Create your character
Character creation isn't where a game actually starts, but it is where most of the players will start engaging with it, so let's begin here.
How do you create a character?
Well, first you take 3d6 and-
No, no. Before that. Before any mechanics or narrative. What verb do you use to create your character?
Are you building your character or are you discovering your character? (Discovering will often be called rolling or generating the character but when you drill down, it's about discovery)
When a game asks you to build a character, you might get points to spend, numbers to assign, feats or abilities to choose. You can build towards a specific mechanical focus or recreate a past character.
When you discover a character you roll on tables, generate random stats, and cobble together a person out of disparate elements. You draw a line around the components you've been given and figure out what you have.
Neither is inherently better than the other. They are different approaches and are Different Kinds of Fun. They also have their own drawbacks. (There is also a spectrum between them of hybrid systems but we'll get to that)
What is important, is that the character creation system aligns with the game's core focus so as not to detract from the experience.
What do I mean by that? Let's look at some examples:
Vampire, in all its iterations, is a pure build system, and that makes sense. The game wants you to put a lot of effort into the angry backstory of your cursed bloodsucker and so you need perfect control over your character to make sure they do what your story expects them to do.
In the Cairn/Bastionland games on the other hand, you really only get to decide on your name and pronouns. Everything else-role, stats, gear, backstory- pops out of the tables fully formed. This reinforces the surreal atmosphere of the games and that you are strange little men in big strange worlds. (And makes making a new character a snap when faced with high lethality OSR principles)
In either case, the opposite system would lead to an unsatisfying match with the wrong system: a kindred who breaks the world building and struggles to feed or putting hours into stating a knight who might die in a single unlucky hit.
When I come back to this, we'll talk about hybrid systems and why those are usually worse than either end of the spectrum. Hot take cliffhanger!