Random Character Creation: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

    As part of the ongoing Prismatic Wasteland Randomness Blogwagon, I'm writing exactly 2,000 (so long as you don't count) words on random character creation in roleplaying games, why I think it's good, and why I think it's bad, because if nothing else Magnolia Keep is a land of (roll 1d6):

1. Homosexuality
2. Barely restrained, simmering rage
3. Mangoes
4. Autism
5. A deep-seated void of self-loathing
6. Contrast

I'm always fascinated by the headers of Wikipedia articles. Like, the Wikipedia article for "Human anus"-what Japanese woman's asshole is that? Does she know? Did she upload it herself? 

Procedural Storytelling

    I'm a big fan of games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld where the mechanics are set up in such a way that it produces a story-a colonist gets in a fight with a cassowary, loses a lung, and then has it replaced with one we harvested from a prisoner. Two people fall in love, get married, have children together, then each decide to cheat on their spouse while remaining married. These kinds of mechanics can write sagas by themselves, but the tabletop world has them, too. "Lifepath" character creation-figuring out exactly what your character was up to before you joined this pirate crew can help create a rich character background that ends up having mechanical effects on the game!

    Traveller is the great-granddaddy of this style of character creation (though shoutout to my Cyberpunk 2020 PC who was raised by a nomadic polycule), with your PC having a minimum of eighteen years to twenty-two years of their upbringing based on what kind of shenanigans you get up to. By the end, what you've created is a story in and of itself, with its own trials and tribulations your GM can bring into the game. While the old "Die if you lose your survival roll" thing made sense both in-world and potentially as a way to make sure you take your career seriously, I do think creating room for "Failed scientist" or "Drummed out of the Marines" can make for a more interesting tale than Corpse #5. 

Shaking Things Up

    Even the best creatives can sometimes end up doing the same thing over and over, whether it's to do with Sonic or Tolkien or Clone Troopers or whatever. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, to be clear-absolutely make the stuff you want! But around the time I wrote my fifth "These people were made to be soldiers and their personal autonomy was stamped out" I began to wonder whether I should be talking to my therapist about this. 

Penny Arcade-The Cubes Win

    Adding randomness into the mix can give you prompts that you have to think about, going "Hmmm, how did I go from working as a dung farmer to a barbarian?" In the DnD campaign I'm currently in, my artificier randomly rolled that she grew up in a circus, which influenced my choice to make her proficient in Cooking Tools due to working the concession stand. It functions essentially as a player-facing Spark Table which can potentially get into more depth because it's built for the majority of the players at the table. 

    There's a lot of different generators for this kind of thing but the gold standard for me, at least for Dragon Games, is Pathfinder 1E's Ultimate Campaign which, due to the fact that Pathfinder had a fuckton of different classes at the time it was written, means you can get inspiration for a wide variety of fantasy archetypes. It also, in the context of First Edition, helped avoid the problem of everyone being bullied as a child for that sweet sweet Initiative Bonus. 

Not Just Stats

    When randomly creating a character, I always find just finding out "You have a 16 Strength" to be kind of boring. Like sure I'm a strong dude, but what does that mean besides a bonus to hit/damage/picking up picnic tables? I'll grant this philosophy runs entirely contrary to the idea of "The game is what happens at the table" but I'm the kind of sucker who can't help but imagine Percy's life as the village smartypants before he gets stabbed to death by troglodytes or succumbs to a fatal case of otyugh-induced apoplexy. Having some kind of extra Fiction Nugget, like the lifepath stuff mentioned above, is part of why Traveller is known and beloved after fifty years while the Without Number games by Sine Nomine are primarily known for their random tables. It's just not as fun to make a character who is largely a stat block.  

    For a great example of this, Beyond the Wall's playbooks are each tied to the player being a specific person in their home village, with their backstory contributing to their stats and also tying people to each other. It's fantastic. 

Curated Randomness

    A cool trend that I've been noticing (which means it's probably twenty years old and I'm late to the party) is the addition of curated randomness into creating things, randomly generating a list that you then pick from. Mentioned previously on this blog, Sentinel Comics has not one but four curated random tables for you to go through as you make your character: your Background, Power Source, Archetype, and Personality. The fantastic Spectaculars has your character pick from 1-3 of Five superpowers you draw, as well as a few generic powers available like Super Strength and stuff, as well as 1 from 3 Identities. It's great at giving people a bit more shape to their characters, since these identities determine your skill percentages and each power has its own unique special abilities. I like curated randomness because it allows for little bits of authorial nudging without feeling like you're "cheating" by ignoring a result you don't like. If you know of other games that do this kind of thing, please let me know because I'm in love with this stuff. Dungeons and Dragons even has this with the whole "You decide where your stats go" thing, which leads us to...

Absolute Power

    Dungeons and Dragons descended from wargames, where individual pieces were meant to be expendable, and that carried forward into the character creation process of 3d6 Down The Line. However, as early as 1978 it became fairly obvious that that didn't gel with the intended experience the fine folks at TSR wanted to create.

As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow participants to generate a viable character of the race and profession which he or she desires. While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy -which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can't or won't identify with. Character generation, then, is a serious matter, and it is recommended that the following systems be used.

-Dungeon Master's Guide (1979), page 11

    Second Edition then promptly switched back to 3d6 in order, unintentionally setting it as a shibboleth for a lot of the OSR going forward.  And listen, as stated I love random character creation as much as the next bird, but in cases where the ability of a character to affect the world around them is dependent on randomness is a recipe for a feelsbad. I always remember a Stars Without Number game I ran where one PC built himself around Charisma, only for another to simply be more charismatic than him by happenstance. It can suck, which is compounded with games that offer experience bonuses for characters with high stats, as a little extra nugget of fuckyou to the Fighter with a 13 Strength. This isn't unique to Elfgames, of course. My brain immediately jumps to the TSR Marvel game or Palladium's oeuvre, games where things like "How many superpowers you have and how good are they?" are determined solely by random chance.

Tfw Jerry rolled the .0009% chance to be a Paladin, but you're stuck as a fighter.

    Now admittedly this is less of an issue in modern word picture play simply because the emphasis is moved away from those statistics: they affect less, and their bonuses and penalties are minimized. But no matter how good you move through your environment, eventually you're going to need to stab a kobold, and then the fact that you were this close to a +1 Strength can really bite. This is also, by the by, why I'm against rolling for Hit Points: Getting Stabbed By A Kobold is ultimately a thing the player can't control, no matter how skilled they are. And that's fine if that's what you're into, but I feel there's something to be said about how "combat is a fail state" because more likely than not your ability to engage with the rules of the game is decided by random chance. My beloved Black Sword Hack uses a bell curve and resolution system that means that most of the time you're looking at about a coin flip odds, with only a 25% gap between the best and worst PC at a given thing. If you're going to have a character's stats decided by dice rolls, I'd like to see more of that, please. 

Conclusion

    So ends a highly-opinionated essay on ways I think randomness can be helpful when creating a character. Whether it's through systems of backstory generation (and tying that to mechanical proficiencies you game has), allowing for some selective ability to cut through the randomness, and minimizing the effect that doing so has on your character's mechanical abilities. I love rolling on random bullshit charts on both sides of the screen, so I hope we keep putting them in games. They rock.