Coming from the same experience as Tim, the Char Gen for 4th edition sucked. Still I am glad I got the books they are find to read and look at. As for 5th edition I found it much cleaner than 4th edition especially with it's quick character generation section.

1. Bzsic We did a lot more character creation and laughing than playing in 4th Ed. The problem arises with, as I keep saying, the conjunction between the cover art and the word “basic,” which naturally conjures up very different expectations in people not already plugged into the HM community and the development of the 5th edition of the game.
2. Hackmaster, 9: Sneaking and Skilling Hackmaster has 3 skill/stealth type character classes: the Rogue, the Thief, and the Assassin. The Thief is the Rogue type from most games - focusing on stealth and fast movement. Like fighters, they advance Attack and Initiative, but not Speed - so they move just as fast but don't get to use their weapon.
3. HackMaster 5th Edition Play: After Session 1 of 2 Back in The Day I was an early buyer of HackMaster 4th and was a low-counter member of the HackMaster Association as a registered GM. Tons of fun - I loved carrying my card around.

(The text below is adapted from another OGL product for use with 5e.)

Hackmaster 5th Edition Character Creation Free

Contents

• 7 6) Get Equipped

0) Get Some Dice!

We’ve got dice in the Open Gaming Store! Check these out!

1) Get a Character Sheet

You can either use an online sheet, or a downloaded PDF, or for a true old-school feel, a standard piece of lined paper, whichever is most convenient for you and agreeable with your GM. Many GM’s like to be able to refer to a player’s character sheet between sessions so it is more common now to use some sort of online resource but use whatever works for you and your GM. There are even nice character generator programs available, many for FREE!

For some example sheets, check our Character Sheets & Other Resources page.

2) Determine Ability Scores

Start by generating your character’s ability scores. These six scores determine your character’s most basic attributes and are used to decide a wide variety of details and statistics. There are several methods to choose from for generating these scores so consult your GM to determine which method he is using.

Standard: Roll 4d6, discard the lowest die result, and add the three remaining results together. Record this total and repeat the process until six numbers are generated. Assign these totals to your ability scores as you see fit. This method is less random than Classic and tends to create characters with above-average ability scores.

Purchase: Each character receives 27 points to spend on increasing his basic attributes. No score can be reduced below 8 or raised above 15 using this method. See Table: Ability Score Costs for the costs of each score. After all the points are spent, apply any racial modifiers the character might have.

Note: The number of points received and the table of costs below have been updated.

3) Choose a Race

Pick a race, applying any modifiers to your ability scores and any other racial traits. Each race lists the languages a character of that race automatically knows.

4) Choose a Class

A character’s class represents a profession, such as fighter or wizard. If this is a new character, he or she starts at 1st level in this chosen class. As the character gains experience points (XP) for defeating monsters, he goes up in level, granting him new powers and abilities.

If your character is a spell caster that prepares spells (such as a wizard) you will need to determine the spells your character starts with. Consult your GM to determine this list.

5) Determine Starting Hit Points (HP)

A character starts with maximum hit points at 1st level (the maximum number on its Hit Die) or if its first Hit Die roll is for a character class level.

To determine a hit points for levels beyond 1st, roll the dice indicated by its Hit Dice.

6) Get Equipped

Each new character begins the game with equipment determined by his class or background. This gear helps your character survive while adventuring. Usually you cannot use this starting money to buy magic items without the consent of your GM.

The armor or other protective devices you purchase may affect his starting Armor Class (AC), so once you have purchased armor or other protective devices you can determine your Armor Class (AC).

Making a Character Above 1st level

If you are creating a character or creature at a level other than 1st you should consult your GM for how starting wealth and equipment are being handled. The following is offered as a guideline: start with normal starting equipment, and gold according to the Starting Wealth by Level Table.

Magic items aren’t necessary, but a GM might consider allowing each character to pick out one or two uncommon items from level 11 onward, and one or two rare items from level 17 onward.

7) Determine Saving Throws, Initiative, and Attack Values.

Determine all of the character’s other mechanical details, such as his or her saving throws, initiative modifier, and attack values. All of these numbers are determined by the decisions made in previous steps, usually determined by your class choice.

10) Description & Personality

Choose or make up a name for your character (or generate one randomly!), choose a Background, determine his or her age, alignment, and physical appearance (such as height, weight, eye and hair color etc). It is helpful to think of a few unique personality traits as well, to help you play the character during the game.

I keep telling myself that I really must make more of an effort with this blog!!

Anyway, I’m taking a breather whilst on my honeymoon (Sprout is asleep and TLC is taking a well-earned rest, while I’m typing from my mobile in an attempt to put that right).

As many of you know, I’m a huge roleplay fan. At the moment I am playing GURPS 4th edition, set in space and using the Ultra-tech rules. It’s a lot of fun, but when our DM took a holiday a few weeks ago (the selfish swine) the group wanted to continue playing something…. Which left us in a bit of a dilemma…… Should someone else take over the campaign and risk side tracking the story (and potentially get the characters killed), or should we miss three precious weeks of gaming????

