Building Character

Rampant Games' Jay Barnson has whipped up another blog entry, this time discussing the failures and virtues within the character creation mechanics that we've seen in role-playing games throughout the years.
I'm happy that modern games have a much broader range of rule systems that aren't all derived from an older edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But making a character can be a lot more frustrating if you don't have any clue how valuable Willpower might be in the game system, or whether or not there will be much call for your Advanced Larceny perk.

Unfortunately, the only real way to understand the game system well enough to make informed decisions in the character creation process is by playing. And once we're played enough to understand the game system, we're not too inclined to want to jump back to the beginning of the process to re-make our characters. Fallout 3 recently handled this in an interesting way by letting you completely re-spec your character after completing the intro sequence. Unfortunately, by that point you still didn't really understand the game system (at that point in the game for example, you'd be convinced that Energy Weapons was a useless skill).