Just ran three players through character creation. It's actually not that bad and all 3 were interested in doing more than just mech battles after I ran them through it. It's just poorly organized.
Examples:
- why have that 850 required XP you're supposed to spend be listed separately when you have to take the affiliation module? Just make the affiliation module 1000xp and include that stuff!
- Why is figuring out you health in a side bar in the combat section instead of part of character creation?
- Why is figuring out your movement a side bar in the movement section instead of part of character creation?
I do hope the rest is better organized since it looks like I am going to be GM actual AToW sessions now. :o
As someone in the beta test a decade ago, I sat down and generated over 100 characters. Most from Minor Periphery / Novo Franklin because I wanted the challenge of something forcing you to buy citizenship and buy off illiteracy if you were going to be anything more than a street thug or laborer (not that there's anything wrong with that - the time passage through jump ship travel + aging effects help build skills up slightly more rapidly if the GM is generous with your character's 'training'). If I recall, many of us in the discussion asked to just dump that little "prerequisite", especially since it's kind of buried in the text. A sidebar with this explanation should stick out. Also, we wondered why Clan characters got more XP to start than IS characters. Thankfully they changed at least that.
I love AToW. I plan to keep running with it. Seems like a lot of love was put into the game, character creation nightmares aside. I have hopes for Destiny that it stays within the AToW vein, fixes the weird costs like the 850 at the beginning, still gives the wide array of skills so that people aren't always encouraged to be MechWarriors.
Two phrases I tend to tell my players when making characters now: "Are you a character who happens to know how to pilot a mech? Or are you a mech who just has a character inside it?" and "Just because it's Star Wars doesn't mean everyone has to play a Jedi."