I dig how characters are created in Liminal RPG. It says go make your character, then come back and work on the crew - the collection and purpose of the player characters. I remember laughing out loud! Mitchener is my friend, and I've enjoyed the games and conversations we've had. But I laughed out loud. That's just crazy; what is he on about?!! We make characters and the crew together; everybody knows that, right? 🤷🏾♂️
Liminal is a roleplaying game about playing supernatural characters of the Hidden World. The setting is mainly the UK and Europe, with a chapter covering regions outside the UK. The mechanics are not what they might first look like; read carefully. Don't be like me thinking, oh, PBTA! The core mechanic is 2d6 + modifiers, but lots of nice resource spends to make it all nice, tight, and gamey. The stats are just the right amount and at the right level of detail. This is not a rules-light game; there is a strong game here. I love it.
RPG best practice says to have a session zero to talk about what game is afoot, the where, when, and how of what we're playing, and getting the group aligned about the tone and shape of what we're playing. Sometimes, in those talks, we'll rough out the player characters, maybe link them to each other and situations, and then commit to the mechanical details.
Liminal says, nah, brother... Make your own dude (or dudette). You don't HAVE to confer with the other players —or that's how I heard it!
After a little further reading, I was sold on this approach! At the crew-making stage, everyone brings their characters and the choices they made to the discussion about who we collectively are and why we are teaming up. In that talk is all the baggage your character brings with them. If you let Batman in your crew, you get the Joker for free! There are crew-level mechanics for resources and factions to figure out your crew’s place in the world. This is where you will make or break your campaign.
Crew generation...and provides a reason for diverse characters to work together.
—Liminal RPG
I leaned in on this for two different campaign runs, not forcing or stopping any character-building talk. Folks made their characters offline, and we resumed with crew generation. I found that the work was largely us working through the fictional 'why are we a crew' until it made sense to us. This sounds worse than it was; IRL we're riffing on our crew's origin story. This made some of the asset and faction choices pretty obvious when we got there. Champions Now has a similar approach. Players make their builds, and the GM pulls them together via scenario design choices made from the character flags like dependents, hunteds, etc. I am a fan of this approach; it's got tremendous player buy in.
Anyways, Liminal RPG is high on my modern supernatural games list, neck and neck with Urban Shadows v1. I need to play it more.