I've known about the Forge for a long time but this is my first attempt at becoming a more active member. Currently, I'm working on a anime/manga mecha game that's aimed at more of a gamest/narrativist (I know that those two things are normally contradictory) market than any of the simulationist mecha systems I know of out there (Mekton, BESM Mecha, D20 Mecha, Mechwarrior, etc...). Here's my question:
I've always been inspired by the character's creation in the original black-book Traveller, and though I recently found it to be a lot less vivid than I remember, I really like the idea of randomly generating a character, not just a character's stats, but there upbringing,background, world view, etc... Whether or not this is a good idea in general is always up for discussion, and I definitely have supporting reasons, but my big road block right now is how to do with out being to tedious. There's so much a player needs to know to play a character well, especially when extrapolating how to play a character. In a sense, what I want to do with character creation is the opposite of what most games seem to do. Instead of working from the knowledge of how you want to play the character and then assigning traits to represent this in the game world/system, I want to present players with a list of traits that they then use to extrapolate how they're going to portray the character in the game. Any ideas?

Hi Nolan,

A while ago I blogged about the character creation mechanics for a game I was designing back in college. Chargen was drawing from a deck of special cards and choosing your character's descriptors from options presented on them:

http://rpgtalk.net/paulc/weblog/321.html

http://rpgtalk.net/paulc/weblog/326.html

You could do something similar. Rather than rolling for skills (and survival) like in Traveller, perhaps players draw from different groups of cards for various life experiences. A card from the "smuggling and blockade running" deck might present choices of descriptors like:

1 Leadership
2 Resourceful, Injured
3 Charismatic, and draw a card from the "incarcerated" deck

Paul

Hello,

I always thought Cyberpunk had a good character generation system. The latest Traveller game is decent. Star Trek RPG had the best as far as fleshing out the character's background as well as enhancing the stats and skills.

What traits will you give them? Are they categories or descriptions of the character's abilities?

Troy

As I have it right now, there are 36 traits, and players use a deck of playing cards for each of the traits. The traits are things like "Upbringing" and "Style/Dress" each suit represents a broad category (for example, drawing a Heart in Upbringing results in "Happy Home") the number is then used to indicate how influetial that particular trait is to the character's personality/outlook/whatever with a two being "little impact" and a 10 being "a great deal."