unless we are playing Buckaroo Banzi
Now that sounds like a good game.
, but rolling a CT character, even with death at term 6 takes, what -five minutes ?
For Book 1? Well, I did maybe one or two under it, and maybe ten under Supplement 4.
I do recall that for my first time through the Book 1 system, it took about an hour to figure out where all the flows went and how all the tables worked together. And I probably made some mistakes as I recall figuring some stuff out under Supplement 4. I did encounter dead characters here under the Survival roll as I was dicing it out honestly to begin with. Right after I rolled my first character death, I stopped and decided to ignore that and continue onward. The Survival roll became a non-roll until somewhere I read about a "forced out of service" option.
Books 4 and 5 were both available by the time I started working on the game, and I picked them up not too long after I had Books 1-3 and Supplement 4. It took me only one character rolled up under Book 5 to realize that I would never use Book 1 or Supplement 4 again as a player, for any reason, ever.
As a GM, I fudged a lot of characters using the rank and mustering tables in Supplement 4 after using Books 4 and 5 to roll up skills. Any super-military skills, like Fleet Tactics, got converted into something else more appropriate after finishing up. This tended to add time to the processes involved.
Character creation times under Books 4 and 5 were what I was basing my statements on. Book 1 and Supplement 4 would have been faster, I admit, had I rolled more characters under them. I always remember taking a bit to think about which table I would risk rolling on. If I had been more, "I don't care," and just rapidly picked tables and rolled, yeah, 5 minutes. For Books 4 and 5, it usually took 15-20 minutes once I got rolling on it. The first under each of them, though, too over an hour. Again, I found out after a few generations that I had made mistakes and the first few characters under each weren't rolled correctly.
What was it, hmm, researching... Oh yes, in Book 5 (and Book 4), there are various schools as special duty. Several of the schools provided a list of skills that were to be learned. To learn each skill on the list, you had to roll above a goal on 1D6. I somehow missed that item on the first few characters and simply wrote down all the skills. I cannot tell you how furious I was when I finally read about the goal roll. It implied that, in the military, you could be sent to special development school and get nothing out of it. And that did happen to me when I tried it, I would roll for every available skill from a school and get none of them. I cannot see a person's superiors taking kindly to having sent him or her to a school, expending the teaching effort, and getting nothing out of it. I think I wound up ignoring the goal roll on those extra schools eventually and went back to doing it like I did before I found out about it. While I did like the extra schools system overall, some offered far too little in comparison to the others. I can't remember having done anything to bring the weak schools into line with the decent schools, but I should have.
Books 6 and 7 were somewhat modeled on Books 4 and 5, but for whatever reason, their processes felt like they flowed a bit differently and I didn't like them.
The vast majority of characters I created were done under Books 4 and 5. I sat and created character after character just to see what random results popped out. That was from a GM's viewpoint, not a player's viewpoint. As a GM, I rather liked getting random results as I was not specifically trying for anything. In some ways, I was even disappointed that there wasn't a random equipment generator so I could just have that part pumped out, too.
okay, YOU try writing an algorithm that interactively conditionally accounts for nearby object variables.
Given that it was their campaign setting, what I actually would have thought was:
Randomly create characteristics of all worlds in one pass, and then analyze the results a bit, you know, to see what had come out of it. Because I'm telling you that the most basic analysis of the results show huge numbers of issues.
Once you had done that, then you go in and manually (or programatically) tweak it until most, but not all, of the issues were gone. It's okay to have serious anomalous results here and there, but not everywhere.
