The Viking Hat GM

  Among my house rules is, Character generation : roll 3d6 down the line, choose from fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief. Regardless of rolls, characters may be of any of fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief, but will suffer a 10% malus to XP if they lack a prerequisite attribute. You character may not commit suicide, but if they happen to die, you can roll another character.  Remember that we have an open game table , which means we constantly have newbies coming - which we want to encourage. Any game has some combination of choice  and chance . Chess is all choice, snakes & ladders is entirely chance, roleplaying games are a mixture of the two. The more choice  you have the slower the game, as each choice takes time to make, with its own pros and cons and considerations and so on and so forth. If there are a large number of choices during character generation, then it takes a whole session to make a character, and casual players won't give it a go. Newbie pl...

In Classic  Traveller , famously your character can die during character generation. The character generation system has you throw for six attributes, then attempt a four year term or more of service in army, navy, and so on; in each term you gain skills. However, at the end of each term you must roll for survival, to see if something killed you during that term. Keep going for long enough and you gain quite a few skills - if you survive! It's not uncommon for a surviving character to have had 3-6 terms of service, and thus be 30-42 years old. Some lucky or merchant characters may even get into their 50s.  Which is to say that they have already had a life - what will be for many a full career.  One famous science fiction space explorer , for example, died in a reactor repair at 55 years of age after 35 years of service (it is said there were later stories, but this is unproven). And so the player who is creating a CT character is creating one who has  already ha...