based". The process of creating a character for a given game involves a number of decisions, such as: advantages and disadvantages that a character will have, what values are to be assigned, and what particular statistics those values are to be assigned to. For most decisions, there will be a rule outlining by whom and how a decision can be made. Most of these rules can be classified into one of the three groups described below. They differ in several aspects, the most prominent being ease of use, as well as game balance and diversity of the generated results. Most decisions in character creation are made according to the following principles: Prescription: The decision is predetermined by the rules (often by a formula or a table that maps one or more predetermined statistics to a specific choice for another), or it is made by the game master prior to character creation. This method facilitates fast and easy decisions that are likely to be balanced according to the judgement of the game's author and the game master, but doesn't allow for variation if not combined with other options. In an extreme case, characters are completely created by the author of a scenario, but even then, players usually may choose their character from the selection provided. This technique is often used to save time for short games run on gaming conventions. Examples would be the skill bonuses a character gets from their attributes in many games (which are usually determined by a table or a simple formula) or the number of character points a player gets to use for character creation (in GURPS, for example, this is set by the game master). Random Choice: Random choices are usually made by rolling dice and either using the result directly or looking it up in a table, depending on the decision that is to be made. Usually, a random generation system allows the full (or at least a rather large) range of values to be generated for each statistic, leading to a great diversity among newly generated characters. Thus, it is possible for a character to start the game with all-maximum scores (or nearly so). On the other hand, players have very little control over the scores, and rolling low scores can be very frustrating for some players. This method is generally less concerned with game balance than with ease of use. For example,