TFT Life History Character Generation

[David Bofinger]

Inspired by the discussion of TFT versions of Traveller, I was thinking of doing a character generation system based on describing a character's life history. Inspired by a combination of the Traveller system and the TFT jobs. This might be used to generate a PC or NPC, though I'd expect a fair bit of editing in the PC case.

The story would start with the character at age, say, 14. The first couple of things they picked up would very likely be mundane talents related to their childhood. (Maybe I'd relax the rules and give them those for free.) It would end with the character around 20 years old, 32 attribute points and filled with talents or spells.

The final output might look something like, "Grew up in a fisherman family [Boating, Fisherman], at 16 became a bandit [ax/mace], at 17 almost killed, at 19 joined a barbarian clan [bow], at 20 hunted by someone, at 20 made a close friend," etc. And at the end a character.

Has anyone tried something like this? If so, what lessons did you learn? Were you happy with the results?