What's a good starting place for a new character in an RPG?

Birth seems pretty legit. Can learn about the world and not be a retard for not knowing yet.

How about something like you play as a child and go on a child like adventure and as time goes on the character ages and so does the adventure.
Or alternatively something bad happens on that first adventure (perhaps friend that went with you get crippled?) and the rest of the game spans years of you questing to find a cure.

The dog of a great adventurer heads out to investigate a familiar scent that passed through the air one day.

Something that was not exploited too much, for example you start as a teenager in a cozy village, you father is about to tell you something importat but first you need to go into the forrest to kill some bears, but when you return, it turns out that someone destryoed the village and you must go on your quest to save the world

That is literally the start to Tales of Phantasia.

And sort of fable.

...

Characters who were already playing some kind of active role and suddenly have some kind of out of left field job pushed onto them are pretty interesting.
Good examples: FF9 and Disgaea 1
youtu.be/s8Gi2QF9hC8?t=30

>dub
:ree:

A nobody suddenly suffers from split personality disorder, gaps in their memory and waking up in unfamiliar places. While trying to figure shit out, he eventually discovers that his alter ego is working towards saving the world from some big bad.

Doomed hometown, you have you leave now

>not his alter ego is arguably more dangerous than the big bad
>not "the villain is you and another, different you"

Disgaea has a great dub though.

>the villain is you and another, different you
Wasn't that technically the plot of Overlord when you find out about the Wizard?

I like when RPG's start you with a small CYOA and you make choices that determine how your character acts as a child and a teenager. It's a good place to put exposition in while still giving you choices to make stats and shit.

You die in the beginning and you have to figure out how it happened.

>Young Adult
>Out on an extended camping to 'find himself'
>Sees smoke in the distance
>From the direction of his old village/town
>Rushes home
>Everything is destroyed
>Raiders napped his childhood friend because she was 'the chosen one'
>Que adventure

A mercenary with a bit of experience behind his ears takes up a job which leads to an adventure of his life.

>What's a good starting place for a new character in an RPG?

Anywhere. I hate this obsession with "we need to treat the player as fish out of water so the MC has to be ignorant about the world". Developers need to have more faith in players' ability to catch on to things. Amnesia as a plot-point is the absolute WORST offender in that department.

level one

As simple as it was, I still consider Dragon Quest III to have the best opening of a JRPG

I think audiences have shown time and time again they can't really be trusted to do anything for themselves.

Offer the player different character backgrounds to choose from with a short opening vignette that differs depending on his character class. Age of Decadence did this marvellously. Pretty much all classes are involved in the assassination of a local merchant. The mercenary class starts out as a bodyguard who ends up failing to protect the merchant from an assassin. The assassin class has to go out on a mission and kill said merchant (meeting a hapless bodyguard mercenary on the way). The merchant class has to visit the local assassin's guild to hire an assassin to take out a merchant in town who has no licence for trading. The drifter class stays at the local in and hears a merchant being assassinated in the room next to him, etc. - in all situations the event plays out pretty much the same, with the merchant being assassinated and involving the same characters (no new assets required) but in each of them the player gets to experience the situation from a different point of view and make a small difference depending on his choices.

Also make sure not to introduce 'loved ones' to the player only to kill them shortly afterwards. Such shit only disconnects the player from the character since the player has no personal attachment to them and certainly isn't going to develop any within the first ten minutes of the game. This is a major problem in plenty of RPGs - even more so if the death of the loved ones is a major plot point of the player character's motivation. Bethesda did the same shit by introducing a father figure to the player he could hardly give a shit about yet spent the whole game forcing the player to chase after him.

>born in a small town
>from a special family
>destined to be The Guide
>The Hero is born every century or so
>it is your families duty to aid, protect and help The Hero
>but not directly, as Tribal History dictates that The Hero works alone
>you are an unsung saint, the author to The Heros journey, and nobody must know of your true fate

i love destined revenge
good cliche

>"You are a selfish person and a sore loser."

