What is in your opinion the worst character generation system you've played and why did you hate it so much?

dangerous journey by gygax
why? the game uses its own terminology. for example hp arent hitpoints but heroic personae, etc.

OP asked for the worst character generation system YOU'VE PLAYED, I thought you couldn't play FATAL, only suffer it?

Explain.

Artesia is based on a comic book series wherein mass battle is a *very* prominent aspect of the setting. However, the RPG has absolutely no rules concerning mass battle whatsoever.

Do you know what Artesia *does* have many rules for? Completely mundane, non-magical trees.

The human average in a given base attribute is 5 (with 10 being peak human). The typical tree has Appearance 5, Stamina 8, Presence 8, Conviction 10, Wisdom 10, and is eligible for substantial "racial bonuses" from a "lineage."

>NOTES: * The Body score of a Tree reflects more than just its physical Characteristics, obviously, being in part composed of solid inanimate matter. Unlike animals, a tree dies when it reaches 0 Body; the tree’s remaining Body points to –Body can then be applied to the creation of other things –- for example as logs in a wall, or cut and planed to form planks or poles for walls or furniture. So for example a 30-point tree that was cut down at 0 Body would have 30 Body points left to use as ‘mineral matter’ in building part of a log wall, or if planed into planks could be made into a regular wooden wall with 10 – 15 Body points depending on the thickness of the planks (see the Common Mineral Body Points Table previous). Further, the COUR and EMP ratings for trees are somewhat nominal; trees don’t seem to be afraid of anything, nor do they seem to show much sympathy for other living things (indeed, barely noticing them at all, as they have no PER score).

Fair point. Palladium has a painful character generation because Physical Skills add to attributes (which is a basically neat idea but the execution is poor and a pain-in-the-ass to work through). Also it traditionally lists skills in a table without also listing the associated percentages (eg, base chance of 45%, +3% per level), so you have to comb through skill description for every skill anyway.

But even that never bothered me too much. Chargen isn't something you do all that often.

>The Characteristics block above can be used for most varieties of both hardwood deciduous trees found in the Middle Kingdoms region such as those of the common Birch Tree, Magnolia Tree, Cherry Tree, the Éduins Mountain Ash Tree and White Ash Tree Lineages. A larger variety of hardwood tree is the Danian Maple Tree Lineage, which adds +3 APP and +2 STAM for an average Body of 35. Wood of the Mahogany Tree Lineage is often imported into the East from Samarappa and points West; its wood is very tough, giving furniture a mineral armor value of 12/12/12 and Body of 25. Evergreen tree Lineages such as the Éduins Cypress Lineage and the Danian Cedar Lineage are most often used for log walls; they add +2 APP and +7 STAM and some extra Body for an average Body of 50. The Holly Tree Lineage is also common in the region, but its wood is considered unsuitable for anything but inlay work. High elevations in the Harath Éduins occasionally allow for the White Spruce Tree Lineage, which adds +2 APP and +7 STAM and some extra Body for an average Body of 55. Its wood is sometimes used in sturdy quality furniture and cabinet making (Body 15).

Does... does the author of this game write a comic book about a warrior-priestess in plate armor engaging in contests with mundane trees, where the exact attributes and statistics of a given type of tree are absolutely critical for the story?

I know I sing its praises a lot, but Dragonquest, if you play the RAW, has an absolutely fucktarded aspect of its character creation, and it's so bad that not only do I not play with it, I don't know anyone who plays with it.

>You want to play a non-human PC?
>Roll on this table to see if you can.
>If you fail three rolls in a row, you MUST play a human.

Which of course makes no account for the relative population levels of elves, dwarves, orcs, etc; which might vary from setting to setting.

Doubly so because Humans are mechanically one of if not the most powerful race.

>Artesia: The Known World has a completely randomized character creation system. This is unbalanced because the results on each table are *not* created equal. You might be a divinely blessed and mystically empowered king of a grand nation with superb statistics... or you could be a lowly, sickly, divinely cursed peasant with abysmal statistics.

I see you never played original WFRP.

