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What game that you have actually owned, had the oddest character creation mechanics?

How did they work?

Quote from: Silverlion;250452What game that you have actually owned, had the oddest character creation mechanics?

The StarCluster system's chargen by age.

QuoteHow did they work?

Fine.

-clash

Villains and Vigilantes suggests making superheros based on the players, and suggests ways in which you can test each other's strength and intelligence and so forth.

Quote from: Warthur;250505Villains and Vigilantes suggests making superheros based on the players, and suggests ways in which you can test each other's strength and intelligence and so forth.

The original Timelords by Greg Porter (BTRC) did the same thing; you created yourself and determined ability scores via series of questions.

Quote from: Drohem;250511The original Timelords by Greg Porter (BTRC) did the same thing; you created yourself and determined ability scores via series of questions.

So did at least the first edition of Immortal, in which the group by default played themselves after awakening to the realization that they were in fact ancient and godlike beings suffering from amnesia. As I recall, the initial health levels of the PCs were based on the actual weight of their players.

Everway uses freeform association with a series of randomly-drawn images to shape character. It's definitely odd, but it provides surprising, amusing, and challenging results. It's fun.

In In a Wicked Age, the basic situation is determined by consulting the oracles. The example in the book is:

Quote...A company of desert horsemen, hiding a woman amongst them...
...A wandering spirit, visible at will, an inflamer of human passions...
...The marriage of a region’s most beautiful girl, necessarily virgin and without blemish, to the dead stone effigy of a harvest god...
...A wandering exorcist, severe, who accepts no payment for his services but who lusts after carnal congress...

You draw four of these and only then extrapolate the PCs from the revealed situation. So in the example, you might have the beautiful girl, the exorcist, some of the horsemen, even the spirit as PCs. Or, as in the book example, a local boy who wants the girl for himself. As long as it fits into the oracles, it's all good.

Quote from: Drohem;250511The original Timelords by Greg Porter (BTRC) did the same thing; you created yourself and determined ability scores via series of questions.

• Strength was determined by the weight you could hold straight out to one side for five seconds.
  
• Constitution by looking at how often you get sick.
  
• Intelligence by your SAT score, or US 4 point QCA.
  
• Dexterity by beginning with 10, and then adjusting by dice rolls you got from judgment - like "you admit you're a klutz" or "you are a tightrope walker, race drive, ballet dancer" - and a few tests. My favourite was "hold your arms out and spin in place at least 30 times in as many seconds, and then stop abruptly and close your eyes. If you cannot balance for 10 seconds without shifting either foot, you get this minus."
  
• Willpower by judgment - like "you can't stay on a diet, exercise or study program" or "you have your teeth drilled without anesthesia".
  
• Bravado also by judgment
  
• Appearance by judgment, eg "person tends to get on your nerves at times" is a malus, while "is a good conversationalist" is a bonus.
  
• Perception also by judgment.
  
• Stamina by judgment with concrete examples, like how much fat you have, how much exercise you do, etc.
  
• Skills were rated according to how often they were used, and how professionally, with example years of practice. For example, ""used professionally, among top 1%" was "PhD or 10-12 years", and they specifically say, "just because you have had a driver's license for 10 years does not mean you have a skill of 19. You have 10 years of experience at whatever skil level you use in your average driving." So if your daily driving is to and from work through traffic, that's skill 6-7; but if your daily driving is practice for Formula 1, then you might have that skill 19...
  

It's possible to be more precise than that in certain game systems. I've got written down a series of tests which would let people get statted out in GURPS, but most the sort of gamers I like to hang out with are more humble than those we often talk to online, and thus they know they'd have relatively poor and unadventurous stats, so they prefer to play someone else ;)

Still it could be fun spending a session testing things out!
"Okay Jim, now we'll test your Firearms skill. Hold this rifle, and keep it pointed downrange at all times."
"What's this button do?"
"That's the safety, don't touch that yet -"
*bang!* "Ahhhhhhrgh Jim you stupid fuck you shot me!"
"Alright, so Jim has Firearms = 0. Now Jim, let's see what your First Aid skill is like, take this pocket knife, lie still Bob."

Ok, I stand corrected. :)  It's been a long time and I was going off the top of the head.

Oh man, you could a whole series just off the exchanges in character creations, good stuff!

Quote from: Drohem;250742Ok, I stand corrected. :)  It's been a long time and I was going off the top of the head.

Not corrected, there are basically questions, it's stuff like "+1d3 to Bravado if you are acknowledged to have a poker face" or whatever. So you'd be going around the table and asking if the person has ever been under fire as a soldier, police officer, or been an ambulance officer, or had a heap of hobbies like juggling, hackysack, soccer or something, and so on.

The best way, I've found, is to just ask players to rank the various stats from best to worst, and to assign 12, 11, 10, 9 and 8 to them - or whatever. So that it's not you, it's a caricature of you - recognisable but not precise. Otherwise half the group will be overly humble and underestimate themselves, and the other half will be overly confident and overestimate themselves. And a realistic assessment by means of actual testing could bruise some of those delicate egos... :D

Quote from: DrohemOh man, you could a whole series just off the exchanges in character creations, good stuff!

Well, perhaps this leads to something which isn't in game books, but is often part of character creation, where the GM or other players ask, "okay, so you have trait X, how did you get that?" People are not usually born extremely strong or predisposed to pickpocketing or whatever, people have the traits they do for a reason. And this kind of discussion can be useful for really getting to the heart of what the character is like, I mean just consider someone who is cowardly + charitable compared to cowardly + callous.