>Small child, travelling with his father
>He's on some nebulas quest, looking for something or someone, too young to understand
>He leads you around on the world map
>In battle he's far stronger than you, heals you when you get hit
>Finds a lead as to what he was looking for
>Dangerous territory
>You accidently wander into a trap because you're a kid and don't know any better
>Big bad shows up to kill you
>Father gives his life to protect you
>Grow up to inherit his quest and exact revenge

It's more of a design problem in that devs and players try to apply video game standards of engagement to RPGs. When your game is 30+ hours long you can't really expect to immediately engage the player in first ten minutes like you can with a performer, shooter, etc. When you peddle story shortcuts don't work because players have to experience it step by step.

Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit. Game begins with you taking the midnight train to anywhere.

>What's a good starting place for a new character in an RPG?

You're a police officer trying to solve a murder mystery? The catch? There's an asteroid on its way to hit Earth and apocalypse is just around the corner. YOU HAVE 72 HOURS!

So good it was already made into a book.

I'd play it. Especially if it's timed like Dead Rising to piss off completionist fags.

This, but you have to have a naive character that other characters can explain the world too.
Don't just throw the player in with little to no exposition. That in mind if you are going to use fake words make sure to define them with real words, not use made up words to explain other made up words. It would be like I come up to a stranger and say "Dave kicked Tyler out of the Lorgthal because of the ragthym, when the ragthym are kicked out they become magthym. Magthym are bad for being against the lorgthal."
It's shit like this that I can stand and FF 13 does this. You drop someone in the middle of the story and expect them to alteady know the workings of the fantasy setting then completely roll the player over with made up words as an explination.

Wow, so the premise is finding a killer while the planet panics

I think everyone would appreciate it if you broke convention by starting a game with a MC who is already an accomplished adventurer/mercenary. He could be heading back home to decompress between gigs and then gets wrapped into the main plot of the game. The entire time the big bad will be tearing out his hair shouting "who the fuck is this faggot" as you foil his plans and kill all of his followers.

DQV is so good

Wish more games had that kind of span where like thirty years go by in game and you start off as a kid travelling with his dad and end up having kids of your own who fight beside you

Grandia 2?

Dream and wake up from the bed.

Best cliche.

Dream is the vision of the future and hot chick reaching out for you
"Help me"

You might enjoy Saga Frontier 2.

Then you stab her.

I don't mind amnesia as long as they don't use it to set up some dumb twist. MC should just be coincidentally amnesiac.

>mention's Disgaea but not Makai Kingdom

Makai Kingdom has the best start out of any NIS game, you're literally playing as a character considered to be last boss tier.
youtu.be/VceqYerVw4s?t=76
PC port when?

Every rpg has been done, any thing new would be like the world was destroyed and land masses are now floating into space, and the main character is a refugee.

It could happen because there is a PSP version, but sadly it was never translated officially.

Yes, but I was also thinking of Radiant Historia. Stocke was such a competent badass that even his former employer couldn't foresee him surviving betrayal by copying an invisibility technique that he'd seen just moments before.

Low level pirate known for his combat thats moving up quick about to assault a waterside castle for that booty.

The job goes wrong and your crew is captured or killed while you fall to the water and "somehow" survive. Some villagers find you and you wake up in a fishing village with amnesia. Eventually you get caught up in some stupid bigger story to save some shit like every game ever. Half way through you meet with your old captain and crew and find out they succeeded that night after all. the mid game plot twist, is that you dont really have amnesia the whole time You forget your "epic journey" and go be a pirate again for a bit and then the world goes to shit before the 3/4 mark which makes all the people team up and win after you go around exploring and solving peoples problems to recruit them. One last excuse to explore the whole world. Gotta love writers convenience.

>assistant to a scholar studying a new field of science
>go on expidition
>goes awry, get kidnapped
>meet someone else who was also kidnapped
>escape but not before they take your mentor elsewhere
>adventure begins

Seeing how this is the story of Buddha, I'm surprised I don't see it more.