>character generation system you've played
Are you talking about systems I've actually played a game of, systems I have only created a character in or systems I have failed to create a character in?

Artesia presents the twist of being able to cherry-pick your "random" character creation results.

There are very few instances in character creation where you have no option to bypass randomization, but those that exist offer major benefits for passing a roll, such as becoming a divinely chosen amazon huntress.

Even if you skip these rare forced randomizations, nothing is stopping you from simply choosing to be a god-king with incredible statistics.

WFRP is the shit, though.

>party rolling for classes
>dog-catcher, coachman, beggar and peasant
Forget being big damn heroes - surviving the day is an achievement for that group.

Any given random generator, where you just roll for both fluff and crunch part of your character.
What's the fucking point? I can somehow get the appeal of random stats, especially if it's a horror game, but why the fuck I'm suppose to also roll the character as such?

This completely kills the roleplay value, because you end up with literally random somebody.

I love WFRP. Sure, you may start as a bum, but you can work your way up to Templar.

Shadowrun core, most of the editions.
Why? Severe item restriction.

If your character focuses on wealth, they should be able to use that wealth. No matter how much money you collect, there will always be stuff to buy. And there is already some drawbacks to high end gear - you will stand out more, it is often restricted or forbidden, and it might be harder to replace and is more expensive.

Thus, if you're willing to spend your cash on some high end gear, you should be able to do so.

Something like warhammer fantasy roleplay 2nd.

I like rolling for my character's natural aptitudes (stats) while being somewhat effected by my choice of race. Then, I like the whole profession system.

Someone's salty they couldn't get the Thunderstruck.

You can use your starting nuyen easily to buy all kinds of crap, everything from good and highly illegal cyberware to armies of drones with assault rifles to powerful magic foci. If you want something extra-special and beyond the normal limit of things you can buy, you need Restricted Gear. An inability to just buy heavy milspec armour at chargen is not the bad part of Shadowrun chargen.

At least with 4e and 5e, the bad part is how fucking nonsensical the system is, with so many interdependent factors that you need Chummer or HeroLab to do it, and even then the people writing those programs need to put in their own interpretations of the rules because the books are unclear.

Wait, what?! SR's priority system is one of my fave chargen systems. Just because you can't play Tony Stark as a starting character, it doesn't mean it's a bad system.

Came here to post this, I'm running a Shadowrun campaign for my group and I still don't fully grasp character creation

What the fuck?

Varg's RPG, MyFARoG.

It was a sadistic experience for all involved.

And although I love it, GURPS 4e creation by hand was probably the most difficult character creation I've done. Now I have GCS to radically simplify the process, but holy shit the original take was like a 5 hour affair.

Anima, another game I love to play, has a character creation process that's both complicated and obtuse, involving a great deal of math if done by hand.

Easiest character creation is probably VtM or any oWoD game except MtAs, really.

Mutants & Masterminds.
Any system more or less requiring a computer program for CharGen (or severe autism) is too complex.

RIFTS is pretty bad, with stats that mean absolutely nothing unless you roll increably well, the skills are a mess to put together on a sheet. Trying to figure out what bonuses you get for weapons is a bitch to find in some of the books.

Fuck that's not to even mention the retard who put these books together, holy shit how did these things sell, I mean you can find shit eventually but the way it's put together seems like it was written by someone who just wrote it as he thought it up, with no sense of order.

All that said I still do like the system, I just don't like talking hours to make a character.

The nice thing about Rifts is that you can roll everything randomly super-fast, because 90% of it doesn't matter, and you don't need to work out 99% of the skills.

>You can use your starting nuyen easily to buy all kinds of crap, everything from good and highly illegal cyberware to armies of drones with assault rifles to powerful magic foci.

Most of this stuff, while not too expensive for starting characters to buy, nor unreasonable for them to have, is unavailable due to a high availability.

I've already stated why this is a bad thing.

>unavailable due to high availability
You wot mate

And I pointed out that you can get up to 12 availability for free (which means Alphas, Steel Lynxes, F4 foci, even a fucking Northrup Wasp helicopter if you're so inclined). And Restricted Gear is explicitly for "you want thing, but availability is too high? Now you have thing."