Luckily, I’d recently picked up a copy of Hackmaster 5th edition players handbook, by Kenzer & Company, as well as their “Hacklopedia of Beasts” (which is a beautiful book in its own right) whilst I was looking for a roleplay with a real “old school” feel to it – I cut my teeth on AD&D 2nd edition, but have played 3.5 for years and have recently become really disenfranchised by the system, the point build method that we used and the “power gaming”/ min-max game play that it seemed to create. This really came to a head after I read a great article on the “Known World, Old World” blog about the “pathetic aesthetic” and I realised that I was desperate to try a different direction.

Thankfully, I was able to convince most my usual group to give it a go (this was a pretty big step, as most of them are pretty wedded to the system and don’t like new things, or reading rule books for that matter!) Now, like with most RPG’s character creation takes an age in Hackmaster. It uses a great mix of the traditional 3d6 stat generation and point buy methods, which I really liked and which pretty much ensures that each character will be (at least marginally) different.

To speed things up (and to test out the character generation system) I rolled up and built around a dozen various first level characters and offered them to my players (these were only “throw away” characters anyway), they were complete with quirks/flaws which provided a bit of extra colour to the characters (as well as a few badly needed building points) – in the end they opted for:

1. a Dwarf fighter “tank” (i.e. very high defence), with a great warhammer and a medium shield.
2. a Dwarf fighter with a battle axe and small shield
3. an Elven Mage with his trusty staff
4. a Human cleric armed with a mace
5. a Human barbarian armed with a battle axe and medium shield

The Dwarves were armed with their racial weapons so were able to buy weapon talents at a much cheaper price compared to the rest of the team. Also, fighters can buy specialisations cheaper than other classes (not to mention that they ended up with more build points to start with – Hackmaster provides you extra build points if you don’t move your starting stat rolls around too much) – these factors combined to make their attack scores pretty good compared to either the barbarian or the cleric (a minor point of contention – but that’s the way the cookie crumbles!!)

Now, Hackmaster is a pretty complex game if you use all the available rules (probably too complex if, like my players, you’ve not read the rule books!) so I decided to introduce them to the system very gently. I set the game in Games Workshop’s “Old World” setting (and I made the Cleric a follower of Sigmar), with the players traveling north through Wissenland, along the river Soll on their way to Nuln. I told them that they had left Geschburg a day or so ago, that they were one days march away from Wittenhausen, it was September (or the Empire equivalent) and the weather was good (so far). They were also carrying with them a sack containing 3 goblin heads and 6 pairs of goblin ears (I thought a bounty on goblins would be a good way to give them a little starting cash to buy the supplies they would need for the next leg of the journey – you see dear reader, I’m a nice GM to my neophyte adventurers).

Needless to say, the players tore through the goblins like a chainsaw through a bag of wet kittens, one of the greenskins managed to escape, but the rest were cut down in a little under a minute (Hackmaster uses a great “count-up” system where each count is one second) with very little in the way of injuries on the player’s side. Even though the fight ended up very one sided I was able to show them several great aspects of the game, namely:

1. critical hits and near perfect attacks
2. fumbles
3. perfect and near perfect defence
4. armour damage
5. penetrating damage.

This last one is my favourite (although I do like to see a players face when you tell him that he needs to pay to have his armour fixed) if a weapon rolls its maximum on its dice, you subtract one from the roll, roll it again and add the number into the first roll (continuing if you roll maximum again….), and with weapons like a battle axe rolling 4d4 damage (opposed to 1d8 in dnd 3.5), this makes even low level enemies a threat and means that they can be used a lot longer than in games like dnd 3.5 (ask yourself, in 3.5, after level 4 how often do you meet a run of the mill Orc?), as such there is less of an “arms race” between the players and the GM, which was a real must for the “pathetic aesthetic” game I had been searching for! Messenger beta download for windows phone.

Hackmaster 5th Edition Character Creation Book

All in all it was a really enjoyable session, both for me as the GM and the players. We played a second session a week or so later, which I’ll write up in my next post – this one was a lot harder and nearly ended their adventuring careers a little earlier than I had envisaged. I’ll also post up some tools I built for the game, including:

1. a random encounter generator, based on the Hacklopedia of Beasts (habitat, frequency, etc)
2. a weather generator, based on climate – including environmental factors/hazards and effects, based on information in the Game Master’s Guide.
3. rules for infections, based on the excellent Winds of Chaos website
4. A count tracker (which I found really useful for keeping track of what my monsters where doing)
5. A town generator – the towns my players are visiting are meant to be real working communities, locals are not simply waiting around to sell equipment to passing adventurers – not every village will have a weapon-smith or the shops that my players need. This generator provides a selection of occupations that are undertaken in the town – some of which they may find useful, some of which they won’t.

That’s it for me for now, I’m off to enjoy newly married life until I have to return to reality,

Until next time

FC