It was a blast!
There is something with random character generation systems. They can lead you in directions it wouldn't occur to you to pick otherwise. They might add a twist to your character that you would overlook.
In this case, the characters became different, but with some really nice connections. It didn't take long for the group to decide that they wanted to have a company that dealt with information, basically a spy-network. It all fit together very nicely, the process added a couple of both patrons and enemies, and gave me a number of sub-plots to incorporate.
Why do I mention this? Thing is, I think that the last couple of years, random character generation has gotten kind of a bad rep. Different kinds of point-buy systems are the norm, as is different kinds of class-picking (and often a combination of these). And, while I definately see the charm in custom-building your character sometimes it's just as fun to roll the dice, and then use your creativity to make sense of whatever was rolled.
One game I remember fondly was the old Golden Heroes superhero-game from Games Workshop. You rolled up all your powers, and then you had to come up with a background and theme fitting those powers. The powers you couldn't fit into that background you hade to forfeit. A couple of my most memorable characters was made using that system.
That's why I'm glad that there are a couple of games that return to random chargen. One of these is Reign. If you are using Wild Talents, there is an official webb-download with a similar random generation system for superhe.. sorry... talents. The upcoming game Icons! also uses a random system.
So, consider this post a small praise for the interesting, challenging and wonky characters you can get from using random character generation.
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