want a sense of things having happened back earlier than high school, though, but at the same time, I don't want pre-high school stuff to dominate.

I've decided on three skill levels per phase, and a pyramid shape, so I know that it takes four phases to get to a Good. I want them to have a shot at getting a Great (four levels above baseline Poor), which takes at minimum eight phases with the pyramid shape. I want to give them a little extra play, though, so I'll set the number of phases at ten. Since pre-highschool is less important to me than highschool on up, I divide the phases up this way:

Phase One	Grade School (up to Grade 5) - 1986-1990
Phase Two	Middle School (Grades 6-8) - 1991-1993
Phase Three	High School: Freshman Year - 1994
Phase Four	High School: Sophomore Year - 1995
Phase Five	High School: Junior Year - 1996
Phase Six	High School: Senior Year - 1997
Phase Seven	College: Freshman Year - 1998
Phase Eight	College: Sophomore Year - 1999
Phase Nine	College: Junior Year - 2000
Phase Ten	College: Senior Year - 2001

Once I have this outline, I can start tying the events of the timeline to the phases. This gives the players an idea of what influences their characters came across as they met in grade school and grew up through the years together.

And that's about it for the "basic" timeline generation system. This being Fudge, however, there's plenty more to go.

Playing the Kid Brother

So far my example has supposed a set of kids born around the same time, going to school in the same grades at the same time, and so on. But timeline-based generation can work for characters that enter into the picture at different starting points, too.

This time we'll suppose a military-themed game, centered on a mercenary company that picks up new members with some or no combat experience at various points along the timeline. In this case, you've got people who are coming in with different levels of experience. You already know you want a six-phase setup, one phase for each major campaign in the Company's past, with the skills set at a column shape and two levels per phase (you've got very broad skills in this setup).

The guy who's playing the Captain joined up at the beginning; the Lieutenant, in phase two; the Sarge, phase three. And your "specialists" came in mean and green at phase four.

This presents an interesting dilemma if you want "balanced-in-the-points" characters, since the Sarge, for example, is only going to be "active" in four of your six phases. The other issue is with creating a sense that the Captain has seen more, done more, and is more experienced and rooted in the world than the greener recruits for the Company. I'll get to that second issue in a bit; the first issue is all about potential.

Fulfilling Your Potential

Whenever a character is unavailable to participate in a phase (due to not being born, or not having joined up yet, what have you), that character accumulates a point of Potential for that phase. Once they become available to participate in the character generation phases, they can start cashing in their potential to play catch-up.

Characters who are built using potential rather than "experience" (a skill-allocating phase) are your prodigies, your wunderkind, your "natural talents" who came along later than the others but dove right in and got up to speed.

On a given experience phase, the player may cash in one or more of their points of potential to get an additional allocation of skill levels equal to what you get for one phase, per point cashed in.

If you're using a skill tree shape, then this influx of extra skill levels has an interesting effect on things -- namely, you can cross some of those hurdles more rapidly because you can outright buy higher level skills without having to pass through multiple phases of fitting the tree-shape.

Let's compare the Captain and the Sarge.

Captain

• Phase 1: Tactics - Mediocre (1 level), Hand-to-Hand - Mediocre (1)
• Phase 2: Hand-to-Hand - Fair (+1 level), Artillery - Mediocre (1), Tactics - Mediocre (+0).
• Phase 3: Tactics - Good (+2 levels), Hand-to-Hand - Fair (0), Artillery - Fair(0)

Sarge

• Phase 1: Not joined up: 1 point of potential accumulated.
• Phase 2: Not joined up: 2 total points of potential accumulated.
• Phase 3: Cash in the potential. 4 skill levels can be allocated. Tactics - Good (3 levels), Hand-to-Hand - Fair (2), Artillery - Mediocre (1).

In two phases, the Sarge has managed to grab the same skill profile as the Captain has in three, despite having seen less duty. He was also able to buy a Good skill outright in a single phase, something a person without potential can't do when you only get two skill levels per phase.

But wait -- assuming that the Sarge is allowed to buy the same skill profile as the Captain, how do you really differentiate the two characters?

Something on the Side

The answer to the differentiation problem is in providing side effects on a phase-by-phase basis. These side-effects can be gifts, attributes, aspects, flaws, what-have-you, but the upshot of it is, characters who have more "experience" phases versus characters built on potential will have more of these side-effects attached to them. They're the benefits of experience and the weight of age. The best side-effects are double-edged in some fashion or another.

In our military example, we might have an attribute called "Rank". Each experience phase that you have gives you a new level in that rank, starting at Terrible (Private) and in six phases potentially hitting Great (Captain). The GM uses this attribute to determine who has to follow whose orders, influence and respect you get from other military organizations, and so on. Your six-experience-phase Captain is going to get more mileage out of his Rank than your four-experience-phase Sarge is. At the same time, a higher rank means greater responsibility; as a military leader of men, the Captain has to be the strong one, to keep the others at a distance, to maintain his authority even when he'd rather not.

Here are a few quick ideas for side effects:

• Connections: Whenever a phase features your character developing with a particular key NPC or organization, the character gets another level of "Connection" with that organization or person. This can be used to rate the character's influence with that entity, but also the character's obligation there. Optionally, if a character pursues an activity that would get a Connection in a later phase, those who already have that Connection can influence what skill development is actually available to that character during that time (though it should incur some other side-effect for the ones doing the influencing, too, like a Rivalry).

• Rivalry: If two characters pursue the same activity on the same phase, they each accumulate a level of Rivalry for each other. If you were using the Aspects system, the GM would be able to invoke this inter-PC rivalry during competitive moments during the game.

• Training: If a little inequality doesn't bother you, offer training options, whereby characters can get an additional skill level in a given phase, in exchange for an obligation (connection) to the trainer -- but look out, because the trainer is going to have some veto power in your skill choices!

• Youth and Maturity: A friend of mine is running a game centered around a family of children based on six phases, three years apiece, with the eldest child still shy of adulthood at 17. She's using Aspects to represent the various benefits and drawbacks of age and youth: those with six experience phases have 'Mature II', five 'Mature I', four no aspect, three 'Young I', two 'Young II', and is disallowing one-phase characters, since three-year-olds don't really work as PC's in this setup.

Baked and Served

While I've called it a system, timeline based character generation is more of a "method" than a hard and fast set of rules. It's a direction to take if it suits you.

I've found that with a sufficiently collaborative set of players and the right side-effects, using this method can produce some surprising results. An alchemy of sorts that gives rich inter-character history, a tie to the setting in the form of the events that people have stepped through in the course of character generation, and a pleasant modeling of the benefits and burdens of age and experience.

Timeline based character generation, together with Aspects and a few other custom tweaks, form the core of my homebaked Fudge implementation called FATE. You can visit FATE's homepage at http://www.faterpg.com/.