Your pirate ship in What the Sea Wants is populated with both scripted and randomly-generated characters. The latter provide replayability value, but it’s important that they mesh well with the scripted crewmembers and not come across as fake “burner” characters who it’s okay to sacrifice. Many factors needed to be balanced to create plausible random characters–nearly every attribute is affected by another attribute in some way.
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Name: 90% chance it’s picked from a list based on the character’s gender and home port; 10% chance of a neutral nickname. There’s an additional 5% chance of a piratical prefix such as “Mad” or “Salty.”
Role: 90% chance of seaman, 10% chance of mate to one of the officers (gunner’s mate, surgeon’s mate, etc), with no more than one of each type of mate.
Age: Random, between 16 and 30.
Gender: Random, but not exceeding 9 of either gender. Stored as an int but displays as “man/woman” if over 18 and “boy/girl” if under 18.
Home Port: Random.
Years on the North Wind: Random between 1 and 4, or random between 1 and 2 for characters under 20.
Traits: Every character has two, randomly assigned, but they must be different.
Skills: 10% chance of 0 skills, 70% chance of 1 skill, 15% chance of 2 skills, and 5% chance of 3 skills. Mates additionally get their officer’s skill for free. Skills are randomly chosen from a weighted list.
Friends: The maximum number of friends is a random number from 0 to 4, with Empathetic characters getting +1 and Reticent characters getting -1. Friends are assigned from the following categories in order, stopping when the maximum is reached or when all three lists run out, whichever comes first: 1. Mutuals (crewmembers who are friends with them), 2. Compatriots (crewmembers from the same home port), and 3. Sympathetics (crewmembers with the same pair of Traits).
Description: Random, but procedural text matches the description to the character’s gender.
Portrait Code: This string is generated based on the character’s gender and home port to match one of 18 available portraits.
And as my mother says, “As the French say, Voilà.”