[RMS]

Originally Posted by Rurik

I long ago gave up the random background tables. The novelty of playing farmers did indeed wear off in short order. Also, it seems based heavily on real world demographics, but certainly certain backgrounds are more prone to adventuring than others - and farmer just sin't one that comes to mind (unless of course someone wanted to play a farmer). I've typically allowed either choosing background or more often used the assign a certain number of skill points yourself approach. In RQ3 if I recall right your age roll has a major effect on starting skills in the default method, which again I have not used in a while.

If you're doing that, then you aren't doing anything different than me. Allowing someone to simply pick a 27 year old from a warrior background, automatically makes them an experienced veteran character (something akin to letting someone pick a 7th or 8th level D&D character...to keep the analogies going). To me, that's nowhere near a "starting" character, or "starting over", and in many cases is going to be more powerful than the other PCs at the table.

Btw, I don't use those tables randomly either and never have...at least completely. It's fun at times to make people roll background with X years, then explain why they "left the farm" and let them develop several more years as a <insert exciting background> before play.

I like the MRQ chargen approach a lot. Choose a background, choose a profession, assign your free points.

I've actually gone to letting players just fill in the character they want to play on the character sheet: total freeform character creation. Everyone has to know the rules and background for this to really work, and you have to trust your players to be reasonable. Interestingly, I've found that putting so much trust on them has lead to less minmaxed characters, and I spend more time upping character's abilities than lowering them.