Chargen Fun, Game not-so-much

[SiderisAnon]

Yummy Random Charts

I have to say: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I college, I spent hours and hours creating stacks of NPCs for a game I was running. Most never got used. They were just so fun to make, both from the oddities of the charts and the time spent creating a backstory to support those oddities.


Though they are not technically characters, I'd have to say my second favorite generation, based on time and fun, is from the old d6 Star Wars game in their Planet Guide. They had a system for randomly generating worlds. I have spent hours creating various worlds and whole sectors of space, then creating the fluff to go with them all. Many also have never gotten used. (But I'm always ready if the PCs want to head off in a random direction.)


I guess I just like random charts and having to be creative about what they come up with.

 

[darjr]

How about 'as much fun'?

I recently played in a Mongoose Traveller game where we made characters at the table. The interconnect feature of chargen for party formation worked wonderfully.

We ended up with a pirate that washed out of the marines who saved his old marine boot camp buddy by not shooting him when his unit raided the pirates camp (which the marine later found out about) and a lawyer that had a washed out bumb of a son who tried to make it as a pirate with the afore mentioned pirates gang who also turned out to defend said pirate cause he saved said bumbs life from other pirates..... whew... the lawyer was then driven out of the profession cause he 'bent' the rules to save said pirate. The marine later left the service to go adventuring with his old pirate buddy cause he owed him his life. A marine, a pirate, an EX lawyer and his bumb kid.

Oh yea, They all took up with an ex scout who was on the lamb with an escaped psion experiment that he rescued.

The following game of rikki tiki traveller was just as much fun.

 

[Dice4Hire]

This thread reminds me of a forum that I used to frequent, but will not mention here to protect the guilty.

Such wild enthusiasm for making characters, talking about their builds, and meshing histories and backstories and little details., People jumping into the character creation process with both feet, after the obligitory "I'm not sure if I can fit in another game, but this one is so cool ......"

Then watch the game fall apart within weeks ,days, or months when no one has time to post to the actual game, after posting multiple times a day making their characters.

Repeat ad nauseum. It was rather amusing in a perverse way unless you wanted to run or play a serious game over there.

 

[Dyson Logos]

Ever play a game where MAKING a character was more fun than running him?

Your TMNT reference is not lost here - however I disagree that the whole thing was better than the game play. The initial stages of chargen were awesome (getting your animal, mutating it with Bio-E, and finding out your background), but then you had the tedium of having to pick out 40 skills, and then modify your stats because of your physical skills, and then spend the tens of thousands of dollars you might have in hardware if you got the right background. That was TEDIOUS. Made gameplay seem like a truckload of fun after all that.

I think that Palladium finally fixed this over-abundance of skills (and the fact that most of the physical skills modify your ability scores) issue with the newest version of Robotech, where you basically get to pick one or two of your skills, the rest are chosen as part of your O.C.C. and M.O.S. choices.

The Mongoose version of Traveller definitely has the "most fun" chargen of all the Traveller editions to date. I'm a big fan. I could make characters for days (I used to with MegaTraveller - rolled up sheet after sheet of characters - and since a character only takes up a few lines on a sheet when it's done, that's a lot of characters).

I've been making characters for all my RPGs for my blog, I've got 40-some-odd up there now, and plan to have at least one for each of 200 games, and then start making "suitably advanced" characters for most of them. I love Chargen, and doing it like this has taught me a lot about the pros and cons of layout, design and levels of complexity in Chargen.

Car Wars

Ha ha. Character creation in Car Wars is picking two skills (or three if you don't want a +1 in one of them) and then adding three boxes to your car (your hit points) to represent the driver.

 

[aurance]

I'm gonna have to go with TMNT as well. Intriguing character generation, but bizarre game mechanics otherwise.

 

[scruffygrognard]

I'd go with I.C.E.'s Rolemaster or MERP games here. I loved the options and room for growth that were built into chargen.

Unfortunately both games were too bogged down by their rules to play for an extended campaign (at least they were back in the mid 80s when I was an early teen trying to play those games).

 

[JeffB]

Oh sure...plenty. Going off memory...

Adventures in Fantasy (sorry Dave)

(sorry Gary)

(making a character was still torture, but MORE fun than playing)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Wow- a vote for Universe? I relate...

But honestly, I could say that of any system. I love designing PCs, but rarely does the campaign match up to the images floating in my head.

That said, some systems are worse than others. The various Palladium systems are like that. To a certain extent, CoC and Paranoia have that flaw...but for different reasons- both games have high PC mortality rates, but in addition, Paranoia is just stone funny.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

I really enjoy building a 3e character, so much that I'd literally spend days and weeks building one for a game that started at say level 5 or higher. THe game itself is just "ok" after the newness wore off. And a downright chore at high levels.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Hackmaster. We had an absolute blast making near completely random characters. Really funny stuff came up like the Fairy magic user with no short term memory and. her dumb as a stump half-ogre bodyguard.

Then we tried to play it and the fun died. Too bad. Probably should have just used the characters in an AD&D game instead.