January Character Challenge

One of my fellow bloggers found a challenge for January, and I thought I may see if I can somehow squeeze in the time to try this. His post is here. Now, I can roll through classic Traveller generation in fairly short order, but this will give me a chance to go through a few other systems. While I do have a LOT of potential career paths (see my career bibliography here), I also have a few other game systems I may roll up characters for. I do plan on the majority of these characters to be Traveller, from Classic, Mongoose, Cepheus or T5.

For those days I simply only have a few minutes, The Fantasy Trip can be a quick character system. And I will be cheating - probably try to do a few extras on those days I have some time for. But I am hoping to post 1 character each day. I will capture each die roll and go from there. Those that have played Traveller enough know that the character generation is a fun game in and of itself; it is easy to add a bit of extrapolation to the rolls as to what is happening to the character. While this is barely implied in the classic generation, Mongoose added events that occurred during generation to make it explicit. And I like that as it can spark the imagination, and generally gives you at least a couple of choices for those events and how they get handled. 

I think I'll also see if I either have buried in my piles of games stuff a personality generator/random table or find an on-line one, or even create my own multi-axis system. Something with things like optimistic vs pessimistic, thoughtful vs spontaneous, things like that. There are a lot of these on-line, such as this one or this one. Maybe after I do this enough times I'll have a better idea of what I am looking for: I know that it should be actionable in some way in a game. And I need to get better at NPCs - I can generate them left and right, but playing them...I may try for an index card of the character as I do better when I have something written down in front of me to reference. 

My plan is to go through a few of the T5 character generation processes which will take me quite some time, Classic Traveller which could be very quick if I fail the survival roll, The Fantasy Trip for 32-36 point characters, and perhaps dig through some other game systems I've accumulated over the years and never actually used. I've a Fate game coming up, and while I do have my primary character mostly created, she has a staff. So I may try to see about her primary butler/body guard, name him Heimlich. I've had a Heimlich character in several games now, generally a Dwarf as that is how he got started. A player in my group does not like Heimlich. So he shows up every game I can. Along with something with Bird in the name (one RPG it started as Birdy for an areal drone, next game of Five Rings it was Birdsong of the Northern Mountains, my horse. I try to have a common thread running through games I play or referee. I think it is fun. Not so sure if my players do though it generally does have a groan involved).

I'll use the tag challenge for these posts, along with characters and whichever game system the character is getting generated in. Trying to get a bit better about being able to find things in this blog, which has I've posted to more than I thought I would when I first started writing about my various trade program attempts (hey, one worked pretty well, but then I started changing which version of .Net I was targeting, and then Microsoft started a really fast cadence for updates. So I've not caught up and gotten lazy)

I may also see if I can find a character design that may work, so that there is an image. If I have enough time & get carried away, I may even try to include a PDF for the character sheet. 

And I've only played Shadowrun the 1 time (where I had the drone). But here is a character collection. Just like having an image in my posts!