What are some of your favorite chargens in RPGs?

What are some of your favorite chargens in RPGs?
I personally love the priority table from Shadowrun 5e. The rest of it is okay, but the priority table is great imo.

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karma > life modules > sum-to-10 > 4e hacking > priority table

>I want to just min-max

I just want to have options. If I wanted to minmax, I'd play 4e.

Plus pic related makes me mad; 5e AI only works with karmagen.

Karmagen and life modules are incredibly inefficient ways to minmax. Sum-to-10 is the one true path, omae.

I've never even played Traveller, but every few weeks I'll sit down and make a character in MgT 1e. It's basically a game in itself, and I love it.

I love the priority table. It makes things so simple. I do see the appeal of sum to ten, though. I think the Karma and BP approaches are a bit minmaxy and more importantly they're way more complicated.

Sum to 10 is okay too because it has a greater variety of characters done from it, but at the same time I feel like it can lead to some weird setups, like AADDE

>He's never played an AACEE adept with 5 magic, A in attributes and skills, and no money as homeless swordsman barrens-crusader
Truly, user, you've never lived.

What are life modules like?

Traveller character gen is the best character gen.

The Runed Age. It's chargen creates your character's entire backstory and personality.

Backstory building blocks. Things like your character's education and upbringing actually give them varied skills that are more in-line with them being real people.

You buy the modules from a pool (it's more mix-and-match than anything, you'll never find yourself at the end unable to purchase anything) and then combine any leftover points you might have with a Karma pool to round them out for their professional life.

You can take things like public schooling, which gives minor skills in computer operation, science, etc.

5e AI literally only works with sum to 10 and going whole hog with exceptional entity.

Whats it like?

A Traveller character starts at 18. You select a few starting things, like homeworld, which give a few perks. You dole out some attribute points. And then the fun starts.

You select a career which you want your character to get into. First, you have to make a roll to see if you even get into it, so you have to pick a career that fits your character if you want the best results. Then you get to select some skills, and randomly pick up others. You roll for events that take place during your career, and they can have major consequences, from advantages to, according to oldschool rules, actually killing your character. Yes, your character can die during chargen. Mongoose Traveller gives the option for these setbacks to simply mean a loss of money and provide some character background. If you fail to get into a career, you can choose to be drafted, or to become a drifter.

This is why the injoke is that Traveller is a midlife crisis in space, because experienced starting characters will invariably be older. There are aging effects, though.

It leads to a very fun character creation system where you typically make up your character's backstory as you go along. I had a guy who failed to get into the Navy, did a stint as a cop, then got into the in-universe exploration service and rolled really well until his last stint, where he got chewed up planetside and got kicked out of the career (just as I planned to put him into play). So my starting concept of "pilot" turned into a guy with great piloting skills, but a severe lack of trust in authority. A friend rolled up a Western themed doctor who had all of one medical breakthrough in his life, and he fluffed it as the dude writing one paper about leeches that was valid, and subsequently becoming obsessed with the medical validity of leeches.

Seconding this.
Traveller chargen leads to magic backstories.

Traveller is probably my favorite, but Dogs in the Vineyard is cool too.

I love making characters/superpowers in Mutants&Masterminds, with all the building blocks you have access to it's fun to just try and stat the very same power but in multiple vastly different ways.

Honorable mention to Weaver Dice, it's kind of obscure but also a capeshit system, the rest of the group generates the power you get which stems from a traumatic event you randomly roll. Not having control over what power you get isn't for everyone but if you go in with the right mindset it can fun.
Too bad the rest of WD is shit.

how does DitV does it?

bump

Secondin this. It's like Traveller mixed with Cyberpunk 2020.

bump

Being an AI only costs ~100 karma in karmagen; you can get WAY more out of AIs with karma than you can with priority.

Like I said, spoken like somebody who's never used Exceptional Entity. AIs are a total joke in 5e otherwise.

Show me a good exceptional entity build using only sum to 10. I wanna se what you're talking about.

Gimmick builds, the only thing AIs are good for in 5e.
13 charisma cheerleaders.
high depth skillmonkeys who spam autosofts for everything.
Need I say more?

How about actually having really high mental stats and skills, and all the skills of a standard decker, but without needed to worry about your meat body being geeked?

That's not happening with AIs, no matter which gen you use.
>AI
>decking
lol

Rogue Trader's character path system is pretty cool, especially with all the alternate options from Into the Storm.

darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/dogsinthevineyard/chargen.html

The key to Dogs is to remember that it doesn't treat dice rolls the way other RPGs do: you roll the vast majority of your dice at the beginning of the scene and just leave them sitting so that they make a pool of "votes" you can spend in a game that is somewhat like but not entirely poker betting to see how the scene plays out.

Putting more dice doesn't mean "I want to bonuses for this" it means "I want more votes when this is involved," bigger dice means "I want to be able to make big, uncountered plays when this comes up" and smaller dice mean "I want this to be a complicated thing that can lead to character IC and OOC character growth when this comes up.

Subtly, this means that the "greedier" you are about trying to get more dice, the more "generous" you become about creating complications, events, plot hooks, dramatic moments, and driving up the stakes. Which according to the design is 100% on-purpose.

It's definitely a brain-bender of a game, but I love it. It's my go-to for both rules light and narrative gaming, and I think time spent with it makes you better at other games: playing, DMing and designing.

Two things to keep in mind: First, you don't have to use the provided setting if you don't want to: Virigin Morman Inquisition Gunslingers is a hoot but any system where you just start writing things on a blank piece of paper is super-easy to adapt to anything from CIA agents to Star Wars to versions of other games with great settings held back by lousy dice systems.

Second, it's not for every person, every group, or every setting. It just might not appeal to you, and that's okay. "Fun" is relative. It's probably still well worth your time to track down a copy just to look at the ideas, though.

Like this

I love capeshit chargen. Heroes Unlimited random charts are a great way to spend an afternoon.

I found it really unpleasant in play. I played with a GM and group that was really into rules-light stuff, but it was really clunky and gamey to bet dice against each other and constantly be counting out what was on the table. Maybe if we did more than a one-shot it would have been fun.