Test project: Extended character creation game

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It’s 1991, and I’m sitting in my bedroom with a stack of paper, a set of dice and an A4-sized booklet with a picture of a dragon breathing fire and a warrior with a sword and shield on the front cover (for anyone for whom this doesn’t immediately ring a bell, it’s the Dungeons & Dragons basic guide). Specifically, I’m rolling 3 dice over and over again, assigning them to six attributes and trying to imagine what kind of character it would be: creating names and backgrounds, equipping them with weapons and armour or spells and then sending them off to, mostly, get charmed by Bargle and end up penniless in the practice adventure Gygax and Arneson wrote to explain the game to new players.

OG D&D is amazing, and as an exercise in almost pure imagination (almost because, in the old Basic rules, it’s always a fantasy world and you’re always making a recognisable archetype: a dwarf, an elf, a magic-user) it’s hard to beat the experience of creating characters over and over again. The closest thing to pure digital crack I found as an early teen, though, ended up being the character creation minigame in space-based RPG Megatraveller 2. CRPGaddict describes it well in the linked review, but  the tl;dr version is that character creation is a very involved process where you don’t just make up your character’s backstory, but actually live it out. That is, you roll up a character and then proceed to apply for school, get a (military or adventurey) job, and then stay at it as long as you want to. It’s a fascinating series of tradeoffs:

·       Longer careers accumulate more resources and start you in a better position (maybe even starting with your own multi-million dollar spaceship), but

·       you’re always ageing and losing physical (and eventually mental) stats; and

·       it’s entirely possible to get trapped in a dead-end career, never advancing, and stay there until you are sacked or die.

I’m a sucker for this kind of ‘emergent story in a teapot’ character creation when games offer it. Another good example is Darklands, where unless you look at a guide you could while away hours trying to get a husky knight with an education to rival Aristotle but end up with a series of moderately successful cabbage farmers.

So the project to test out whether I can do this is going to be to basically rebuild from scratch that kind of character generator drawing from some arbitrary but interesting (to me) premise - corporate life, maybe, or the Babylonian military - and stick it on a website somewhere I can play with it when I’m bored.


Edit: You can find the original MT2 on archive.org here.

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