You said not being able to get stuff is bad, but you're an idiot who doesn't realise there is nothing preventing you from getting 90% of the stuff. The only reason you wouldn't be able to get it is if you didn't build your character with enough money to buy it, which is your own damn fault.

M&M character creation isn't like that, though. It's bad because it's unbalanced mess, not because it's actually hard to use.

Anything where your character can die before the game even begins. At that point you might as well just pick from the tables and charts instead of rolling.

But now you're wrong. There's like 8 grades of bioware, and even buying the lowest grade there's plenty of bioware you will be unable to get.

It's easy to get enough money to buy this stuff, but because of some silly limitation you can't.

When you finally do get the skills down, yeah.

One aspect of the system I do like when you have a new character is that they are experts/knowledgeable in the subjects that they have studied. It's refreshing after so many systems that have characters who are just ok or terrible at everything except one or two things, maybe.

Rolling a random character and seeing what you can do with it is an absolutely wondwerful way of creating a character for a one-shot or a short campaign.

Shadowrun.
Priority is absolutely retarded, I learned in Karmagen, but Sum-to-Ten is way more flexible.

in shadowrun items have an availability rating, the higher the rating, the harder it is to get.

I mean I get it but it just sounds stupid.

I mean, I've heard stuff about MyFARoG, but mostly due to the fantastic racism and the font.

What exactly is so bad about the chargen?

>8 grades of bioware

4, 5 if you count omega/used. You can get standard, alpha, and used out the gate, betaware and deltaware in game.

What sort of bioware can't you get? You can get up to 12F without karma payment, and up to 24F with Restricted Gear. You can't get a deltaware pain editor, sure, but you can buy an alphaware version with Restricted Gear, which makes sense because pain editors are stupid good.

You can't get the deltaware versions of it because that grade is disallowed at chargen for Essence balance, but you can get literally any implant you want. I think the only thing you can't do is get Rating 12 Damage Compensators, because even with Restricted Gear it's still too high. You can get the R8 version, though, R9 if you go for omega, which is more than enough at chargen.

How? Some things are hard to get. If you want to get them, you need to have connected people who can get them for you. It's assumed that you worked your connections over the years up to the campaign to get stuff up to rating 12, even very illegal things like cyberspurs, rocket launchers or decks, or you use Restricted Gear and got something super-duper illegal like a military-grade VTOL.

>realism is stupid
>smuganimegirl.jpg
Ok, cucchboi, keep enjoying your shit opinions

Granted, that too.

Ooh nice random assuming there man, I feel bad for giving the (you) ya want but honestly your not really good at baiting so I felt bad.
Just meant I would prefer if the lower availability got the harder it would be to acquire, and thought that it sounded silly that an item that had a high availability was hard to get, like "the availability of the item is high, there for it is hard to procure". Like that.

Honestly, FATAL. I'm still not really sure how the fuck it works.

>Priority is absolutely retarded,
To the contrary, it helps a lot with point-buy chargen.

So your problem is you think the numbers are backwards?

The numbers are used for the actual system, though; it's the threshold you need to roll in game in order to get the item. So a person could easily get 4 successes and get an Availability 4 item, but it's a lot harder to roll 22 successes and get an Availability 22 item. It's eminently workable as a rule, you just need to remember that high numbers are harder to get (which flows with every other part of the system, where high numbers=better).

Yeah I'm being pedantic about it user, I realized it works just fine as is, just I'm being autistic about the how it sounds.

Traveller.

any character gen system that you can actually die in is by default not a good one.

plus, if you don't die, you still usually don't get a character that's even within the ballpark of what you wanted. Oh, what's that? You wanted to be ship's engineer? Shame you did nothing but learn how to use Comms for 20 sodding years. It doesn't build balanced or even fun parties either, as some people come out as amazing aces and others come out as strung out wrecks.

What other systems would you recommend?

>Die in character gen
I'm guessing this is another remnant of the 80's style retardedly high levels of lethality, take to the extreme?

