Everyone's charged up about a new campaign. Eclipse Phase looks interesting and fun, and it's all new and shiny. We sit down to make up characters and... 4 hours later we've just about finished. Apart from weapons and armour. Seriously - there's too much point juggling - and each time you spend, there's a little bit of maths to do (what's the starting attribute?, how many of these ranks cost double?, is it halved/doubled because I'm an AI?). And that was without a couple of players who couldn't make it - so when we actually play next week they're going to be sitting there doing maths for the first few hours rather than roleplaying. OK. Whine over. I think there's probably an elegant solution for this. Something like skill packages. How about if for the 400 points you had to spend on Active Skills, you just chose 4 skill packages, each of which contained 100 points. So, for example, you might have: [b]Martial Artist[/b] Unarmed Combat: 40 Fray: 40 Clubs or Blades: 20 Perception: 10 Interest (Martial Arts): 10 And you could do something similar for Knowledge skills. Instead of 300 points, you choose three educational focuses which would say something like: [b]Professional Training[/b] Profession: [Your job] 40 Profession: [related job] 20 Interest: [Whatever got you into this profession] 40 So while you still have to choose the exact area, you get pointers to get you halfway there. There could be ones for things like: Slacker Humanities Academic Artist Sportsperson Social Scientist Material Scientist Hacker Military Cadet Business Person Computer Artist Anarchist Agitator etc... If you did this, there's only be 300 points to juggle, not 1000 and character generation would be much more streamlined and you'd be adding flavour to your character with each group you picked. What do you guys think? Worth expanding upon? Any potential problems?