A Life Well Lived Reactions

A Life Well Lived is a new title from Cubicle7 in their 5e Vault line, building out new systems for 5e and will also be compatible with their own upcoming C7d20 system. This system is designed to help players “discover” rather than build their character, providing general background information that they can flesh out on their own. Additionally it includes new downtime activities and a system for retiring adventurers.

Lifepath

I decided to build a character using the system so that I could walk through the process from cradle to grave (pun intended). 

Character: Tekwack

Lineage: Gnome

Life Path

• Origins: 
• Temperament: The Pegasus, CHA +1
• Family:
• Parents: Same lineage
• Prosperity: Poverty 
• Upbringing: Strict discipline 
• Family Size: Extended, 9 members 
• 4 Family Bonds
• Early Childhood:
• Environment: Coastal Village, experience INT +1
• Adolescence:
• Experience: Animal Handling skill
• Life Lesson:
• Hunger: INT +1
• Pivotal Moment:
• Defining Event: Grand Festival
• Occupation: Musician (proficiencies: Musical Instrument (flute), Performance, 1d8 income die
• Proficiency: Musical Instrument (Bagpipes)
• Quirks
• Naive: Disadvantage on Insight checks to discern lies, advantage on attack rolls outside combat 
• Class: Wizard (+1 INT)
• Call to Adventure: 
• Left because home was destroyed 
• Starting funds: 15 gp
• Attribute Scores (Rolled 2d6 + 6 randomly and assigned)
• STR 10 DEX 15 CON 14 INT 15 WIS 14 CHA 13
• Lies We Tell Ourselves
• They’ll leave if they see the real me.
• Skeletons in the Closet
• It’s easier to tell others the nice version of events from your Adolescence, but you actually learned those skills in a more questionable manner.
• Connections: Determined with other players
• Goals:
• Short term: Find a like minded group of companions to discuss my thoughts with.
• Long term: one day teach all I’ve learned to students in the most prestigious academy in the realm.

Lineage

This section has a random table to select your lineage, but also includes modified traits for each lineage. These are derived from the 5.1 SRD, but don’t include any ability score increases or the modified ability score assignment. This all makes sense. The main drawbacks I see are that this doesn’t include all the options that I might make available in a given campaign (like my Midgard campaign where they can play anything from a Darakhul ghoul to a hedgehog folk). Additionally because it does away with subspecies for each ancestry the system creates some extra work for the GM looking to convert other publishers’ options.

Lifepath

There’s a lot here, from your zodiac symbol to determine your temperament to how you were raised. And some of your experiences growing up.

In the origins section it mostly focuses on how you were raised, but also includes your astrological symbol. This is billed as a replacement for alignment, which I’m not sure I like any better. A d12 roll versus picking from a 3 x 3 array doesn’t seem to empower the player any more. One is certainly more arbitrary. You also get one of your ASI from this roll. 

The childhood and adolescent experiences provide another ASI and a skill proficiency. Again, I like the flavor that’s captured with these, and it’s an interesting implementation, but I (and probably others) would generally prefer to be able to pick these, as you do with the ability to modify your background and swap proficiencies. The pivotal moment is also interesting, but another ASI is assigned for you. Occupation provides further proficiencies normal provided by the background. It also completely lacks any sort of occupations for a sage or acolyte, making creating clerics or wizards very non-archetypal. Choosing your class also gives you another ASI, making it the fourth one you get.

I like the call to adventure, although it mainly provides flavor a clever GM could tie some of these motivations into the campaign, forging closer personal connection for character arcs with existing material.

Quirks, lies, and skeletons in the closet essentially seem like ideals, bonds, and flaws. I’m not sure that rolling for them in this process really impacts the likelihood of players actually following them at all, but I’d love to be surprised.

