Tonight, well actually more like sometime in the morning of tomorrow, I finally finished the Character Generation document for my Star Trek campaign. Step by step character generation, with lots of tables and hopefully explicit rules for making a character that will reflect my concept of what a Star Trek character should be. So in this journal I want to go over some of the design decisions that went into making this 14-page document.

First off, once I saw the Icon System character generation system, I saw that it was elegant, simple, and rather boring. Yet another system that is point based, although with multiple templates to make it even easier to make cookie-cutter characters with some amount of individuality. I wanted a way to make random characters a la older games from my youth. With the Starfleet Academy supplement my idea was to have something more akin to the old Traveller, where you can build up your character through different tours in the military.

With these criteria in mind, my general outline is a seven-stage system, in each stage you get a few skills based on your specific circumstances. The stages being species, personality, early life, and four years of Academy training. The end result being that you have a character who will be individualized through the personality and Academy major skill selections, with characters being similar only if they have the same two personalities and same major.

So stage 1 is choosing the species. For this I divided the 17 species in the main rules and Player's Guide into rare, uncommon, and common. The goals were to make any psionic species rare, since I don't want to deal with mind powers, as I believe they can be used to shortcut adventures too easily. The Icon System does make mind powers rather difficult to use, but I still don't like them. Unfortunately, Vulcans are in this category. The other objective was to make humans common but not predominant, so there is about a 1/3 chance of rolling up a human.

Stage 2 is to choose a personality archetype, which is composed of an Aspect and a Focus. What I did was to the five renown attributes of Agression, Discipline, Initiative, Openness, and Skill and place each Aspect and Focus in one of them, keeping the distribution even. This makes some weird placements, but for the most part they fit. Then I rated each species on the five renowns, rating each at low, medium, or high. In general each species had two high, one medium, and two low renown, although there are exceptions. Humans are medium all around. Then in was a matter of creating six 2d6 tables for each race and placing the Aspects and Foci in the tables such that high personalities are easier to roll up than low ones. This took me a couple of days and is vastly reduced in my original scope where I wanted for each race one level of tables for the Aspect, and then a second level of tables for the Focus based on the Aspect rolled. Each Aspect and Focus gives a character a selection of skills, advantages and disadvantages to choose from, a few being chosen now.

Stage 3 is early life history. Mostly how the character was brought up. There are seventeen which I once again divided into rare, uncommon, and common. The rolls aren't modified by species or personality, so it was easy to do this part.

Stages 4 and 5 are similar. Stage 4 is Freshman year, where the characters pick four classes to learn basic skills from a common list. In Stage 5 they pick four more classes from a second common list. In each stage they also get a few points to buy more from the Aspect/Focus tables.

In Stage 6, Junior Year, the characters pick a major and take an advanced class package. There are only seven majors, rolled on a 2d6 table, modified by the Aspect/Focus of the character. Then they can roll a d6 on a table for their major to see what advanced program they took this year. Finally they once again get some more points for Aspect/Focus table options.

Finally, in Stage 7, the characters pick 4 skills from a list tailored to their major. This should give them the minimums to do their jobs for the cadet cruise once the campaign starts. A final round of Aspect/Focus table options to round out the character and they're ready to go.

I wanted characters with a wide range of low level skills. Achieved by having them pick from lists without being able to repeat skills taken. In each list you can't pick an option twice, so the only way to get a skill of 2 is to pick it from two different lists, of which there are some skills that you do this. Getting a skill of 3 is even harder, since I placed limits in each stage of how many skills you can voluntarily raise to level 2. You can't voluntarily raise a skill to level 3 unless a package makes you do it, which may happen for one or two characters. There are also limits on making your attributes better. The limits are slowly increased through each stage, since I'm expecting to run a few Academy adventures.

So in the end we have characters who are well rounded, at the beginning of their careers, capable of doing their jobs competently but not expertly, and who have skills and advantages reflective of their personality, which is reflective of their species. At least that's the goal, whether it actually works or not, I'll have to wait for the campaign to start.