Character Theory Random Attributes

[official clown business]

Attributes are a fun, ingenious way to improve the role-playing experience. They evoke tension, excitement, and despair before the adventure even starts. Most importantly, though, they provide a reliable jumping off point for players struggling to make unique characters or step outside their comfort zone.

But what are Attributes?

Inspired by content such as URealms Live and whothefuckismydndcharacter, Attributes are permanent passive effects that your character gets when they are created, and they will have a significant impact on your character's appearance, backstory, and many other factors.
Unless you really have something good planned for your character, you might want to consider getting yourself one or two random Attributes in any adventure that allows it, destroying most of the ideas you initially had for your character but also providing you with many more interesting ones you've never thought of before.

Attributes are not at all limited to the content you can find, and are oftentimes far more interesting than simple adjectives and traits. In the standard URLive deck, you have the potential of getting Attributes based around the deities of the world as well as those that grant you races and supernatural abilities unique to said world.
You can, of course, create your very own Attributes if you want, or change how they work in order to tailor them specifically for what you're doing, such as non-dicers and futuristic themes. For example, I've created these six Attributes that I think would work well in most roleplays here.

There are many situations you can apply random Attributes to within a roleplay as well, such as

• Making your kids go through puberty
• Becoming completely stoned on drugs

You will laugh. You will cheer. You will cry out in emotional pain. Eventually, you will be ready to have your character absolutely destroyed.
But what matters is that you're going to have an amazing character ready by the time the adventure begins.

So what are your thoughts on this, my dudes?

 

[Umbrie]

Randomly determining Facets of a character's history or personality, tends to come up with a lot more unwanted characters than it comes up with halfway desirable ones and at the same time, randomly determining things like a character's combat statistics, such as strength, agility, or even charisma, tends to come up with massive group imbalances that will make the gods feel super bored at how overpowered they are compared to everybody else and make the weaklings feel super upset at how useless they are in comparison to everybody else. and if you are allowing mulligans to counteract truly bad rolls, you might as well use point buy system because the characters with good rolls are still going to wreck things.

 

[WhipDing]

Glad to see someone else who appreciates URLive on here

I will say that this method is really good for expanding the range you can play, just by forcing you to play types of characters that you wouldn't normally. And it can definitely be a lot of fun, obviously.

But what I will also say is that it only really works in quite specific types of roleplay - for long-term, one-character-per-player roleplays, I can see it be being more frustrating than fun in the long run. URLive makes it work by creating a whole new set of characters every 6-8 hours, so on very rare occasion you get a dud, no-one has to live for it forever. It also has some pretty heavy DMing to keep things balanced gameplay-wise, as well as keeping all the really important stuff (like class and race, which essentially determines stats) player-controlled.

It's also worth noting the whole "90% funny, 10% serious" thing. In a fully serious roleplay, some of the wacky characters you end up with using attributes would be pretty hard to use. That said... I can see them being nice as inspiration for character creation. Kinda like a random name generator - you don't necessarily use the first character you generate, but it can give you some new ideas.