Some RPGs don't throw a character sheet right at you when you start up a new game and tell you to fill it out. Bethesda's tradition seems to mostly revolve around having someone ask you who you are and then throw a few no skill minigames in the tutorial dungeon, as an example. This has the benefit of allowing you to play the game before solidifying your character. Starting you with a character sheet has the benefit of allowing you to decide your character's short and long term build, but then if the game isn't all that well-rounded, you may very well end up with a substandard build because you thought putting points into a skill would be useful when the game barely ever uses it.

I think one way of overcoming this is allowing you to distribute your starting points as you play the early game, so if you want to hold off on certain things until you want to use them, make specific scenarios easier at your discretion for example, you are spending points you might need for other things or are willing to sacrifice having the ability to commit to.

What do you think is a good way to build a character without necessarily starting with a character sheet? What examples have you come across that work well, or poorly for that matter?

A free respec with a mollyguard that basically reads, "In case build didn't match designers ideas". Because at the end of the day, you're not building against a live human who can react to the fact that you've been cheesing every encounter with Tenser's Floating Disk, but instead a lot of complicated design decisions that are largely set in stone.

So you're building for an optimized path though this, instead, and if someone decided to make a dungeon full of spiders manditory and you've been studying baking instead, you can free up those points and reallocate them as needed.

Alternately, just don't provide the player with useless skills such as Cartography, Book of Eschalon.

It was rudimentary but I liked how Mass Effect presented it as rebuilding a corrupted military personnel file during the specter process. There's a lot of ways to go with sci-fi, from building a new body to downloading a profile off the internet or whatever. I agree more games should do this.

The cartography skill is among the things I loved the most in Eschalon.

But in general, I love the Morrowind approach to character development. I love stats to grow as you use your skills, and these to shape your character. It feels organic (the french saying, "it's through forging that you become a smith") and offers real freedom. I understand the traditional logic of pre-defining your attributes, and not starting as a blank slate. But starting with your character in a deterministic box, even if it's defined 3 minutes after the game properly started, is still locking yourself down a path before knowing the landscape. In Morrowind, character creation never stopped, and felt continuous and natural.

(Not to mention it avoided "i clubbed 560 xp worth of rats I can therefore know lockpicking*.)

For basic traits, Elder Scrolls also goes the post-intro "by the way, what's your gender" route. Which feels nice. Makes me think of the reveal of Indiana Jones or Lazenby's Bond. It tries to balance the act between defining these traits early enough but also first giving you a superficial taste of the gameplay to come and the gameplay style you're likely to opt for. But the important thing is that, even then, it doesn't set it in stone, and keeps the character (re)definition going.

A criticism is that, by the end of the game, you become an expert at everything. But it's merely due to the almost infinite length of the game. If there was less content, you'd end up with somewhat realistic limitations in your ranges of skills.

Few things can top personality test in Jagged Alliance 2.

I happen to like the way the SaGa series does things. In SaGa 1 and 2, you choose a race (and gender, for humans and espers), and that's the only choice you make at character creation. Later SaGa games have recruitable characters who may have certain tendencies, but generally aren't shoehorned into a specific role. Then, once you've started the game, your characters grow based off their actions (or, at least humans do; some of the games have non-human party members who have different growth rules). You want a fighter? Just give your character some good weapons and fight with them. You want a mage? Just have them use magic, and their magic ability will improve.

Some of the Final Fantasy games have open-ended systems that allow you to customize characters in different ways, which end up not being pre-determined. In particular, I believe this includes FF2 (very much like a SaGa game, to the point where it could be called SaGa 0), FF3, FF5 (best game in the series, especially for a topic like this), FF7, FF8, FF10 (with the international sphere grid), and FF12 (original). (Or, at least, that's of the ones I have at least some familiarity with; note that I haven't actually played 8, 10, or 12.) I also like this approach.

The one thing I *don't* like about the Morrowind/Oblivion growth system is how level-ups, and in particular, attribute and HP growth at level up, are handled. Skill increases by use work well, but stat increases encourage a very specific counter-intuitive and un-fun playing style.

(Worth noting that Daggerfall takes a similar approach, but character creation is more involved, and stat gain at level up is random and not dependent on skills used; it's more like Arena in that regard. Arena just has you choose a class, has no skill system, and just gives XP rewards from killing enemies and completing main quests.)

By the way, one other issue with Daggerfall/Morrowind/Oblivion is that, while higher levels of skill take more skill XP, accomplishing more difficult tasks does not reward any more skill XP than completing easy tasks. This means that, for example, the best way to improve magic skills is to just tediously case weak spells over and over, rather than trying those more powerful, but more difficult, spells that you've learned. (Wizardry 8 handles this better, at least as far as magic skills are concerned.)

In concept, yes. In execution foams at the mouth and rolls my eyes back

I once looked up what the skill levels did and what the caps were, and the investment you needed for a competent map was baffling.

The skill itself is interesting, yes, but you first need to know that you can purchase the first five points, and only the first five points, in order to make do without and not spend any skill points until that happens. And then it's annoying that the map gets redrawn with less detail if your skill decreases (such as by removing a +skill item) too. Indeed, and That's also a huge plus for me, not in the least a criticism.
But This is indeed the problem. Attributes should also be raised through use, as in through the use of related skills.

I think that's more of a problem with how experience is doled out, encouraging mass murder for level gains. While I can appreciate the verisimilitude of growing your skills by doing, it has the double-edged sword of encouraging grinding or discouraging leveling up that skill if it's too tedious. It also comes up against a wall if there's not enough content to make leveling up those skills viable. (Say there's a level cap of 100 for skills, and each locked door gives you a level up in lockpicking, and there's only 50 locked doors. You are stuck at level 50 if you start at 0.)

Or, at the very least, attributes should be raised through a mechanic that doesn't result in the issue of missable stats.

(The whole missable stats issue affects some other games, including almost all games with non-retroactive HP growth, most games with random stat growth, and games like Final Fantasy 6/9 where something you can equip affects the stats you gain at level up.) Some other issues I've seen with improving skills by usage are:
* Skills that are useless at low levels. (For example, in Final Fantasy 2 some spells are that way, like Basuna, Esuna, and (in the Famicom version) Raise (well, at least Raise works fine outside of combat), not to mention all the instant death spells (of which there are too many).)
* Skills that are infrequently needed. (For example, in FF2, Basuna and Esuna would fall in this category.)
* Many passive skills, particularly those that rely on enemy actions to improve.

There's also the question of how easy it is for a new character to catch up to the rest of the party, or how feasible it is to level up a new skill on an old character.

Or my favorite, the skills wasted on a temporary character.
And skills only useful for one segment/boss.

Skills useful only for one segment/boss aren't so bad if one of the following is true:
* Said segment happens to be harder than the rest of the game. (Or, from a speedrunning perspective, said segment is time-consuming without the skill.)
* Learning a skill does not slow down your ability to learn other skills. (In other words, raising one skill doesn't slow down others; this precludes, for example, the system where you gain skill points at level up, and level ups take longer to get as your level increases (if you don't fight stronger enemies to compensate for that).)
* There's a character who is temporary, and who can learn the skill, and who happens to be present for that particular segment/boss. Bonus points if the character already starts with some ranks in the skill in question.
* The game makes it easy to respec out of the skill later.

(Edit: Added the bullet point about respec.)