OK so im going to be running one shot or two shot missions for the next month because my players apparently have "better" things to do on the weekends and we will be missing 1-2 every weekend for the next month.

I am trying to come up with a "system" of randomly generating characters for them. I have hit a wall though, so far i have 1-5 being attributed to race with 6 being ghoul, shapeshifter, or metavariant.

for example:

1 human
2 orc
3 troll
4 dwarf
5 elf
6 next table

table 2
1-2 ghoul variant of table one
3-5 metavariant of table one
6 shapeshifter

aside from that , im stuck. is there even a way to pull this off or should i just start rampaging through the books and try to keep it as random as possible without a set method?

Random PCS?? That's a terrible idea. I think you should instead gather as many archetypes (from the rulebook, from TSS, etc), put em all in a hat, and have people draw one. They then write down a personality in 5 minutes and off you go.

Any way that I can think of to make a character 'random' results in a character that doesn't make sense, has no consistency, and low survivability. But if you're doing it for the fun of having deliberately screwed up characters, you could draw names of archetypes, but draw one for attributes, again for skills, again for equipment, again for magic....

"okay, so I got a (draw) human, with (draw) a combat decker's attributes and (draw) a street shaman's skills and (draw) no magic and (draw) a samurai's equipment..... oh damn."

Second that. Shadowrunners are specialists, and Attributes and skills are linked together. Random characters would be a real mess. Pre-made characters such as the archetypes in the book are much, much better. Heck, I wouldn't even have them draw them out of a hat. Just have a stack of them, then ask the players what kind of character they would like to play, and hand one to them.

mainly what i was looking for was random race, random archype. im not making the PCs goofed up.

just the fastest way to make a pool of characters for them to pull from, in the shortest time

I would love a "Random Character" option in the NSRCG, for my evil GM purposes. You know, so you could put together fast NPC's with contacts and everything.

About as "random" as I would recommend would be to figure out your number of players, then create a fully detailed team of characters. Balance the team yourself. When the game is close to starting, or a day before, have them all pick from the lot of the character sheets (face down). This way, you don't have a bunch of mismatched character/races. But, keep in mind that not all of your players may know how to play certain types of characters.

"I never read the Matrix section. Do I have to play a decker?"
"Wahhh, I don't get magic!"
"I was going to go to Tashi's to get some power converters!"

Has your group not go long standing characters?

I know in SR the life span of a character is not much but we always have backups, Might be worth trying to see if they want to run up there own ones for short games and have them to hand, thats what we do.

torz x

You know your own group, but would they want random characters? A lot of people have strong preferences. There might be talkers who would be bored playing a troll musclehead, or combat junkies who wouldn't know the first thing to do with a face character. Some might not be comfortable with the rules for decking or rigging.

Personally, I think it's better to just have a pile of pregens, so the players, while not getting the personally-crafted character they would in a longer-running campaign, will at least be able to play the general kind of character that they prefer.

What kind of character creation rules do you use for your campaign? If it's getting a quick stack of archetypes, beyond those in the book, that you need, then I could post a few of the ones that I have put together.

i was just trying to come up with a stack of PC sheets as fast as possible so my group could grab from the pile. I was going to run a one shot run to keep them fresh on the rules because the rest of the group is out of town and we wont be able to play for another month (two months between runs is far too long). The idea was to create a stack of varying archtypes and races and let them pick from the stack.

yes my group has long standing characters, no i wasnt going to stick them with things they didnt know how to do ( ie no riggers and no deckers) this was a basic go hunt paracritter mission). the reason for the stack was so they didnt take an entire afternoon making characters (possibly a full day).

Consevably it could be done but a lot of things would not be covered.
For example.

Role archetype.
Sammy roles augmentation style. (replacement limb, heavy cyber, cyber/bio, bio samy.
Then role exact implants.

The system would probably run to 200-400 pages depending how many books you included, take months to design and probably still throw unplayable characters as often as not while not being able to role many combinations you would actually use.

If you branch out into cross archetype characters it gets worse exponentially.

Edward