When you play role-playing games, it is generally the case that your PC comes from somewhere and has a personality and history. The character isn’t just a collection of numbers, except in the most basic of dungeon crawls.
Not everyone is good at creating these personalities and backgrounds. 5th Edition D&D uses “Background” system to give some context to the character and explores a few of their personality traits, ideas, flaws and bonds, but that isn’t the only way of describing the character. The product 5 Questions from Roving Band of Misfits Press provides an alternative or supplementary method of determining your character’s history or personality. Instead of rolling on a random table to determine what your ideal is, 5 Questions poses… ahem… five questions, randomly selected from a list of 500. By answering the questions, you get a starting point for your character.
The questions fall into five categories: “Physical or Personality Traits”, “World Places, Events or Organizations”, “Interparty Relationships”, “NPC Relationships” and “Character Secrets”. Either you answer one question from each category, or you can mix up all the questions and just answer five questions.
One of the interesting things about how the questions are phrased is that the actual question gives you details about your background. For instance, one question is “Which pirate owes you a favour and why?” The character that gets that question has a part of their background filled in, and the answer they give just makes their character more interesting. At their best, these questions spur the imagination and allow for some fascinating characters to be created.
Not all the questions are interesting ones – at least, not to me. “What sort of weapon would you never use and why?” is an example of such. But most of the questions are excellent, even if they’re confronting. “Who saw you kill your sister and how did it happen?” is a tremendous question, although not a comfortable one.
The product has 500 questions, but is a 257 page PDF! No, it’s not only two questions per page. Instead, it provides 200 pages of already selected questions; 100 with one per category, and 100 with the categories mixed together. The idea is that you can print one randomly-selected page for each player, rather than having to copy & paste the questions into a different document.
The details presumed in the questions may make this supplement unsuitable for some campaigns, but it should work as a supplement for most fantasy role-playing games. I’m not sure if I’d use it myself, but I know players who’d find it very useful in their games.
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