I died in c-gen!

[pyat]

I rolled up two Traveller characters the other day. It was an interesting process. The first one was a Scout Service Bureaucrat with medical training, and the second an Imperium Naval Gunner.

The first guy (a pudgy blue collar genius) died at the age of 29 during assignment to a field mission. The second (a burly, though clumsy, fellow from the upper classes) died at the age of 22, during a planetary siege.

Ah, fun times.

Comments

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Traveller and ... wasn't there some other popular RPG system of that general era that suffered from the same possibility?

I am reminded of how Mutant Chronicles. No, you couldn't die in character generation, but there were certain dead-ends in the character generation process whereby the system basically went, "Okay, you've gambled enough and lost your big chance to play an uber-hero. Now you're down on your luck. Time to start adventuring!" So the gamble came in the form of: If you keep going, you may get higher social standing, more career points to spend on skills, and better starting equipment. OR, you may get a combat injury or suffer a major setback and suddenly - BOOM - you have to start playing. No chance to recover with more lucky die rolls.

If you were allowed to keep rolling up characters until you got lucky, or if you had a too-generous GM who would let you ignore the "bad" rolls ... well, it wasn't hard to end up with some overpowered characters - particularly if you signed up with certain overpowered factions. (I shall resist the urge to get too great into detail about that.) It isn't that I think it's really a problem to have an "overpowered group" as a whole: In that case, the GM just needs to chance the scope of the game. But you could end up with grossly mismatched player characters: One person is a Doomtrooper, the ultimate superhero with tons of skills and abilities and the best equipment ... while someone else is a washed-out nobody who is "On the Dole".

If you wanted to, say, start a campaign with the premise that the PCs are actually supposed to come from the same walk of life (E.g., we're all going to be Doomtroopers, taking on the Dark Legion! We're all going to be corporate marines from Corporation X, defending against corporation Y!) you just couldn't go with the rules as written. If ever I dreaded the prospect of running a campaign where players chose characters who just had no really good reason to have anything to do with each other ... it was made even worse by the randomization of career paths in the original Mutant Chronicles system.

And yet, it was fun to generate characters and see what you'd end up with. The character generation system was kind of a mini-game in its own right.

I suspect that the character generation system was only there to entertain people who would buy all the sourcebooks but never actually *play the game*. For GMs who wanted to actually run campaigns (if they existed), there was no choice but to simply declare by fiat that the players shall play from this limited set of roles, have this many career points to spend on skills, and that's that.

And, really, it wasn't that hard to do. They just never officially suggested it anywhere that I could tell.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

*nods* The only other game that I can think of that can have something similar happen is Hackmaster, and even then it's more likely you'll pick up a missing finger or debt rather than just DIE...

I don't think I've met anyone who played Mutant Hero, but I always liked the cover art!

Wow

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

That's something that was missing in the various point-based character creation systems - gambling. I like the idea that the player can keep pushing his luck by saying "yes, I want another randomly-rolled feature".

Re: Wow

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, it was missing in the traditional random-roll systems like D&D and Palladium as well: There, you roll the dice, you get your stuff. Not really much of a gamble - just luck of the draw to start off.

At least in theory, I can respect the "gambling" aspect of a system like this.

But as a GM and player, I've been in campaigns where great PC power disparity was a point of contention. (E.g., PCs who can do everything everyone else can do - only better - by virtue of an amazingly lucky roll they made ... and usually while nobody was looking, and it wouldn't be proper to question the veracity of the player's claims.)

So, I can really see the appeal of point-based, too.

Re: Wow

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree - I was saying that the gamble was interesting, whereas I consider point-based games to be the default. And in D&D/Palladium, the stats were dull anyways. I know in Palladium 99% of stats didn't matter at all unless you had a value over 16.

I mean the fun of having a player aspect that's actually a gamble, where you start with a midding player and can push your luck.

And yes, I've had campaigns - ones where dice never entered into it, where players designed their own characters from scratch - where I've had one whiny-assed player who complained about his crappy character from day 1. And dice just make it worse.