Dear Editor: As a player of superhero role-games for the last four years, I would like to answer a recent point made in a letter column, regarding character generation in SH role-games; the act of character creation in literature is not a random act. Robert E. Howard did not roll dice and consult a table when he created Conan, nor did Stan Lee when he created Spider-Man. A comic book superhero is a passive agent; when a rolegamer is creating a character, he is acting as an author, not as a character. Random character generation is marvelous when it forces the player to explore concepts he wouldn't have considered playing, and imbecilic when it limits conceptions and/or produces contradictions. Let's not hear anymore of this "Peter Parker didn't get to pick Spider-Man's powers" gibberish, because Stan Lee created Spider-Man, not Peter Parker! --Scott Bennie Abbotsford, BC, Canada Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #11 To Game News List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1986 by Dana Lombardy. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com