Colorful Characters 27: Bric Shilic

This product photo is EXACTLY what I was picturing in my head when I first described Bric Shelic to my players. The only difference would be a whole lot more dents, dings, grime, and grease.

I never expected to write another Colorful Characters post, but here we are. There’s no way I could keep this fuckin’ guy to myself.

Bric Shilic is a parts vendor. Human parts. He meanders through the back alleys of large cities. The ones that the locals have learned to avoid. When he sees someone with a serious injury or disfigurement, he calls out to them with a practiced friendliness that seems at odds with his gravelly voice. He likes to say “An arm or a leg won’t cost you an arm and a leg!” It’s a witticism he’s proud of coming up with.

He speaks speaks with all the bluster, fast-talk, and suspicious confidence of a successful street vendor. All of it comes through a foreign accent so thick it’s sometimes too dense to penetrate, but you get what he’s saying by context. I went with a stereotypical middle eastern accent myself.

Also present is Bric Shilic’s cart, covered in dried blood and grease, buzzing with gnats and flies. Inside of it, Bric Shilic has one of everything, but only one. If you’re missing an eye, he has one eye, if you’re missing a thumb, he’s got one thumb, and if you’re missing 12′ of intestine, well he’s got 14′, but he’s willing to cut it down for you. Special deal.

His prices are:

1,000 money for any small, mostly cosmetic graft. Noses, fingers, ears, etc.
2,000 money for major grafts. Arms, hands, legs, eyes, genitals, etc.
3,000 money for anything that has to go inside of you. Livers, lungs, bones, etc.

There are usually little stories to go along with each piece. “Nose came from little boy. Die in terrible accident. Was hit by…stick. Stick wielded by bad man. Not Bric Shilic. You buy. You buy.”

For any parts that are not internal, the player should be given some idea of what they look like. After all, the character is lucky just to have found someone willing to sell them a right hand. Who are they to complain that the hand comes from someone of a different age, sex, or ethnicity? It will function just fine, of course. Bric Shilic does not sell shoddy merchandise. But if the character is gonna look like a frankenstein, they oughta know it.

Flip a coin to determine the sex of the person the donated part is from. Roll 1d8 – 1 to determine the decade of life the donor was in when the part was harvested. Parts have a 1-in-6 chance to match the recipient’s ethnicity, otherwise the skin is of a noticeably different color.

Parts are attached by using Bric Shilic’s body fluids as an adhesive. He’s sensitive about explaining why this works, but the results are undeniable. If you need a new nose, Bric Shilic just licks the back of it, then presses it against your face for a few seconds. The process burns a little, but when he removes his hand you’ll be able to sniff,sneeze, and smell with the best of them! Of course, installing internal parts is a little more of an involved process that will require Bric Shelic to shove his entire arm down your throat. He’ll ask some of your friends to hold you down if a procedure like that is necessary.

Bric Shilic is a 6th level Magic User. If attacked, he primarily uses spells like Hold Person and Sleep.

I Hate Choice

A long time ago I wrote a series called “Pathfinder Class Analysis.” Basically, I would read over an individual Pathfinder class, then I’d write outlandish blog posts about what I would do differently if I were the one designing it. At the time I probably would have said I was criticizing Pathfinder because I loved it and wanted to see it improve. In retrospect, the whole series was kind of my parting shot at the whole 3.X family of systems. I had already started to play in OSR games at that point, and was enjoying the hobby more than I ever had before. It wasn’t too much later that I stopped writing about Pathfinder entirely.

But in many ways, Papers & Pencils is still much more popular as a Pathfinder website than it is as an OSR one. The Class Analysis posts in particular draw a lot of traffic, and produce a lot of comments. Some are surprisingly positive, but nearly all of them posit some serious disagreement . The most consistent criticism is directed at my frequent assertion that some class choices ought to be made randomly, rather than left to the player’s discretion.

It’s a belief I’ve only doubled down on. Many of the classes I’ve drafted for you this year have randomized powers, The Windmaster and The Slasher are two examples that come immediately to mind. I love randomized class options, but a lot of folks seem to think that’s a pretty weird thing to love. So lets dig into just why I love them.

There are two arguments I find compelling in favor of randomizing character options. The first is an argument against choice, the second is an argument for randomization.

Choice is good. But like all things, it’s only good in moderation. The human brain is really only capable of weighing so many options before it reaches a point of choice paralysis. This is doubly true when the effects of those options aren’t readily apparent. If you’re trying to learn a new game, you can’t know if +1 to your Blamf is better than +1 to your Flumph.

Most players don’t enjoy creating their character. Oh, sure, there are some who do. They’re the sort of folks who go online to talk about their favorite games. The ones who just can’t get enough D&D. They get together on forums or subreddits and it’s easy to assume they represent the entire player base for tabletop games. But I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those people outside the Internet.

Every player I’ve ever played with in real life just wants to play the game. Every choice the character creation process gives them is an extra step they have to take before they get to do the thing they actually want to do. But they won’t rush the choice, because they don’t want to make a bad choice. So they agonize over options they don’t really understand, that are too numerous to be explained to them in any meaningful way. When they finally do choose, it’s more out of exasperation than anything else. Then they spend the next several months asking the referee “so…what does this do again?”

This is not because players are lazy. This is because complicated, choice-heavy character creation is only fun for a small minority of people. For everybody else, you might as well gate the fun behind tax forms.

None of this is to say that character creation should never include any choices. Far from it, I think a small number of options that can be made quickly and understood easily are a great way to make a player feel like their character is really their own. But many rules-heavy games labor under the false assumption that more choice is always better. Quite the contrary, too much choice is poison to fun.

So that’s why I don’t like (excessive) choice. It’s a barrier that prevents new or casual players from enjoying the game. But what makes randomized options so appealing?

If there’s a list of 10 class options, and the player is allowed to pick whichever one they want, they’re going to try to pick the one that will give them the most success in the game. That’s a completely reasonable thing for them to do. It’s what I would do. Most likely 1-3 of those 10 options will seem obviously superior to the rest. It’s not that any of the options are bad, but no array of powers are all created equal. Not unless they’re painfully bland. (+1 to attack during the day, +1 to attack at night, +1 to attack underground, +1 to attack indoors, yawn.)

If, on the other hand, the player must roll a d10 to determine their power, then there’s a good chance they’ll end up with something they don’t have a good idea of how to use. It’s a perfectly functional ability, there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not what they would have picked, and now they need to figure out how to make the most of it. There is a true artistry and beauty in figuring out how to excel with the cards you’ve been dealt.

When you’ve got a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. And in a world full of nails, you might be inclined to pick the hammer every time. But what do you do when someone hands you a hacksaw instead? Maybe you cut the nail in half, maybe you cut the board that’s supporting the nail, or maybe you realize some of your problems were never nails in the first place.

In other words: you get creative.

Randomization breeds creativity in players. It forces them to be clever. To think. To explore options they never would have considered otherwise. That creativity is the kind of thing they’re going to be proud of, and tell stories about.

So that’s why I said the Sorcerer’s spells should be randomized in Pathfinder. It’s also why anyone playing a Slasher in my games wouldn’t get to pick their own quirk. Choices made during character creation are a slow, alienating, unnecessary process; and randomized character options elevate play to artistry.

Come at me, bruh.