Nope. You randomly roll your character's life in stages. Each stage comes with a few rolls. Some of the outcomes are literally "You died, restart from beginning".

That sounds like it would get stupidly frustrating after the 7th time it would happen.

>dying in chargen
Going into high-lethality careers is a great way of getting rid of said garbage characters.

Anyway, it's not even a thing in Mongoose except as an optional rule.

It was a rare thing to happen, and came from choosing specifically dangerous options, afaik.

Any that rely on dice rolls rather than diceless, point-buy, skill lists, or so on.

I want to make a character to suit what I want to play, not hope I roll well and then play whatever the fuck it is I happened to roll.

>role-playing game
>the very point of it, by its own fucking name, is to play a role
>the roles I get to play are in large part determined by random chance
Why anyone would ever think this isn't fundamentally retarded is beyond me.

Rolling characters can be annoying in longer campaigns, where you generally want to play a character you came up with, one that fits the setting, campaign and party. In short games, though, making do with what the dice give you can be both fun and something of an exercise in roleplaying. Getting into a character you didn't really design, character who may be very different from the character you usually play, can lead to legitimately good roleplaying. I've known habitual minmaxers and powergamers who show suprising roleplaying chops when playing a wimp with no real combat skills, and have fun while doing so. Again, for longer campaigns I agree about point-buy systems being better, but random character generation has its place.

"Reroll the X lowest dice" or "Roll XdY, then assign those rolls to whichever skills you want" etc systems are, at best, patches for how shit rolling characters really is.

The former is basically just trying to fix it at a higher-than-statistical-average point to help along unlucky players. The latter is just point buy in spirit yet unnecessarily shackled to unneeded dice rolls which serve no purpose but to occasionally screw players over.

It's incredibly fun if you are open minded. Not every game has to be about your super cool character concept. Making up the story behind the character is part of the fun.

And nonlethal char gen was an option even in Classic Traveller (and has disappeared completely from the current game).

It's original purpose was to discourage players from continually rolling new career terms and winding up with a party of 80 year old admirals with millions of credits apiece.

A party of retired, rich as fuck admirals sticking their nose in other people's business sounds pretty great, to be honest.

Play Paranoia: High Programmers.

Looks to me like those tree stats are to be used to define the toughness of fortifications built with them.

Interesting shit, but even Dwarf Fortress doesn't go in this much detail (yet)

>what is Rogue Trader

Erh... The availability rating is the opposed dice pool on your CHA+Negotiation roll. Not the threshold per say.

It's broken in the sense a Face or Chargen Fixer contact could easily-ish get 16+ to 25-ish dice on that test.

The duration of that test scales with the price of the item though.

You don't build fortifications out of living trees unless you're, like, an elf.

And that doesn't explain the mental stats for trees.

Well I mean, it is realistic. People can talk to trees IRL after all

The people talk, the trees don't talk back.

They have no perception anyway

Wood is pretty much the same alive or dead, except that if you dry and prepare it, it won't rot. Wood types was a big deal before plastics and polymers. It just look like the author had carpentry in its background and milked that knowledge to Magical Realms level.

The way it's written, I can't see these as rules other than being part of the crafting system.

Alternatively, "animate tree " is probably a staple spell.

No, what happens in traveller is that you random roll your player's "career" up to that point - if you've played System Shock 2, it's a lot like those door ways you pick at the start of the game - and depending on what duties and career paths your character ends up on your stats go up here or down there etc...

The trouble happens because if you hit 0 on some stats, your character is "dead", so there's a bunch of unlucky rolls that will zero out at least one of those stats and leave your character unable to to live in a game before CHARGEN is entirely over.

And the only way to rule that out is to make CHARGEN have a cap on how many negative modifiers you could pick up, but doing that would masively unbalance chargen unless you also cap out the positive modifiers and neither the developers nor the player based wanted either of those options so it was just an occasional problem that made you restart your chargen now and again.

Artesia has no dedicated subsystem for crafting (apart from alchemy), and there is no tree-animating ability in the game.