Attribute Scores

The alternate standard array presented here makes sense because you get no fewer than 4 ability score increases from the life path system. But the rolling seems a bit crazy to me with 2d6 + 6 as the formula. I rolled my example above and got no score less than a 10, and my average was around 13.5 or a 14. Combined with my score increases I have a super multiple ability dependent (MAD) wizard build with okay charisma. So I’ll play a super charismatic Bladesinger. I could have just as easily decided to be a smart paladin, or a slightly charismatic artificer, or a sorcerer or warlock. Or a bard just good at all the things. My main point is I think this is pretty generous most of the time for your ability rolls, so you’ll definitely have superheroic characters from this system. I’d be rolling every time if I were a player.

Connections & Goals

These tables and concepts I do really like. Connections because a random roll can be helpful in coming up with an effective idea to tie two characters together. Goals are really the winner here for me though. The Dungeon Dudes also do something similar in Dungeons of Drakkenheim with long term goals tied specifically to that campaign that earn a feat subject to GM approval or give you a +2 ASI. More unique here are the tables providing inspiration for short term goals, along with level appropriate XP awards or narrative awards. I actually really like these, and based on my recent foray into playing with exclusively XP-based leveling, the numbers also make sense for the given ranges. Enough to be an incentive, but not so much that players will ignore the main campaign or monster fighting. This entire system along with narrative awards seems a great way to get players to think about how their character would act. There’s also a brief section about party goals that honestly could be more fleshed out, but I understand it’s more difficult to provide examples or a table of these because they’re often campaign specific.

The lifepath system is very much a departure in form from the normal process for creating D&D characters. It obviously takes inspiration from other similar systems like those found in Traveller. It’s a system you’ll need to get your players on-board with if you choose to use it. To be honest, I don’t know if I’d want to use it as a player, but I do like the goals and connections that can help connect a party. But “rolling a character” with even more random rolls than the six ability scores doesn’t necessarily appeal to me. Although I probably would play the gnome above, and I have an idea or two how I could make him fit for a Midgard campaign as a Neimheim Gnome. I may end up allow my players to make a character this way if they choose to in my next campaign, but I certainly won’t be forcing them to use this system.

Campfire Craft

These are activities designed to be conducted during a long rest. In fact they’re the sort of activities that one hopes your players simply come up with, but for those who are less creative or don’t think about it the system is nice so they can pick options “a la carte” if you will.

Downtime

This chapter provides an entire new system of downtime activities, similar to those found in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, but with Cubicle7’s unique spins. Most of them either come down to what they call an extended test (which is a skill challenge, with multiple skill tests). Others appear to succeed automatically with some roleplaying. They are generally more fleshed out that those from other sources, and I like the progression system that they came up with for various skill training that doesn’t require me to add up hours in a given workweek and see if the player finally does enough hours and pays enough gold to get their skill or language. It just limits characters to three downtime activities per downtime, with each activity taking at least a week. One thing it does almost exactly the same, but without as many random tables is allowing you to develop a connection with an ally or rival based on performance of certain activities. 

This is a good section, and along with the campfire craft activities it’s really the best part of the book. I’d recommend pulling downtime activities from other sources and modifying them to fit into this system. You can hand players a list of options or they can come up with their own ideas of things to do.

A Place to Call Home

Provided here is an entire system to create home bases for a party or character. This section resulted from a stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign, so It’s not as integrated with the rest of the book as it could be, but it is better integrated than the section on generating fantastic locations in Uncharted Journeys.

It’s reminiscent of Strongholds & Followers, but goes into very specific detail about the rooms in a player base and the benefits they confer, which general confer buffs that may aid the player with a camp craft or downtime activity. I feel that this system works much more for a manor house or actual home, probably as intended, than for a fortress. Where Strongholds & Followers looks at introducing a domain level of play, providing advantages to players who construct or capture strongholds and spend time there, the activities suggested in this section really focus on enabling personal role play and developing the relationships between characters and individual character identity. I don’t think I’d attempt to mash the systems together, because they both facilitate different styles of play that are appropriate for different campaigns. For instance, I think this system is much better for a city-based campaign where strongholds are largely unnecessary and you really want to ground your players in the setting and get them attached to the location. I’d also use it to help players put down roots in a more human way—while a stronghold gives them political and fighting power, a home provides them something they can customize and build for themselves, and sets them up if they want to engage in long term downtime activities like raising a family. (Although I’m already thinking of ways to combine them…I lied. I might try).

