I am about to write some new careers for my planned campaign and would like to know a bit about how you generate characters.

I think I'll use some sort of story driven system where the player rolls on a table each term. The range of the table is 1 to 22 or 1 to 33. The safe events are in the middle, while for those who wants to take a few risks may choose to elect to use DMs that gravitate away from the average. Ie rolls above 11 on 2D10 will add to the roll and rolls below 11 will be substracted from the roll.

Events may lead to other events or other opportunities. Thus shaping the character much more than just going term after term rolling for survival, special duty and so on.

My vote for this poll is then Other.

What do you prefer?

I hope to have a basic draft for Republic of Rome Legionaire character generation. I have nothing written down yet, but here is a few pointers.

Only nobles can become officers in a legion.
There will be 4 basic branches within the Legion.

Legionaire (Basic trooper)
Special forces (however named differently. However, a name has not been decided upon, but it will be based upon some old roman terminology)
Cavalry
Support (artillery, heavy weapons units and so on)
Field Specialists (Combat Engineers and so on)

Legions will be some sort of equivalent of Imerpial Marines.
Local defense forces to a given planet is called Pretorian Units (after the old Pretorian Guards that defended Rome)

I actually liked the advanced MT character generation the best. It added some depth to the character prior to play, but only to a certain degree.

Another thing I liked from MT is that the different races and polities (in the alien modules) had small variants from the generic character generation from the main rulebooks.

With my setting I'll try to do something like this, however I'll try to add some more story background to the character in the process. Hopfully I'll have a draft finished by friday. Or else it has to wait until January as I am leaving for Brazil this saturday and will be away for almost 5 weeks. As my wife has managed to crash the laptop I'll probably not be able to log on during this time. But I digress.

My ambition is to have a different style of characters even in the same type of branch just to illustrate the difference in philosophy and social order of the society.

I have also plans to make a tiered criminal character. Small time criminal which may have several fines and short term jail terms behind himself up to the mafia guy with. Their skills, contacts and earnings will be very different. But also their requirements may be different.

The advanced character generation in MT is one of the best systems I have seen. In a way the sub branching of a service branch made a character more unique. Standard character generation as basic generation in CT/MT and in TNE was not as diverse, and a system that lets a player select their skills often turns into a munchin at some point.

I have been thinking about that myself. But I would not do the conversion through Survival Margin as the conversio rules are rather loose, and may take a long time.

The best option is to just replace the skills in the tables with TNE skills and give the character more rolls per term.