Gamma World certainly qualifies as risky, as do Empire of the Petal Throne, early RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and perhaps a few others, but, by and large, RPGs seem to have minimized or move away from such things entirely. The kind of risk assessment that comes with creating a Traveller character is something I enjoy and I find myself wishing that more games included character generation as "risky" as Traveller's. It's why I continue to believe it's probably the best character generation system ever created for a tabletop RPG.Īs I think more on it, I realize that I like the "gambling" aspect of character generation a great deal. More than a few truly memorable characters were created because of the way Traveller generates PCs. In Traveller, I've long aimed to create Naval/Marine doctors - no idea why - but often the character generation rules have other ideas. Like a lot of gamers I have certain "types" of characters that, if given the chance, I like to play. There's also the chance that you won't wind up with the character you intended to create but with someone just as, if not more, interesting.
There's always a chance that the random rolls will turn against you and your "perfect" character will be killed in action, requiring you to start over. If one is using a computer program, which cannot fudge its results, this process is a lot harder than one might think. I actually find it extraordinarily diverting to roll up a random set of characteristics for a character and then see if I can press my luck by getting him into the service I want, with the skills, rank, and mustering out benefits that I'd like as well. It's become my new time waster, much in the way that many people play Solitaire or Minesweeper or those little Facebook apps. The other day I discovered a simple little computer program that lets you generate Traveller characters.
0 kommentar(er)
