I posted a bit about the process of rolling a character last week. I kind of botched publishing the post correctly and got way less traffic and feedback. Pretty much the only real thoughtful piece of feedback I got was someone asking:

"Why are my starting classes random?"

and that they didn't like that idea. Of course anybody can house rule picking classes or picking one and making the other random, but I wanted to talk about the ideas behind having a fluid character, how it fits in mechanically and narratively.

First a bit of background context. Chronomutants loosely follows the narrative beats of a heist movie. The players are given resources and a goal with obstacles/challenges in the way. They are a crew of specialists out to complete a clearly defined job, with clear success and failure conditions.

So why should each player's role be randomly assigned?

Let's start with the most important reason. Mechanics.

Each mission is essentially a puzzle. There is a goal that is difficult to achieve, that the players work together towards. By combining their resources they will overcome or be flattened by those challenges. All player groups have an equal number of skills to start, having to craft a plan with the random skills you were given is the bedrock of the puzzle. Some obvious strategies may not be viable for the group, or some may open up due to an odd class feature, creating the need for player plans to be unorthodox. Coming up with these plans is the core of the game.

The other randomly assigned player option is a special rule (sometimes two) that comes with each class. These are designed to be mostly flavor, but many offer a situational advantage or drawback. These vary wildly in how impactful they will be on a character, some being purely flavor, and some being additional crunchy mechanics. These come bundled with the classes or added to a character by a mutation. There are many many of these and they are not balanced against each other, but are mostly very low-impact. These serve as an additional less impactful version of player skills, and serve a smaller dose of randomization in addition to the randomly assigned skills.

But the point is, your party should be unbalanced, you should have weaknesses and specialties. Being a honed group of experts that can handle any situation is what happens as your characters level. Those characters get to tackle more difficult challenges to match their expertise. There is still a wrinkle…

Mutations. Those small little special perks given by mutations tend to pile onto characters as they progress. While a 3rd level character will have more skills and be more effective, they will also likely have more quirks where they are disadvantaged.Including the likelihood that you will have to reroll one or more of your starting classes. You will never remain fully the same in Chronomutants.

Having a fluid character, you are an ever changing toolbox, your character sheet should be in flux, mutating out of control. This is to keep some of the goal of the game that players make plans with a random pile of resources.

Let's move on to how random character generation affects narrative.

So if I am tentacles one minute and a glorious mecha-hawk the next what does that mean for me as a narrative character? Hopefully it means that what you are and who you are, are different things. For better or worse Chronomutants does not support imagining a character and then building that from a list of options. Instead narrative and character drama should be emergent from a player's actions. Hostage negotiations, deadly standoffs, snarky banter, and shooting first. Chronomutants doesn’t really have any mechanical hooks for character drama, it’s not systemically built for that. Not to say you can’t roleplay, most dungeon crawlers don’t have rules for roleplay and people do character driven narratives piled on top of those systems, so go for it if that’s your thing. You just won’t be getting to decide that you are a barbarian who loves horses before you start your journey.

Again, you could house rule picking some amount  of your classes and/or subclasses if you want to use this system to tell a plotted character arc, but I’d maybe look at World of Gamma   instead. Chronomutants is a weird and specific game, and if the randomness in character creation is a deal breaker, when you get blown to bits and are replaced with a semi-random version of yourself from an alternate timeline, you will probably be unhappy about it. If Steffeno returning the party as the now robotic Steff-no makes you smile, then you are in the right place.

Similar to Blades in the Dark, where all characters are scoundrels, in Chronomutants all characters are mercenaries who have agreed to do violent work for personal gain. Every character will be some version of a mutant mercenary. The intent is that being a tentacle thing or a living shadow is the form your mutations take, but does not define your role in the world the same way being a barbarian does in other games. Who you are is not what you are.

I’m putting a lot of the narrative focus on emergent gameplay. Player’s have great latitude in how they complete their tasks, and the particulars of their characters ascetics. The hope is that players will be defined by their actions and in game decisions, not their backstories.

If you really wanted to be a secret princess or be motivated by family tragedy you still can, you just aren’t going to be able to pick an archetype and be that in the world. Your archetype is time-traveling mercenary. This is going to be a turn off for some folks, but I didn’t make this to be the end-all system to run everything in; I built this to run 1-shot heists with gonzo action or a sprawling campaign hopping across all of existence in under eight sessions. It’s got limited scope by design.

So, random redditor is right. You can't really be whatever you want to be. I hope instead it's a good change of pace to be your  actions more than your character sheet .

Stay safe, destroy the timeline,

-gary