The amnesia part sound more like brain washing, amnesia would mean he lost his memories even the events of the last job.

Eastern stories and folklore aren't that popular in the west. People tried doing journey to the west only for it to get mediocre sales.

brain washing or personal motives, whatever floats your boat.

I just like pirates even if they dont play a huge role in the game.

>mfw i have been judged

>You're a 19th century polish composer in the throes of death, suffering from cracked out fever dreams during your final moments
>You relive your life through a metaphoric hyper-anime adventure filled with moe blobs, big tittied healers, and two-handed-buster-swordsman all named after musical instruments and genres
>You're the final boss, and your dream compatriots fight you in a flowery field as your greatest and most renowned composition serves as background music

Even in jrpgs it isn't common.

I really liked the idea of ffX's origin just executed poorly. I mean you are a dream version on reality when at first you thought you just time traveled. Too bad the game wanlsnt that good.

They use elements, but the rpg to them is more medieval with knights and shit, those stories don't grab people like magic and d and d stuff does.

eternal sonata was pretty eh

The setting of BG1 and 2 are great. On the road to revenge for your foster father death, you uncover a plot to undermine one nation by monopolizing trade for good quality weapons.

BG2 you escape a maniac dungeon who was experimenting on your soul.

I would love to have a story where you are on the run and you have to avoid getting caught. If you do you have to escape how many times you get caught effects the story.

>amnesia
Washing up on a beach goes well that that!

That's a remake only thing. The real game starts with you waking up and 'go see the king'.

Your mum's vagina

Maybe some kind of Janissary type thing.

Like you get taken from your family as a child to be raised as a soldier in an evil cockroach's army

It's the entire plot of Xenogears. Fei is pretty much to blame for everything, even his rival is him

>Be a cat pirate captain
>Get caught by disgusting Spanish dogs
>Sent to prison to be executed in the morning
>Crew dead, no way to escape
>Just as kitty pirate is about to give up hope he finds a letter about the magical Nine Lives Amulet
>Forces his way out of jail, kills the Spanish officer that captured him and sets out to find the amulet.

Yes, this is a game that actually exists

The player has amnesia is the only way to go

A normal highschooler died because of an accident and got reincarnated to a fantasy world but still retain his previous memory.

Looks like the story of Jake in the dark tower books.

That game sucked and had a stupid (if unique, so encouraged) premise.

You're an astronaut who crashed on a planet you were sent to do reconnaissance on.

Most memorable one was when our GM told us our characters woke up in a barn, their balls chopped off.

A devout follower of a church. Seemingly just another lowly follower, no one special.
The church holds an event for the town. A brand new affair. This event has a special ceremony.
During the ceremony, it appears as though a special person in the church is going to be touched by god's divine light. When suddenly, the MC absorbs the light. Right there in front of everyone, the MC is granted some kind of gift.
What should be a miraculous moment, is cut short by accusations of heresy by one of the heads of the church. You're accused of thievery and evil. Because the way they see it, the gift was not meant for you. You must have done some underhanded dead to steal away god's gift.

So they try to attack you, but divine light protects you, and you're able to escape, an outcast.

The remainder of the game is trying to figure out how you obtained the light, and if it was a gift, or a curse.

The girl whose gift was "stolen", is taken under the wing of the church as something of a saint and a martyr. She's turned into some weird idol. A symbol of persistent faith, even when disturbed by evil, she remains devout. Or at least that's the idea the church is selling. In reality, initially believing that she was robbed, ends up doubting if the gift was ever meant for her. She finds it increasingly more difficult to believe what the church says. What's more confusing, is that she did actually get a small fragment of the gift. Using that fragment to perform small miracles. She wonders if that fragment even belongs to her.

Anyway... Halfway through the game, you and the other girl finally confront each other. But by that point in time, she's wanting to know more about the gift, and work alongside the MC, so she joins your party.

Yeah, i've always wanted a game like that. Some adventure game/RPG where you start as maybe a 12-17 year old, and then the game would skip like 7-8 years once in a while