They tried the random event thing in 3rd edition... it wasn't great.
It wasn't great because it was just poorly implemented. As I said, looking at (later editions of) Traveller is a good place to start. One
major issue with the random events in 3rd Edition was simply that they often seemed irrelevant, or made little sense. Star Trek Adventures,
the current Star Trek RPG, also uses Random Events to do some elements in chargen. And then you have the Heritage Tables in all editions
of Legend of the Five Rings. Random Events *can* work well. Just....MW3rd, with its already involved math handled them poorly because they
just added more math...MW3rd and AToW probably would have done better to have been licensed GURPS products, and would have been less
math heavy.