Randomized Character Creation: a good thing for beginners?

[Christoffer Lernö]

It was a long time since I GM:ed a total beginner, and a solo adventure at that.

I was running a really old Swedish RPG which had a lot of randomized elements during character creation.

I was struck by how nice it was to have this randomness helping a new player to make a character. I don't know how many times I've walked players through character creation, explaining what skills they can choose while they don't really have a clue of what the world is like.

Randomness isn't for every game of course, but I'm wondering if it shouldn't be a thing to use more often? Especially if you let it be "roll or choose".

Is there some good reason why not have randomized character creation at least as an option?

[Mark Johnson]

Is there a good reason to have randomized character creation as an option?  

How does randomness make character creation easier?  

Have you looked at simple templates?  

Is your space or focus better used doing something else?

If randomized character creation sometimes produces "better" characters in a gamist sense, wouldn't players keep "rolling" characters until they get one they like rather than constructing their characters from scratch?

Would you provide some meta-game reward for those who use "worse" characters to overcome a particular challenge?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

This is an interesting topic for discussion, Christoffer. I, like you and probably like many here, have forgotten what it's like to be a total newbie to roleplaying. Thinking right off the top of my head, I have a couple ideas on the matter.

I would say that for the total newbie, the best approach is to have 3-5 premade characters to choose from. This way they can get right into playing which is the meat of it. This is my opinion.

Even today I find the character creation process boring and tedius whether it takes five minutes or it takes a five hours. I can imagine a neophyte roleplayer would find it boring, tedious, and largely confusing.

I suppose it could be argued that the character creation process is a new player's first contact with system and an important learning experience. I have my doubt about that. Especially with the random character creation you're describing. It would be just as easy to justy roll the dice you are told and write down what you are told than to learn what any of it actually means. Besides, I personally think you don't learn anything about a game system until you see it in action. ("I thought having 400 in my sword skill would make me a world-class swordsman but it turns out I am really pathetic")

I don't think building a car is necessary to learning how to drive one, to coin a rather lame analogy

[Lugaru]

As much as I suport using random or premade characters to start roleplaying, the random tables must be good ones. You know... have interaction between rolls.

It sucks when you have 4 completely unrelated skills totally maxed out.

What Im planing on doing my self is a bit of a random path chart thingy where at each segment you make a roll regarding some challenge you faced or whatever and depending on what you get, you add certain skills or attributes. That would create randomish characters with a bit of logic to them.

"Ok... say's here a friend of your's was kidnapped by ogres... make a roll to see if you where able to save him... nope... but that's ok, you gain a point in wisdom from the experience... now when you where 12 some a relative offered to pay for your education..."

I think it would be cool... like a tree that can randomly send you to other parts of the tree. Then after perhaps rolling 15 events or so (like from when your 10 to when your 17) you have a character and an opcional history you can flesh out with your own ideas.

Frankly I dont like players to use randomly generated characters but as a responsible creator I must be able to supply the option.

[ThreeGee]

Hey all,

Lifepaths are cool for creating character background, but I prefer Chinese menus for making the actual character. The old Marvel Super Heroes game was a great example of low-impact character creation. You could roll randomly, pick whatever you liked, or both, depending on how inspired you felt or how well you understood the options.

Later,
Grant

[Jack Spencer Jr]

What Im planing on doing my self is a bit of a random path chart thingy where at each segment you make a roll regarding some challenge you faced or whatever and depending on what you get, you add certain skills or attributes. That would create randomish characters with a bit of logic to them.

Hrms sounds like the Mekton Lifepath or Task Force Games's Central Casting. If this is your bag, you might want to check it out. My GM loves using it but after a few years I have since developed a dislike for it. It takes forever to roll up a character this way. As often as not the information created during this process are not used during play. And one thing no one seems to like to talk about such random charts, you wind up getting repeats. I can't tell you how often I've had a character who wound up joining the military because they thought they were signing up for a different government job. Once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Three times or more is just silly. But that's only my opinion of it.

[Christoffer Lernö]

The reason I like the player participation in chargen is that it allows the player to feel later on that their character was something they made themselves.

Pure template-driven creation might be the only option for some games, but the downside is that it might give the feeling that one needs to "upgrade" to a "full-fledged" character. The random method gives an illusion of having created something oneself.

What I'm suggesting isn't to go on a randomizer mayhem, but rather to allow the player to create (i.e. rolling the dice) a character without having any previous knowledge.

For this to work, the system usually already provides some sort of templates, from which the randomization then proceeds.

For example, a game might randomize stats, then have you choose a race out of 5 possibilities, roll an occupation, derive skills from the occupation, roll special abilities and a single special skill.

In other words a few templates with randomized details. Are there any drawbacks to such a method?

As for lifepath stuff. It was fun the first few times playing Mekton and Cyberpunk, then it became more of an annoyance than anything because where non-randomized character creation is faster with time, any life-path system has a minimum amount of time that must be spent writing down and rolling. IMHO

[Mike Holmes]

Like Grant said, Chineese Menu. What makes D&D easy to get into? Not the random rolling. Hell, you could just skip the stats altogether. What makes it accessible and empowering is that you pick from a list of races, and then classes. This simple two step combination is all a player needs to feel that they have customized a character.

