Carl Cravens of The Raven’s Mutterings runs across someone that makes him go “Huh?”
From a recent “game opening” post I saw…
If you want to play non-human, you will have to roll a 1 on 1d10. Otherwise you have to play a human.
Wow. People still play like this? No “let’s talk about it,” just “one in ten chance you get to be something I don’t want you to be.” (Or something I don’t want more than one character to be.)
Back in about 1981 something like that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. The market leader was first edition AD&D, and it was full of illogical and arbitary things like that.
Carl’s example just goes to show that there are still people living in sealed bubble who appear ignorant of every development in the hobby in the past quarter century.
If that floats your boat, I suppose…
So apparently the lesson they learned from White Wolf wasn’t that characterization matters to a lot of people. No, it was to use a d10.
Well, that certainly doesn’t float mine either.
Careful though, your own character generation system feels very like “Traveller” at times. Except of course that in Traveller your character might not survive to start the first real game session.
GMs who forget that they need players more than the players need them end up without a campaign very quickly.
Rolling for a race is not a great idea, it’s not even a particularly mediocre idea, but it does have one element of usefulness. It can encourage people to expand their horizons a little. The “I’m always an elf mage” or “I’m always a dwarf fighter” kind of thing. OK, odds of 1 in 10 are pretty poor in this case but it it the only thing I can think of that is positive.
As for Traveller, you could always ignore the death roll part. It was only a mechanism to try and stop you getting OAT’s (Old Age Travellers) that were skilled up with everything going. Imagine it:
“I’ve got Pilot-10 but I can’t take off because I can’t find my glasses.”
“OK, gauss gun – check, battle armour – check , zimmer frame – check.”
“I’d like my OAT starbus pass please.”
etc.