namely, that a resume or CV is just your IRL character sheet's tally of XP

& now I desperately want to run something where you literally have a CV tallying up your XP

I really like procedural character generation & this sounds so fun

(I know there are systems which do similar things already - Traveler character creation for one; Dogs In The Vinyard for another)

but yeah. just being able to look at your character sheet & immediately seeing why your character got good at X is

super fun to me

Oh I love that

right?

it wouldn't be too hard to make this work for a non-level XP game like Shadowrun or Vampire: The Masquerade either

just add an extra sheet where, when you spend XP, you record WHY & HOW

(I have also been thinking lately how fun it might be to run a vampire game, masquerade or otherwise, with Traveler-style procedural character generation)

where we set up as your backstory, a certain number of years of your unlife pass, we roll on a table to see what events or complications you face

you make a choice how to handle that scenario

and that choice gives you a bump to the connected skill or power

I really like the nuance & depth you can get with organic, procedural character gen like that

(there was a span of about 4 years where in every game I ran, I only did procedural character generation. I still like it, but I don't INSIST on it any more)

in some games, you want to create naturalistic characters the players have fun discovering & exploring; in others, you want to give players free rein to follow their vision, I no longer think either of those is more valid

it's just what vibe you & the players want for that game

although

my all-time favorite character creation technique, as a GM, is still when a player comes to me & says

"I have two wildly different character concepts I want to play & I cannot choose between them"

& I say, "have you considered ways in which you can fold these concepts into the same character?"

it always leads to WILDLY memorable characters

including one PC who wound up with a d7 Hit Die, because he was literally two souls in one body, one of which had d6 HD, one of which had d8 HD, & we did not want to recalculate his HP every time he swapped personalities

One thing I really like about Cyberpunk RED is you get improvement points and that’s your XP and you spend it and the rule book highly recommends spending some time at your new level before leveling up again to sorta simulate the improvement over time. IDK how many tables actually follow it, but I’ve always loved that they wrote it in there lol

Okay so the idea of folding two characters together like that is so cool Djjdjdjdjd

it can be so much fun in so many ways. like even when much less literal than that one, you kind of automatically get the character having nuanced, conflicting wants & a richer, busier backstory.