Today I want to combine two of the RPGaDay prompts because I've missed a lot of days, but also because I can't really tell the story entirely in a single article without a fair amount of stuff getting in the way. For those who can't see the image below, the two prompts are "How has a game surprised you?" and "Weirdest character name?"

(questions and image from autocratik.blogspot.com)

The game that surprised me the most was Open Legend. I'd been a game reviewer and an amateur game designer for a long time when I found Open Legend, but I hopped into playtesting and found it to be both one of the most well-polished systems I'd ever played and one of the best games for building flavorful characters without getting bogged down by loads of stuff.

The Build

As a playtester on Open Legend, I wanted to come up with something that would test the system to its limits, and I settled on something that was... a little unusual for me.

I always shy away from melee fighters, much less beefy and tanky ones. This is something I've changed recently, because I've been moving away from characters with combat focuses, so I've been running more melee fighters like Barbarians and the like because I like their non-combat skills and can settle for their combat "limitations".

But I made the beefiest, tankiest melee fighter I could, and gave him a massive two-handed halberd with reach.

And then I gave him the ability to teleport.

The action economy of Open Legend is such that I was able to teleport as a bonus action (it was originally a movement action, but a feat I took made it a bonus action), and then again as a movement action. This gave me incredible mobility, and also let me break up something that would otherwise have to be uniform movement. Add in reach, and you've got someone who can hit anywhere on the battlefield without suffering retaliation.

The way that attributes and powers work in Open Legend is that the attribute fuels powers, and not only did I not need to make a roll to teleport (thanks to the same feat that made it a bonus action, if memory serves correctly), but I also was able to teleport further than most people could move.

It was a nice compromise for someone who prefers to stay out of the action most of the time, and it also meant that my character could wear heavy, bulky armor that would otherwise have slowed him down. Teleportation doesn't care about your movement speed, only your attribute, so I was fine.
Anyhow, I was running that build for a while during playtesting with Bryan, and it was really satisfying. But something was missing.

The Build 2.0

One of the things that Open Legend does is have a system where you build characters using feats and attributes, and the abilities they can access are dependent on their attributes, but to make them really exceptional you need to add feats into the mix.

Open Legend is really generous with how much you can boost characters in this way, so you can wind up with some really good things. While my first build focused most of its feat points on defenses, I decided that I wanted Build 2.0 to have a few more active, offensive things.

Around this time, one of my local group players wanted to run a game of Open Legend (I think I'd played it with them, running it as a one-shot or maybe a very short campaign, or maybe he'd just heard me rant and rave about how awesome it was), so he started running the game and I rolled up a new character, with everyone else at the table more or less unaware of the colossal mischief I was about to get up to.

A Hasty Development

Varden-Avag was the name of the character. I'm not quite sure what the origin of the name was; it was probably randomly generated, but I think the true meaning has something to do with roses or somesuch, and I'd made his backstory being a sort of displaced knight errant questing for honor. Ultimately we left many elements of the background behind because it didn't fit the setting, but the character build itself and Varden-Avag's overall personality stayed.

Two changes between Build 1.0 and Build 2.0 really stood out.

First, Build 1.0 did have an ability to move after getting a kill (because you can still use the Teleport ability with that, it had too much value to not get), but not really anything else to help with aggressive play.

Build 2.0 upgraded that to get another attack after a kill, or at least something similar to allow me to hit multiple targets, and put a couple feat points toward a special ability that allowed me to always put a buff on myself.

We were starting at a slightly higher power than we had been at during the playtest with Brian (one of the reasons why the campaign didn't last long), so I was able to pick Haste as a boost here. Now, Haste does provide a penalty to any action you take with it, but A) if I used it for a teleport I didn't have to roll anyway and B) I could get an absurd number of attacks off.

One of the limitations of a melee fighter is range, of course, but I stuck with reach weapons and the ability to teleport and basically made quick work of that barrier to sheer unlimited power.

How Open Legend Surprised Me

One of the things that I really liked about Open Legend is that even with my best efforts to cause an incredible amount of stress to the system, it handled everything well. Characters scaled nicely as they progressed in power. A lot of games just encourage you to throw out the rules when you get off the scale of power that the game operates on, with Cthulhu eating 1d4 adventurers or poorly built characters winding up like ants being left behind in the dust, but Open Legend really managed to get around that quite nicely due to how it worked (a unique dice-pool system with explosions).

I don't think I've ever seen a game that can handle PCs who have that much mobility and damage well. I probably managed to create a lot of GM angst, because at a certain point I became able to teleport through walls and sequence break plotlines (sometimes as accidentally as such things can be), but it didn't make the system stop working entirely. Nor did anyone else's build, with a couple minor hiccups for summoning and the like being a little difficult to work out (but not, by any means, cataclysmic).

If anyone's ever seen the videos of DARPA robots being kicked and trying to stay standing, that's what the system went through under playtesting. It was a whole lot of force and fury thrown at it, but it managed to come through in ways that kept the gameplay interesting and left the universe believable. Build 1.0, for all its strengths, fell in combat to massed musket fire (though this was merely incapacitating, rather than lethal, due to the fact that most shots missed and Open Legend has very generous policies on such matters).

Likewise, a lot of Build 2.0's combat focus was sort of redundant, since Build 1.0 had a lot of power as a utility character (using Forced Move or other alternatives to damage-dealing attacks as a way to control enemies, or even sacrificing attack actions to teleport allies around the battlefield), and Build 2.0 actually felt a little less influential because it wasn't used as much for that purpose.

Varden-Avag's New Name

So, long story short, we wind up being monster hunters in a Witcher-inspired campaign. Varden-Avag, being a fairly reserved but brave and honor-bound character, was a little overzealous in hunting down monsters.

It's worth pointing out that I intentionally played Varden-Avag with restraint and wisdom. At one point we wound up in a personal conversation with a king, and I managed to not only solve his riddle but push him toward ending the war that was currently going on between kingdoms. Varden-Avag did get into fights occasionally, but always restrained from causing lasting harm to anyone unless they especially deserved it (like bandits).

However, once while we were hunting monsters that had taken up occupancy in a local lake, we got ambushed by what was intended to be an overwhelming force of humanoid undead "drowners". The other hunters were waiting along the shoreline, watching the forces stack up against us.
Varden-Avag, however, knows no restraint when it comes to hunting monsters, and views them as a personal insult to his honor, so he rushes in and starts chopping down the baddies left and right. Unbeknownst to him, however, a larger monster was dwelling in the lake. Enough killed drowners would draw it out, and it would make short work of the remaining enemies, so we could complete our contract by picking off stragglers and staying away of the larger clusters of enemies.

Varden-Avag killed every drowner in the lake (with the exception of a handful picked off by an ally who was an expert marksman and one that got cut down by another ally with a sword), and then killed the monster that was simply trying to snack on their corpses.

When Varden-Avag returned to town, he had earned the moniker "Genocidicles", on account of his incredible feats of monster-hunting prowess, and against my best efforts to get people to start calling him by his proper name again the name stuck.

On the upside, nobody ever underestimated him again.