Well, that’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla! Most of my gaming buds dislike random generation, and prefer point-build systems. (A friend of mine is big into GURPS, which is a bit too complex a system for me.)
TSR had another offering, “En Garde,” which was a 3-musketeers sort of affair, where you gambled and visited courtesans and fought duels. EXTREMELY rigid. It wasn’t really so much an rpg as a “computer game,” with a limited-option decision tree. It was more of a “party game” than a role-player, although, of course, it was fun to put on extraordinary Franch Accetnz and pose and posture.
(There are those of us who “role play” Mille Bournes, by going “Vroom, vrroom!” and “Screeeech…BANG!”)
Oh, yeah, that was my main RPG for years. But character gen wasn’t very random, beyond what you rolled for attributes. If you wanted to play a tank-pooping cyborg, you just picked that tank-pooping cyborg class and rolled up your character. I did actually like the massive power disparity between classes, although it could have been handled better. I like the idea that the setting was broad enough to allow players to be anything from squishies with a laser pistol and light armor, to actual fucking dragons. Some sort of tier system, so you could easily tell that these groups of characters are at one power level, and these other characters are stronger, would have helped a lot.
Interestingly for this discussion, they just released a total rule conversion for Rifts using the Savage Worlds rule set. I’m not sure if this is a Savage Worlds thing, or something just for the Rifts setting, but each character gets a number of rolls (usually around five) on background tables. It’s not a determinative at the Traveler system - you can’t die during character creation, and the over all type of character you play is still your choice - but it gives you a lot of neat little edges and nudges to help you flesh out your character.
I hadn’t noticed at first, but even though this thread started with a literary reference, it’s mostly discussion of gaming, now. Off to the Game Room.
[Not moderating]
One character generation system I’ve pondered would be to have all stats plus race generated randomly (with race weighted according to how common each is in your gaming world), but with the generation being done twenty or so times, with the player then picking which one of those twenty they want. After all, the usual explanation given for adventurers being above-average is that the average folks mostly just stay home and work on the farm, or whatever it is they do. So those other 19 character rolls you didn’t pick are the ones who stayed on the farm. And this lets you mostly play what you’d like (unless you’re really unlucky), while still keeping you from having total control, and providing the roleplaying hooks of having stats not quite how you’d like them.
Obviously this would be quite slow for pencil and paper, but it’d be very easy to computerize (complete with buttons to sort the characters by estimated suitability for various classes).
I’ve seen this in alternative D&D build schema. Also variants where you roll for STR five times, DEX five times, etc. And systems where you roll four (or five!) dice and keep the three you like.
In one Call of Cthulhu game I played in, I wanted my character to be a down-at-the-heels street reporter, while another player wanted to run a town doctor. I rolled very high for “wealth” – and the other player rolled very low. The ref allowed us to swap!
Sometimes, “Intelligent Design” is a good thing!
(This is, perhaps, more common among “story teller” players than among “wargamers” or “role players.” “Power gamers” will favor ANYTHING that helps maximize stats.)
Yup! (And when people ask what I, personally, would do if propelled into a D&D world, the answer is “stay indoors and teach arithmetic.”)