Don't want classes? Fine, just have background little templates that the player creates the character from by selecting a few. This allows for greater customization, is easier to contemplate (race/class requires stuff like considering whether or not the class suits the race), and results in characters that are as fun to build as an advanced player as a newbie.

So, the player chooses the dwarf racial template (gives strength, infravision, etc), then chooses the Red Mountain dwarf cultural template (gives level mining skills and proficiency with pick), then warrior template (which allows pumping up pick skill, strength, and things like dodging), then the traveler template (which gives languages and survival skills), etc.

Then have a point based system that allows the player to tinker if they like. That is, if they reduce something in the final design by x, something else can go up by y. Beginners can skip this leaving it for advanced players. If you like how the templates make for reasonable characters, then limit the total number of adjustments so that players can't warp them too far.

Mike

[Walt Freitag]

Point allocation systems, stat-independent Chinese menus, stat-independent non-random lifepaths, and totally free form char gen options all have the same potential drawback: requiring players to start with a "general character concept." Which some players may be disinclined or unable to do. Randomly generating stats first, which begin to establish the "general character concept" and become a simplifying constraint on subsequent char gen options (whether point re-allocation, Chinese menus with stat prerequisites, random lifepaths with stat branching, self-selected lifepaths with stat prerequisites, or whatever) does make a certain amount of sense for these circumstances.

The problem with OAD&D-style "rolled" stats isn't that the stat rolls constrain subsequent choices -- which as Pale Fire points out can be a desirable effect -- but that they do so to a widely different degree depending mainly on variations in the total number of stat points rolled. So one guy's stats gives him practically unconstrained choices and another's come out "hmm, looks like a human cleric." You can't count on subsequent char gen being either sufficiently constrained or sufficiently flexible. (Hence, re-rolling and re-allocating options get tacked on, which defeat part of the purpose of the random stat rolling because they confront new players with complex tactical options that only an experienced player could make informed decisions about.)

I've considered, but never tried, a compromise in the form of randomizing the distribution of a fixed number of stat points. (With all the hundreds of stat-randomizing and stat-allocating schemes I've seen, I'm surprised that I can't remember seeing one like this, though I'm sure it must exist in some systems). One possible method: suppose there are six stats with ranges from 1 to 10, and you intend 36 points to be distributed among them. Roll 36d6; each die that comes up 1 is a point in the first stat, and so forth. This assumes that the stat set is relatively "balanced" in the sense of each stat contributing about equally to the breadth of subsequent char gen options.

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

The fantasy game Fifth Cycle has a method like you suggested, in which one rolls to get (a) a number of points to allocate and (b) maxima for the attributes. It suffers a bit, I think, from the likelihood of generating a sucky character, but the principle seems sound.

A lot of the fantasy heartbreakers that I mention in the two essays present interesting randomization/allocation strategies, mainly I think because they're trying to fix the D&D/AD&D system. Reading them, and then removing the "fix it" agenda, might yield some interesting avenues.

Best,
Ron

[Walt Freitag]

Hmm, if I'm interpreting the description of Fifth Cycle correctly, that's almost 180 degrees opposite from what I was suggesting, which was to fix the total number of points as a constant but randomize the actual allocation of points between the stats. I left the nature of the mechanism unclear due to a premature "and so forth"; let me try again:

One possible method: suppose there are six stats with ranges from 1 to 10, and you intend 36 points to be distributed among them. Roll 36d6; each die that comes up 1 is a point in the first stat, each die that comes up 2 is a point in the second stat, each die that comes up 3 is a point in the third stat, and so forth.

So the result is guaranteed to be as many total stat points as there are dice rolled. A million trials with 6 stats, max score 10, and 36 points allocated (rerolling individual dice as needed to avoid any stat going over 10) yielded the following distribution of stat scores:

0  0.1%
1  0.9%
2  3.3%
3  7.8%
4  13.1%
5  17.0%
6  17.8%
7  15.3%
8  11.2%
9  6.9%
10  6.7%

The idea is to allow the overall character concept to come from (or to be more precise, be significantly constrained by) the dice, while minimizing the risk of a sucky character. This would work best, of course, if the system were free of stat breakpoints and if all the stats are about equally niche-useful.

Still, the idea does have a slight ring of familiarity in my mind. Perhaps some of the other Heartbreakers come closer.

- Walt

[Jack Spencer Jr]

The reason I like the player participation in chargen is that it allows the player to feel later on that their character was something they made themselves.

I suppose. But then an actor taking a part in a play may have had little to do with the creation of that part, especially Shakespeare since he's been dead for a while I am led to believe, but it isn't the part of the lines written down in the script but how the actor plays that part and makes it his own. So it can be with RPGs where the player takes the sheet with numbers on it and breathes life into it.

I get what you're saying. I'm just pointing out a possibility.