Random Character Creation

[FredGarber]

Some random character generation was good, and some was bad:
Traveller was great - I liked the idea of trying to come up with a reason "what happened that he got cashiered out so early?"
I didn't like the Cyberpunk system - I would spend a whole game session building a lifepath - and then get shot in the head and need to start all over again.
D20 was a question of which house rules we used to cheat up our starting scores - I wanted Heroic Fantasy, not Moorcock.

On the other hand, point buy systems , Hero in particular, sometimes took so long that we would spend hours wading through the design system before actually playing - and then sometimes we'd get shot in the head and have to do it all over again.  Sometimes it was so important to design the character right the first time - If I felt that my current character wasn't happy with his chosen career, there was no way to change it without an unrealistic expenditure of XP nuggets -> Try turning a GURPS heavy-armor warrior into a scout sometimes.

To me, random generation is good when it determines the Tools your character uses to succeed, and not the chance of success.  But then, I'm a big believer in games where you don't Suck at the start and have to buy Effectiveness as you play.

[Frank Tarcikowski]

The last two games I played in regularly were Reign and Artesia AKN. Both offer randomised character creation and in both cases we used it. There was one specific difference which made Reign work out very, very well and Artesia not quite so.

In Artesia, you roll a life-path from birth to "game starts". It's pretty complex and you can get nearly any character imaginable. You still have a lot of stuff to choose yourself (your skills, specifically), but you already get a pretty complex picture. My character, for example, ended up being a nobleman with a guilt binding and some experience as a warrior, all complete with Spring Queen heritage, from a small woodland castle in the Erid Wold. I fleshed out his skills pretty much by "what this guy would know". I added some flavor in making him a good-hearted and spiritual fellow for a change, but there wasn't all that much of me in that character. And what's more, he did not fit very well with the other PCs, so they kind of, y'know, stuck together but no one really knew why. The game was still alright, but I didn't engage in it all that much.

Reign, on the other hand, not only allows but demands for you to make something of the results. You can interpret them in totally different ways. And if you cooperate with your fellow players, you can create loads and loads of connections between the characters.

In Artesia, the randomised character creation is a lot of bookkeeping, and sometimes you go, "hey, that's neat", but after that in play, it doesn't pay off that much. In Reign, you get some pieces of your character and your task is to fit them together and make them make sense. That's challenging and fun, and it pays off in actual play. If you and I roll the same results for an Artesia character, we'll be playing the same guy, more or less. It you and I roll the same results for a Reign character, we'll most certainly end up with radically different guys.

P.S.:

"I'm bored, so I'll make a character for fun" (optional addition - Wife: "What are you doing, honey?", Me: "Nothing!")

I love that.

[Frank Tarcikowski]

As it happens, last session I played Reign, I have been faced with the disadvantages of the one-roll chargen: My character simply sucks at everything, sad fact. I like him, but his stats are crap. He's got a little bit of everything and too much of stuff you rarely need. And even with that stuff, like "plead", he's at 6 dice max which still doesn't make for a very good chance of even rolling a set at all, let alone a better set than the other guy. And he really sucks at anything that has to do with fighting, which is not going to improve fast. But Reign's a lot about fighting.