What game do you think has the best character creation?

what game do you think has the best character creation?

Fate, you can make any character you can think of.

Traveller.

you are still restricted by servant classes

Monsters and Other Childish Things, easily. It's got all the flexibility of Wild Talents with none of the unnecessary complexity. It lets you play a kid whose monster is Jesus' brother, Yafoos

uh what
fate doesn't have classes

I'm personally a fan of games with playbooks because they're faster and the concepts are usually well thought out. It's much easier to get something genuinelly good out of "This character is [good concept], but..." than out of thin air.

My personal favorite game with playbooks is Beyond the Wall, because the playbooks come with their own backstory rolling tables, and those are pic related.

He's thinking of fate/stay and not FATE core

I like the Twilight 2013's. The backstory basically writes itself.

Yes I'm aware similar lifepath styled ones exist.

I'm a huge fan of Runequest/Mythras. Then again, I'm a huge fan of semi-historical roleplay so that is going to bias me.

You start with your concept (mercenary hoplite, village sage, blacksmith, etc.) and found your starting characteristics. Now, I enjoy the crunch of these characteristics, but some might find them off-putting. For instance, your secondary characteristics (such as luck, hit points, action points, and physical dimensions) are calculated from these character points.

Then you calculate your standard skills (things everyone would know what to do.

Then, you pick your culture. Your culture gives you a selection of standard skills, a fighting style (or more), and a few professional skills you might expect to find in the culture. You spend your bonus skillpoints based on your culture here.

At that point you are introduced to passions. Passions are something that make this system exciting. They are things like "Loyalty to your City." or "Love to your wife." or "Hatred of the Saxons" or whatever you want to put down that makes sense to your concept.

These passions will influence dice rolls and even be rolled themselves to help represent the internal struggle in your character (for instance you may wish to fail a passion roll against "hatred to saxons" if it is learned the only man who can guide you to safety is a saxon). But that's getting into more detail than my summary.

You also have an opportunity to invest some points into your combat style. Your combat style is a combination of the weapons you are trained to fight with and one or more interesting combat traits (usually just one) including things like "formation fighting" or "skirmishing" or "mounted combat". They represent your culture's training you may have received. This can be as simple as Combat style: Peasant Levy - Shortspear, Seax, Round-shield. Cautious Fighter.

Con't

Next you would roll for a major background event. You can roll randomly or pick one from the table. Most splat books have background events that fit the setting's flavor.

Events might be something like, "A sibling has commited a heinous crime that has brought shame upon your family. They fled soonafter, vanishing entirely, shifting suspicion on you. Were you falsely blamed? Did you confess to preserve your family's honor? Is blood thicker than water?"

Then you determine your family, your allies, your rivals, your contacts. This also will finalize what kind of money you start with, what your social class is, what your reputation is (which influences your rivals and allies). Your passions are more thoroughly worked out here with rules to the effect

SO that part represents your character's life and main background events. But it doesn't explain what your character does. Is he a warrior? A fisher? A Mystic? A Sailor?

A huge amount of careers are available to choose from. Like your background, your career gives you access to some skills and extra points to invest in them (it's also an opportunity to invest more in your combat style if you wish).

You can, if you want, choose a different age at this time, altering your bonus skill points (often providing you more) but requiring more background roles in return (and more complexity)

Lastly you can determine if you are magical, what kind of magic you might use (there are a lot of different magic types including theism, folk magic, animism, etc) and if you belong to an order, brotherhood, or cult.

It really is well thought out and has enough rolling to be a lot of fun going through the process without suffering too much in terms of narrative freedom.

GURPS. I even put together two different lifepath systems for it (using a mixture of templates and lenses) ala Burning Wheel and Traveller, in case I'm in the mood for running a more "involved" campaign.

>being a fan of crunchy systems but my players are too retarded to learn DnD 5e
it is slightly annoying

I personally really like D&D 5e's chargen, if only because it's fast as hell and the characters don't need to be optimized because they work from the get-go, which is more than I can say about a bunch of other games.

Traveller's chargen seems super fun, I'd love to give it a try sometime.

I make Shadowrun characters for fun and I wish more games would adopt the Priority Table.

This user gets it, Mythras makes excellent characters. When my player rolled 100 on his social class it might have been the most stereotypically hype any of us have ever been. He rolled really poor stats and we were considering having him reroll entirely, but he rolled this and another player rolled the best stats and rolled as slave just before this.

What's the Priority Table?

I'm honestly really fond of Nobilis third edition's lifepath system, and the way Nobilis in general handles gifts. You want to play the god of breakfast cereals, but also want to be able to bring hats to life? It's really easy to write up a gift for that.

Agreed. Character creation is a game of its own.

You have Priority A as the highest and Priority E as the lowest. You assign these to different areas: Metatype (You need a higher priority to be something other than human), Attributes, Magic or Resonance (Resonance for technomancers), Skills and Resources. The highest priority usually gives you a ton to work with on whichever one you place it, while E gives you the least. For example, Resources is starting cash (which you have to spend). At Priority A you can afford a whole lot of stuff. 450000 nuyen. At Priority E you can barely buy a gun. 6000 nuyen.

>taking E for your cash

Did no one ever. Early level/starters dont even use that table, you'll more than likely do the watered down one that puts MAJOR restrictions on starting nuyen or else everyone is going to have an army of bots, stealth tanks that can fly, and a naval base in the form of a yacht.

Maid.

Everybody's usually like "Yes, I can see myself playing this gambling-addicted spider-girl maid that's secretly a robot and indept to the master's family"

>played Maid with two Indian friends
>both rolled the brown characteristic

I fucking love Maid.

user, You can barely outfit two or three good drones with 450000 nuyen. This is the standard table. The table for Prime Runners gives you like 900000 for A, I think.

I prefer the more street level tables for my games because I'm a fan of "you're a bunch of urchins trying to make it in the shadows" as a campaign pitch. I've ran it twice. The second time I gave everyone that one positive trait that lets you take a point of humanity's worth of ware without losing any and they played escaped child experiments from Shiawase Biotech. Still hoping someone will run something similar so I can fucking play instead.

I am a fan of risus.

Tell us more pls

The thing to take away OP is that priority chargen is retarded and overly complex. It takes all the stuff that makes shadowrun unique and dumps a big fucking dollop of Ivory Tower game design on the system

I disagree. You can always use Sum-To-Ten if you dislike how Priority forces you to prioritize, and it's basically the same thing except you get to put the same amount of focus on two or more things. The priority table simplifies things a lot and makes character creation pretty fun.

The real problem with Shadowrun is that the rules themselves are awful.

This right here. Whether you play Maid or not just the character creation is funny as all hell.

>what game do you think has the best character creation?

fatal. no other game is so granular that it takes into consideration such arcane statistics as anal circumference (dilated and undilated) as well as maximum rectal volume capacity

Fuck off Virt.