I was wondering if it would help to relate the area were someone is born to what careers are available.

Would that make sense in your view or is the current system spot on.

What do you think ?

So for example a rat catcher charcater would most likely come from a town or city ect

Its fairly easy to work out most likely careers to areas

I did something like this for second edition and i think i based the groupings on an idea given in one of the early Liber Fanaticas documents...

http://www.liberfanatica.net/LF1download.html

I used area concepts such as Urban, rural, waterline, criminal, military, mercantile etc and divided the careers amongst those concepts and then came up with a random generation table for each of the available races.

I think one of the issues with doing this for V3 is that either each career would have to end up on many of the sub tables so that you are randomly rolling against more than a few careers, or you'd have to very much reduce down the number of tables to from in the first place.

The three random from the base set probably gives a pretty good mix in concepts as it is...most of the basic careers are pretty iconic in that sense.

I think if you are thinking of running primarily a city campaign for instance, then you could remove any careers as starting options that you don't think fit within that niche, but all in all the starting careers in V3 are more or less generic enough to suit any kind of situation and starting campaign.

remember, that strictly speaking the career you are in is the job you did before you became an adventurer and the job you return to when times are tight and money is needed, so although a employed Rat Catcher would most likely be found in a city, an unemployed Rat Catcher down on his luck who has had to turn to "adventuring" to try and make ends meet could be found almost anywhere..... there could even be a nice adventure hook into why said character has travelled so far away from the city to try and find work.... and who might still be looking for him......

I always do it the other way around. While it may be interresting to draw a random career or have it decided by your place of birth, I always allow players to pick the career they want to play and then expect them to full out the background so it fits that career. My players have always been very sensible about character creation, not trying to exploit loop holes and min/max their characters for combat. But we've been playing rpgs together for close to 20 years, so we know what we like already

I'm with Gallows on that one. I always allow players create the type of character they want to spend the next many months with, letting them flesh out some of their background and working together with them on the rest of what they know about themselves. The secret stuff I keep to myself until the time is right

Lucas Adorn said:

agreed. I let the players pick, unless it's a con game.