With this in mind and my recent comments about Classic Marvel I remember that there was another system that had very random character creation.
Top Secret. Not the 'updated' S.I. Nope...the original one.
Okay, if you've no idea, Top Secret is about playing...gasp...spies. It was obviously inspired by the James Bond movies of the past and the various other 70's Spies TV shows. Anybody who played it would be hard pressed to say bad things about it. I will, only cuz "I'm that guy."
Only in retrospect is the system bad. It's percentile...kinda. I know that sounds odd but really...it was...a very...ahem...unique system. I mean...it was very common for players to have 75% in a skill that they were okay in and 120% in skills that they were great in. There were a lot of modifiers to help bring you down.
And the combat system was just messed up. We didn't care at the time. It didn't matter that the gun combat used percentile and that the hand to hand combat system was...actually a chart based system with zero dice rolls. And the two systems did not mesh at all. It also didn't matter that if you wanted to shot 10 bullets at an opponent you had to roll your first bullet with a 0% modifier, the 2nd bullet with a -10% mod, the 3rd bullet with a -20%, etc, etc. We did not care. We loved it. Well...we were kinda young and impressable and willing to put in the calculations to roll 10 times to shoot 10 bullets.
This is a game that had their first module named: Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle. I played that module several times and even read it. I have no idea today what the hell a Sprechenhaltestelle is, but it was damn cool! Here was a game that was not going to dumb things down, even if they thought about it, they should have. But no sir, not for all us pimply faced losers who played it. You wanted to know what the hell a Sprechenhaltestelle was...you had to go to the library to find out...or ask a German kid...or maybe it was somewhere in the damn module. I don't remember. I don't even care. The word itself just became something iconic. You could be failing math but you would be pretty damn proud of yourself if you could even pronounce this module. It gave you nerd cred.
But back to the Random Characters. This game had it all. Nothing will beat it (not entirely true but there are some games that just made a joke out of it). You had to roll for everything. Everything. What sex your character was. Your stats. Your skills (as in, which ones did you have and how good were you). Your languages. Which hand you were proficent with. In the expansion (that everybody used...duh) you could roll for such glorious and important things as your blood type, your retinal ID code, your fingerprint ID. There were some calculations too, based on your random rolls. You could figure out whether you were endomorphic, mesomorphic or ectomorphic. I had no fucking clue what the hell these were but I figured out one meant fat, one meant skinny and one meant stocky. I think. I didn't take biology and I didn't care. This was rad.
Classic Marvel was just as wonderfully random. It's randomness was magnified if you got the Ultimate Powers book. At least Top Secret was reasonably fair. Everybody played a human...you were only so tough or strong or smart. You could have sucked in all departments but you did have some good skills that could be (hopefully) useful under the right circumstances.
But Marvel...Marvel said fuck fairness. To be painfully crass, I think it skull fucked fairness and then dated it's sister.
No, seriously, it's the only game I've seen where I can roll up a well trained human with no real superpowers and you can roll up a god, while Jim over there rolls up a living plant. Oh and totally random powers. But of course my human gets random powers at low power levels and the god gets his totally random powers and at very high levels. And then the living plant guy is totally random powers at random power levels, such as getting Feeble (2) Storm Control (can make it sorta, kinda windy) and an Unearthly (100) ability to meld with cork or something. Oh and teleportation and laser eye beams. Why not. He's a plant afterall.
Rifts may rival Classic Marvel for inappropriate power levels but only Classic Marvel made it random. It was kinda fun to roll up something totally wild. When I was a kid. I tried it recently...and...yeah...it's pretty awful. A random character creates a role in which you are forced into playing. It is not 'fun', IMO. It's a bit of a lark and silly but it's not a long term thing. You have zero investment in it. And if you can't get invested in your character, then you're just rolling dice.
At the end, I'm a bit more of a fan of a points buy system. I don't want all characters to be equal. But I'm keen to not have anybody outclassed by random character generation. I think it's obvious that the Top Secret and Marvel systems were rather silly. No control over character creation is wrong. There was some joy in watching a character unfold before your eyes but now, I've been unable to find any ability to invest myself in a random character. I would rather build a character the way that I want. To suit whatever music is going on it my head at the time. I think that the industries obviously has adopted this as well, since I can't remember the last time I've even seen an random system. Other than, of course Warhammer. Hmmm...maybe that's why the players had trouble getting into their characters? I dunno.
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