I wrote a character generator some time ago...it is very helpful to not have
to spend two hours rolling up a character that, because of random rolls, might
not be what someone really wants. For NPCs, I cheat; I just assume that they
are +1 or +3 characters, etc., and can do anything they need at that level;
chief bad guys get planned out in more detail. For players, however, the
program is useful. It creates a template that assigns values for stats,
how many terms they were in what career, etc., and it generates of number
of "skill points" that they can use to build characteristics, buy skills,
etc. This way, I save a lot of time on dice rolling, and people can build,
within some limits, a character that they like, with the skill specializations
that they want. In other words, a good technique is to NOT generate skills
for players, just give them a number of skills that they can buy, based on
the character's depth of experience, and let them build whatever character
they want (this is kind of a fusion of the Traveller system, and the
Hero system--by the way, I must recommend the Hero system as one of the
best General Role Playing systems I have ever seen...my biggest complaint
is that their combat system uses a weird curve that gives totally
unrealistic results for anything above personal combat, and their personal
combat system can take a LONG time to get something done because they use
different phases within a combat round, so "fast" characters can do more
stuff...my compromise for handling fast characters is that I let everyone
do the same number of actions in a combat round, but people with higher
dexes get pluses, and trying to do more than one thing--firing more than
one bullet from a semi-automatic pistol, etc., which IS possible in a
combat round, I've seen speed shooters who can pull off six rounds in
four seconds with good accuracy--gets minuses...it's possible, just
harder.)
Enjoy.
Mark