An alternate method of creating player characters



Hmm. We do tend to assume in starting out that characters
have a certain level of skill with a certain number of things.
Some people talk about "class", others about "XP allocation",
some about "starting skills." And we don't think about how
these things came about.

I am reminded of a P&P game a long time ago, science-fictioney
in flavor, where you were given a "child" at the beginning with
no particular skills, a family situation (abstracted - it
involved whether your family were noble, rich, landed, or had
certain types of perks and/or genetic mods) and a bunch of
choices. You'd pick a choice, out of a randomly-selected dozen
or so, some dice would be rolled, some skills and background
knowledge areas would be written down on the character ***,
and then it would be a year or two or four later in the character's
life and you'd have a different set of choices - some of which
followed from the first set, and some of which were sorta-random.
So you'd select again, random chances would be rolled again,
some more skills and knowledge areas would go on the character
***, and then it would be a couple years later and you'd be
facing a different set of choices.

So you tended to get starting characters 35 years old, who'd
served a couple hitches in the marines, were owed some favors
by old service buddies, had some amount of gear and money stashed
away, had retained their service training in wilderness survival
and military tactics, and had a reasonable command of the native
language of the occupied territories where they'd been stationed.

Or, a different character about 35 years old, who'd been born
to a noble house, trained to be a CEO in some excellent schools,
had connections to a lot of powerful characters who'd been his
classmates, various qualifications and skills to do with money
management, red-tape management, and schmoozing, and maybe a
beginning mastery of the fencing foil from college physical-
education classes, who spoke four languages well because guests
in his parents' house had been speaking them since he was a child.

And so on. It was a nice balance between "classless" and
"classed" starting characters, and it made perfect sense. You
had choices that made a logical progression through an early
lifetime and explained what skills you'd managed to pick up.
And even though a lot of it was sort of generic (hitches with
various branches of armed service, for example, figured large)
it gave you a good idea who the character was.

Bear


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