The Tao of Shemp

July 15, 2008 7 comments

For those of you just tuning in, “shemping” in roleplaying games is when you don’t have statistics for a particular character or monster, so you substitute the stats for another character or monster. The term comes from Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who refer to stand-ins and body doubles in movies as “shemps” or “fake shemps”. In 1956, you see, the Three Stooges were under contract to produce a certain amount of short films, but Shemp Howard passed away before the films were complete. To complete the contract, existing footage was re-used and a double was shot from behind or with his face obscured for bridging sequences.

Previously, I’ve extolled the virtues of using shemps to cut down on prep time as a gamemaster, or for use in spontaneous encounters where the players decide to do something off-script and you need fast NPC’s. My latest use for shemps in creating pregenerated characters for one-shots and convention games.

Unless you’re using a packaged adventure that includes pregens, coming up with 4 to 6 characters for other people to play can take a huge chunk of time. I’d much rather spend that time reviewing the rules and making the adventure the best it can be. My solution, which I’ll test in a couple of weeks, will be to shemp to the pregens. I’ll create one base character template, but reserve a few points. I’ll use those points to create the “flair”, two or three things that make Shemp 1 different from Shemp 2. Hey, humans and chimpanzees are 98% genetically identical; it’s the 2% difference that really counts.

For the Brimstone and Gall demo, this means I’ll create one generic pirate and copy him six times. Then for “flair”, I’ll add the edges and skills that differentiate a captain, a master of sails, a master of guns, or a ship’s surgeon. I’m even toying with the idea of just throwing the “template” sheet on the copier and writing the “flair” down on 3×5 cards, but that might be extreme and not particularly player-friendly. Still, writing a sheet six times is still faster/easier than creating six whole characters.

An alternate idea I had, which I may use for another game in the future, is to create the generic character and give the players a cut-down pick list to customize their character. Pick one of these, and two of those, and one of the other. It would allow for some sort of personalized character creation, while not tying up half a game day just to make a character you’ll likely to only ever play once.

Obviously, this idea isn’t for everyone and wouldn’t work well for an ongoing campaign. However, I’m planning on running two demo/con-style game a month, in a variety of systems, for the foreseeable future. This is the sort of things that will help keep me relatively sane.