d100 - Connections & Coincidences for Character Convergence

There is usually a part of Character Generation where it might be useful to determine how the Player Characters know each other. Some tables are completely comfortable with hand-waving or abstracting this or letting those Relationships bloom during play but when that time comes, it can be helpful to have some ideas.

I like to focus on the Teamwork aspects of these games quite a bit, so forging a few bonds between the members of the Party can really go a long way to help emphasize this. A bit of Shared History, in the form of an amusing or intriguing anecdote about how they met is a delightful place to begin.

I’m certainly not the first to attempt a table approach for this, and I managed to resist the urge to peek at another table that I’ve used occasionally in the past: the excellent 100 Reasons by JB from B/X Blackrazor. These are indeed especially useful to address these questions, and I’m certain that despite my best intentions, there might be some subliminal overlap.

I decided to zoom into a very particular part of my version though: Those lovely, serendipitous circumstances surrounding how people Meet for the first time. What common thread was enigmatically twisted to have those fates intertwine? I also champion a clockwise approach for this: each generates one to particularize these happenstances between themselves and the player to their Right, and so on until things circle around. This usually provides that sticky dollop of glue to get things started.

As with other tables, this one features a bevy of dreaded Capitalization to draw attention to the places that might need further specificity. The goal is here is to get the players asking and answering questions about these results to elaborate on them a bit to reach consensus. Another potential use for this is to flesh out Contacts, NPCs, or even Rivals the party might possess. Any acquaintance of a Character might benefit from a bit of background like this.

Everyone who has ever met has a story surrounding that meeting and sometimes they end up being quite memorable indeed. Here are only One Hundred of these, that might be useful in your games:

Table Talk: I had started this table a few months ago, and in its embryonic stages it seemed to be trending a little more toward these “Chance Meetings.” The inspiration for it came from a humorous place: A song that happened to play randomly while my playlist was on shuffle. The song in question is a lovely Medley by They Might Be Giants called “Fingertips.” It consists of twenty-one mostly very short, snippet like songs, stitched together. I have fond memories of using parts of this song to fill up the any trailing silent spaces on the sides of Mix Tapes back in the day.

Specifically, the segment in question that inspired this was the eighth one: “Aren’t You The Guy Who Hit Me In The Eye?” It got me thinking that perhaps I could do a Table corresponding to each of these little ditties at some point, and this one might mark the first in that little silly series.

As I mentioned in my post about how I make tables: Inspiration can come from the strangest places once you have opened yourself to it 😊.