Additionally, despite being patterned after a comic book series that features mass battle very heavily, Artesia has no mass battle rules.

Artesia's rules have no sense of priorities whatsoever. The wall of text on trees is wasteful.

Played it.

The terminology thing was offputting for about 15 minutes (and obviously Gygax going overboard tryingto avoid ANOTHER lawsuit from TSR over the game).

In practice, the game was cumbersome but it worked fairly well and was quite playable and, I dare say, enjoyable. It was also very, very generic so I can't be sure that it was the game or GM that was responsible.

But the comic was fucking awesome man.

Did they ever finish it?

Rolling for stats.

Mostly because it's the only one I had the chance to play. it peeved me slightly that everyone had stats over 18 but me.

It's an OD&D clone, not a B/X clone. It's also the most easy to get into sci-fi rpg that was intended for sandbox play that doesn't assault you with rules.

>This is unbalanced
And this is bad somehow? You are very unlikely to roll much better or worse than other players.

Parts about language skills and arcana are overblown. You will never have more than several major languages in a huge campaign region. 5 Arcanas covers most of individual player activities. 3 suggested Arcanas for each starting occupation you can see during character creation and Sword/Death/Empress.

>Artesia has no dedicated subsystem for crafting (apart from alchemy)
It mentions later in the book that well crafted items receive +X modifier akin to echantment but without heafty price of permanent magic points. I have no douts you would bitch about any detailed crafting system like you do about stats for trees. Author provided it for whatever reason you need it, just in case you want to use dryad or tree spirit or something else. Yet you blew it out of proportions.

Shadowrun

Because jesus christ...

>Savage Worlds

The character creation is pretty brain dead simple.

Five points for ability increases
Fifteen points for skill increases

Parry = 2+half dex die
Toughness = 2+half vigor die

That's about it it, the rest is just simple modifiers depending on edges and races.

I can make a character that specializes in something (which you SHOULD do for group play) in less than ten minutes.

The exploding dice make shit get fucking wacky at time and it does a terrible job handling social roleplay because of the rasies and shit with charisma bonuses, however, it is wonderful for dungeon delves, playing mercs in space accomplishing goals, etc. It is pure combat, magic, and driving focused and it does a great, if fucking wacky at times, job at that.

GURPS

I like being able to make basically anything (see savage worlds above) I dislike having to make a character so god damned complex for a game that most likely won't be played for longer than a month.

Star Wars edge of the empire is confusing

>You are very unlikely to roll much better or worse than other players.

>roll OR CHOOSE

Get rekt.

>You are very unlikely to roll much better or worse than other players.
Why be choose to be a peasant with abysmal statistics when you can be a divinely empowered god-king? After all, you can choose the results from each table.

>You will never have more than several major languages in a huge campaign region.
Characters still have to invest in these languages as full-blown skills, because their social skills will be capped by them.

>5 Arcanas covers most of individual player activities. 3 suggested Arcanas for each starting occupation you can see during character creation and Sword/Death/Empress.
This is not how the arcana work. A character is eligible to gain points from *all of the arcana*, as you can see in the example in .

>It mentions later in the book that well crafted items receive +X modifier akin to echantment but without heafty price of permanent magic points.
This does not necessitate heavy word count spent on statistics for trees, which have nothing to do with the +X modifier you just mentioned.

>roll OR CHOOSE
So you can choose how your group does it and do it uniformly (roll or pick everything) or take mixed approach. Is it a bad thing somehow?

>This is not how the arcana work
This isn't how Arcana works if you know what Arcana stands for. Most Arcana are classes or archetypes if you want. Although most characters will multiclass. Soldier can be described with Sword, Strength and Emperor Arcana. You can ignore other Arcana that don't fit your character and focus on important ones. Some people will never have Sun, Hanged Man or Moon Arcana.
>Why be choose to be a peasant with abysmal statistics when you can be a divinely empowered god-king?
Why won't you pick heroicaly strong peasant who can chock a bull and lift carts instead? Why are you focusing on extremes? Mixed parties with slight imbalance for thematic purpose are very fun in most games.
>Characters still have to invest in these languages as full-blown skills
Read character creation again. You receive skill points to spend on skills you would learn as a kid including parents language. It gives you a lot of points. And again you can hardly find region on the world map or situation by GM where you need 15 or even 5 different languages at once as a single character. Everything else is a dickery. Language section provides info on world history and background rather than set of important ingame choices.
>This does not necessitate heavy word count spent on statistics for trees
You seem to be so offended by this unfortunate tree. Bad blood between you and plants?

