I'm planning on starting a horror campaign in which all the players awake with amnesia. I do still want the players involved in the character building process, and have been working on a way to achieve both goals. I thought of letting the players choose their appearance, main characteristics, and motivations as these would either be immediately obvious or immediately affect their decisions. Also, the players could choose a human archetype as their 'perceived' archetype, though they may in fact be something more. Career, skills, and talents would be under my control,and have to be discovered by the players, though some discussion would take place before the game of directions the players didn't want to go in.

I'm interested in any advice, opinions or suggestions people might have, as well as any special rules or gameplay they might suggest.

Is this a one shot game or a campaign?

How much do your players trust your ability to make characters they will enjoy?

It would be a campaign, and I'm hoping past campaigns will generate some trust in my abilities. Quite a way to test it, I suppose.

One way you could do is is ask them to choose the equipment, strong characteristic, weak characteristic and 2 skills.

You then build the characters and give them blank sheets with just the equipment to start.

Reveal everything as it comes up in the game.

Motivations could come about from the role play before they begin to get their memories back, then their motivations could change to the ones you originally chose or they can keep the ones they came up with.

Is it important to construct the campaign around the PC's forgotten abilities? Because one possibility is to allow the players to choose their characters' skill ranks and talents as they are 'remembered' in-game.

I did something similar for a one-shot Supers game, where the players chose an archetype and 2 skill ranks to start and then fleshed out their characters over the course of the session. I took this route to avoid an extended char-gen period before we got into the meat of the adventure. It ended up being a cool way to build characters that I have adopted for pretty much all of my one-shots.

Building the character during play is a very interesting idea. I hadn't thought about that. It would give players more control over their character build. Mind you, in a horror themed campaign, less control might create a better atmosphere. I'll have to think about that.

Yeesh... this old chestnut... make sure your players are onboard with not getting to make their PCs before you drop this on them.

Of note, most forms of amnesia, you retain motor skills and usually types of perisnality traits (being patient, kind, a jerk, etc.), you just lose memories, information, details, etc.

So, the majority of Skills - just about everything not linked to INT - a player should still get to choose.