Who Pulls the Strings 

While other books discuss patrons, in this chapter a pretty comprehensive system is provided to generate a patron and even determine specific benefits that that patron can provide you. This section seems like it would be well combined with patron options like those outlined in Eberron: Rising from the Last War to create some compelling situations and generate interesting patron NPCs. I have yet to run a campaign using patrons as a framing device (I like having the characters drive their own choices) but I may in the future. It’s an interesting chapter, but not really all that unique.

Hanging Up Your Sword

This section discusses what happens when you retire a character. It’s pretty light on mechanics, focusing instead on how to frame a retirement narratively and ways to use a retired character as a patron or NPC for the party. It’s an interesting discussion, but I don’t feel it delivers completely on the promise of a full system from the end of the adventuring life. Basically you get vague prompts that it suggests you roll for each decade they live and then the player gets to write their excessively long epilogue detailing the rest of the character’s life.

Final Thoughts and Parting Shots

Overall, A Life Well Lived generally lives up to its premise. Its best structures are campcraft and downtime. The life path system provides some interesting narrative options, but its character creation system probably won’t satisfy everyone in your group. The home is an interesting and creative way to build a stronghold or shared home base. Patrons give some more info on how to employ these NPCs in your game. Retirement is mostly focused on narrative devices and more random tables, 

One area that disappointed me is the lack of explicit tie-in support with Uncharted Journeys. There is only one in-text reference to the other title in the book, and it’s about the map room option in the home section. No discussion of how to integrate camp craft activities which are performed over a long rest into a system which explicitly limits long resting. I can solve this problem myself (the buffs are pretty good even if only short term, and will help the players on a journey, so I’ll only allow them to do camp craft on the long rest immediately prior to the journey and if there is a random rest opportunity. Otherwise they can only do camp craft if they’re in a relatively stable location, like near the town or dungeon they journeyed to. Small jaunts in a city or local area don’t trigger a journey, and camp craft can be done over long rests in these areas). But I shouldn’t have had to write that up—it should be included because the products are advertised as being mutually supporting systems. And it really would have been as easy as the paragraph above.

The book is not very long at all, at 133 pages of content. This is not the tome that provides thousands of table results like Uncharted Journeys, although it definitely could have included more material and random tables to help flesh out life events further and provide more options. I would like to have a look at Cubicle 7’s Broken Weave, because based on its description it is the product that tested most of the systems that Cubicle 7 is now releasing as part of its Vault 5e line. Broken Weave purports to provide a haven system to give a safe home base to characters and a system to have successive generations of adventures from a haven. Sounds awfully similar to this, and I’m wondering what differences there are in presentation and content.

Overall, while I like the goals discussion, and the campfire craft and downtime systems, this product isn’t my favorite from Cubicle 7. They knocked it out of the park with Uncharted Journeys, but compared to it A Life Well Lived feels a bit hollow. The life path system is a bit inflexible and too light on player choice for me while lacking sufficient diversity in backgrounds to recommend it over normal 5e character creation. If you are interested in the campfire craft or downtime activities perhaps pick up the pdf to try them out. Otherwise this is one you can probably pass on.

Edit as of 10 March 2024:

I just held a session zero for an Empire of the Ghouls campaign in the Midgard campaign setting. Two of my players found the lifepath system interesting in A Life Well Lived and elected to roll their characters following its process. We had them flavor their ancestry based on the material in the Midgard Heroes Handbook and Tome of Heroes. We ended up with a winterfolk halfling pugilist (using Benjamin Huffman's pugilist class), and a River Elf Justice domain cleric of Valeresh. They seemed to enjoy the randomness of creating their characters, and didn't mind the choices made for them. I was correct that the stat roll method presented here tends to skew high, but I figure it's okay to be generous if they're trusting their entire character choice to the luck of the dice. They also generated short and long term goals for their characters. I'm interested to see how the story develops and what happens next.