After choosing your race, you'll next start developing your character by choosing your background. Your background will start at 4 generations before your birth. It will be randomly generated and you can't cheat. Ref's make sure your players are doing this legitimately and taking the bad with the good. If generating on a computer, checks will be put in place to make sure that every time your reroll on the same character to get better results, the results will start getting worse. Checks will also be put in place to insure that you don't get all crap rolls the first 3 times you try. (basically, everything is numbered 1-10, all bad stuff will be high numbers, and all good stuff will be low numbers. If you roll a lot of bad stuff, the total will be high, the computer will check that an allow you a free reroll if it equals a certain amount, a stop gap to keep you from having a gimped toon. If you happen to have all good rolls on one of the first 3 rolls, then great)
Roll on this table 4 times, each roll is for one generation starting at 4 generations before your birth. Keep track of your results. (D10)
Background
Pro
Con
Notes
1 Farmer
+1 Str/End
-1 Int/Comp
Not available Mon'Za
2 Miner
+1 Str/End
-1 Cha/Int
-
3 Entertainer
+2 Cha/+1 Carousing
-1 Str
-1 to starting weapon skill
To be completed later on
This list is far far from complete, and even when my family was still around it was never completed. This part was a many tiered process, it wasn't just rolling a virtual D10 a few times and calculating stats,,, well ok for the PnP version it was exactly that simple, for the computer MMORPG version it was vastly more complicated.
The game was to be designed so that a story could be constructed around each choice. If your first roll shows your ancestor was a farmer, the game would then choose a random name or prompt the player for a name of an ancestor, then behind the scenes the game would also roll on the type of person your ancestor was, was he an asshole, joe average, or a real saint. Then it would roll to see how successful he was at his profession. All of these things would then be woven together into little story. Segments of story were to be prefabricated and then pieced together as needed.
"Your great great great grandfather Joe was a/an award winning farmer, but wasn't well liked."
Player inputs the name of "Joe"
Game randomly generates Joe was a great farmer out of many possible choices.
Game determines he wasn't very well liked.
Game then pieces those choices together and chooses the appropriate line of text which might look like-----
"Your great great great grandfather (name) was a/an (profession quality), (syntax)(personality quality)."
I always knew setups like the above were possible, even before I had seen other games do it.
OF COURSE, THE ABOVE WAS JUST AN EXAMPLE, AND AN ABLE MINDED WRITER COULD DO A FAR BETTER JOB.