And those conversations are often pretty funny :)

I think that approach is pretty common sense, and is used in a lot of groups. But it's not usually talked about much in game books. So it's "odd" in the sense of "not written down".

TSR's Amazing Engine.

This was TSR attempt at a generic set of rules which were meant to serve a whole bunch of entirely different settings (Victorian fantasy, Aliens style bug hunt, classic space opera). The big idea was that you'd have a abstract "core character" which you would take with you between different game worlds and which you would use to generate your new, actual characters. XP would was attached to the core character, so that gaining a level in you cyberpunk game would allow you to create a higher level character they day you decided to play a Magi-Tech game.

To draw a geeky analogy, it was essentially "Object orientated roleplaying".

How did it work? What do you thin? It was terrible! In fairness the world books weren't that bad, but the core character concept just added a whole complication the game seriously didn't need.

I've never played it, but the d20 Star Wars game has some good stuff about what your character might be like based on your social attributes, along the lines of "characters with high Charisma and low Wisdom might have lots of false friends".

I know this one isn't likely to get much notice, too recent and not too gonzo, but...

HackMaster/Aces & Eights.

Combo random-roll/point-build, with random ads/disads (barring nerfed point-build), plus feat-like customization with class/race/level. Think GURPS with Gamma World.

The whole process is very complicated and time-consuming, despite both games boasting high fatality rates.

Aces & Eights does feature a simplified chargen with simplified rules, a la Boot Hill, plus no levels and careers instead of classes... But it also has roll-over percentile skills ("I have a 01% Medicine--- I'm smarter than House and Trapper John, MD!"). Yet another nook in the WTF cranny.

I've never had any opportunity to try it and have no idea how it works, but doesn't Reign have One-Roll character generation?

Quote from: REZcat;250890I've never had any opportunity to try it and have no idea how it works, but doesn't Reign have One-Roll character generation?

As an option I believe so.  I think they also made a variant like that for Wild Talents as well.

Quote from: Drohem;250511The original Timelords by Greg Porter (BTRC) did the same thing; you created yourself and determined ability scores via series of questions.

Ah, but did it derive your initial hit points based on a formula involving your constitution score and your weight?

V&V is the only game where you can get an unfair advantage by eating a bucket of KFC beforehand.

EDIT: Ah, not the only one after all. But maybe the first.

Quote from: Warthur;251080Ah, but did it derive your initial hit points based on a formula involving your constitution score and your weight?

V&V is the only game where you can get an unfair advantage by eating a bucket of KFC beforehand.

They have "body points" which are pretty much hit points, and those are proportional to your weight. 100kg of muscle or 100kg of blubber are both the same in body points :)

Of course, the blubbery person will probably have lower constitution, and whoever trains hard enough to get to 100kg of muscle probably has high willpower, so though the 100kg of blubber person is injured neither more nor less than the 100kg of muscle guy, the blubber will wuss out pretty quickly :D

TMNT is pretty unique.  It's a combination of random rolls (attributes, animal type, background) and then a point buy to actually design the physical aspects of your mutant using BIO:E (biological energy).  I've seen everything from crime fighting hamsters under a foot tall (the character was eaten by a rat, not a mutant rat, a rat), to truly massive PCs.  You can look pretty close to human if you want or completely animal like.  Want to speak fluent English, or growl?  Want to walk to on 2 legs or 4?  You really get to customize the character.

Cyberpunk 2020 -- the Lifepath System by R. Talsorian Games

Essentially a random series of rolls to determine non-attribute characteristics.  BUT .....

The first set of rolls was to determine look, clothing, and affectations.

If you rolled a 6 (or maybe a 7) under the clothing roll, the result was "NUDE"
(or maybe NAKED).  So, if you had the right combo of rolls, you could have a character who was NUDE, with a MOHAWK, that wears MIRRORSHADES...
Nice!!  :)

How do you roleplay full time NUDITY in the gritty world that is Night City in 2020???

Funny...

It is a VERY detailed system.  For example, you roll for the number of siblings, then each sibling's sex, then each sibling's age relative to you (older or younger), then how each sibling feels about you (likes, dislikes, indifferent, strongly likes, strongly dislikes, etc.)

oops. Time Lords has already been mentioned...

The oddest one I have is Ars Magica. It's odd because alot of advantages and disadvantages are identical, except for when you consider campaign length. The learner and student advantages are good for long games because they give you extra XP every year of game time. The knack and mythic attributes are good for medium length games because the quick bonus with an effective XP discount makes them competitive there. I haven't run the numbers on short games but I presume that the streight xp bonuses are the winners there.
 
It was odd because whenever we got a new player, the build guy would ask them "How many sessions are you planning to play?" and then he'd swap all of the virtues and flaws to ones that would work best with that timeframe. The characters would still have the same strongpoints, but they'd just... be designed to peak within the right window.

Quote from: REZcat;250890I've never had any opportunity to try it and have no idea how it works, but doesn't Reign have One-Roll character generation?

It does, but I really wouldn't describe it as "odd".  In a great many ways, it's like rolling up a Traveller character by rolling all the dice at once.  And, by no small coincidence, I'm working on an adaptation of it to do just such a thing.

!i!