Either chivalry and sorcery which was literally rolls on charts the random extraneous details.

Or mekton zeta. Which was that with a little freedom and I guess I cheated on my girlfriend with my commanding officer now.

It's a TERRIBLE system, with bullshit skills that make no fucking sense spread into arbitrary categories with no thought for utility or balance.

If you want to do hacking (And of course the whole system is ripped straight from Gibson so of course you want to do hacking), be prepared to fork over enough money to literally retire on to buy a laptop and buy a crapton of skills that represent your expertise with computers but don't actually represent your ability to use a computer, it is thus entirely possible to be a computer illiterate hacker.

That being said most of its problems arise once you get out of character creation.

>Either chivalry and sorcery which was literally rolls on charts the random extraneous details.

I love that. Rolling an entire WFRP character, with all the random bullshit tables about body odour and shit, is the best.

Since it's what I've actually played it must be one of my friend's homebrewed games. It tries to be a game were you can do anything but in reality you're screwed if you don't pick health, melee damage, and/or magic. So a ranged character or a sneaky character will almost always be weak enough to die in one hit.

Otherwise it'd be Anima because god does it scare away almost everyone I meet.

Are you shitting on Reign's one roll character creation? Because that is great.

>This isn't how Arcana works if you know what Arcana stands for.
It is. See the example in .

>Why won't you pick heroicaly strong peasant who can chock a bull and lift carts instead? Why are you focusing on extremes? Mixed parties with slight imbalance for thematic purpose are very fun in most games.
This is a sham of a character creation system if there is not even an attempt at internal party balance.

>You receive skill points to spend on skills you would learn as a kid including parents language. It gives you a lot of points.
You are still spending character creation points just to learn language skills so that you can have a reasonable cap for other skills, like social skills. This is byzantine.

>You seem to be so offended by this unfortunate tree. Bad blood between you and plants?
Bad blood between me and RPG writers who would rather use word count on irrelevant rules than mechanics that actually matter and are to be highlighted.

I like that picture. That's a nice picture.

I don't see a problem with you example. I remind you that there are 22 paths to earn exp. There are 250 suggested examples for them but if your players are creative each path can have more. I see you have a knee jerk reaction towards any additional info for GM and players. Each of 2w paths can be summed very shortly and any related activity can be awarded with Arcana points.
Emperor? Establishing hierarchy through personal will and force and following orders. Death? Being close to death and interacting with death and deceased (killing living beings obviously counts). Sword? Self-improvement and challenging yourself to test your abilities.
>This is a sham
This happens in many systems and we still have fun with them. What systems do you play if it bothers you?
>You are still spending
You get enough points to get 5 levels as a kid and get other skills. What's so bad about it again?
>RPG writers who
You are special kind of beast. If he used that page to write mechanics you would complain about it instead of innocent trees.

As a newer player, GURPS is difficult to work out what is good and what is bad in building a character. Since there is so much you can do it can be hard to make it optimized especially when I play with others who know GURPS inside out.

Every time I have created a character dedicated to one area, an example would be sniper/comms officer in a modern GURPS game, when we game to the game the heavy weapons specialist was able to use my weapons better than I was and able to do all computer and comms stuff better than I was able to.

I know that speaks more of the player than the system, but it is difficult for a new player.

Well I'm a racist and I actually like Varg, but character creation, like most things in the system, is way too complicated and restrictive. You have to roll for everything, the only choice you get is your class, and you can only pick from classes that your randomly rolled stats qualify you for. So in my case, I had terroble stats and could only qualify for the worst class, really just one step above peasant