Characters - Domains, regents and others.

[Aeric (DM Matt)]

Matt, are you saying you want to open a new forum section for threads like this?  Sounds fine to me if so, and I'll kick things off in there and try to guide discussions to keep them productive, but I don't have the permissions in the forum to create areas.  Do we want to just put this stuff in the Regent Guide section?

Put it in the regent guide section

(I can't create forums either)

[Talinie & NIT/TD (Linde)]

I like what Linde suggest, about the action never failing. Cool mechanic.

There are, off the top of my head, these kinds of characters:
Fluff the player makes
Friends made
Advisors
Able Assistants
Lieutenants
Heir

listed loosely by rank/value to the domain.

I would not mind if it was simply impossible to pull a super lieutenant out of thin air in one action, but the rule  could use clarification on how to use it to "nuture" an NPC into position over several uses of the action.

Also, it is beneficial to reduce the amount of work placed on the GM to add new people.

I don't think that I made a suggestion. I feel I pointed out how the action have been played.
I have made a hire help action asking for help that by all right should be ddc 40 - 50.
And instead of failing I've gotten the character, but scaled down to a ddc 20.

I am not saying that this is the only way to do it, or even the best way to do it.
I am just saying that it worked.

And in a game where emphasis has been put on the lack of monetary resources, and the importance of using your entire domain and not just your regent, I hope hire help action will continue to work.

[Ohlaak (Alan)]

The thing about movies, about books and even about the stories we tell each other is that they are all have one thing in common - they are all based around characters. The characters drive the narrative, they resolve the actions and they provide all of the emotional content too. It is their fears, their hopes and their dreams, their successes and their failures that we rollercoast through and leaves us cheering or sobbing at the page.

And when we play roleplaying games it is those characters that we play as, that we enact through with the world our imaginations have the jointly created. But Birthright is an unusual RPG in that way, as you are often playing more than one character.

Your domain is a character - it has a personality, a set of agendas and suffers or succeeds based on your actions and those of you acting around you.

Your regent is a character - it has a personality, a set of agendas and suffers or succeeds based on your actions and those of you acting around you.

Sometimes those characters clash; it might be the case that a personal agenda clashes with a realm policy and that friction creates game. It makes the story that drives the game. And then those same characters clash and bounce off other realms and regents, let alone all the NPCs. It is a self perpetuating story machine in the right hands.

So, if you have bothered to read this far, you are probably asking why I am writing this. My summary is this; your character is not just your regent. It is your domain, your realm. It is also your Lts, your minor court official npc's. And it is your regent. All of those characters present the nature of your part in the game and hopefully we will be able to get enough feeling and depth into as much of those elements as possible to make your realm feel a fully fledged character all of its own. After all you are assigned a Domain, not a regent, to play.

But yes, I'll make sure there are some clear rules for generating pc-type characters - just remember they really are not the whole of the game

DM Matt summarized very well here what characters we the players are playing.  Much of what he wrote got hidden behind other less important things.