A popular insight in game design the last few years is “game play is a conversation.” To be nit-picky, you can play many games without having a conversation, but then it becomes boring, a game of dice and probabilities, not a complex interplay of events and reactions.
It occurred to me recently that character creation is a conversation, too. This is especially important to know in point-based games, and even moreso in universal games like Cosmic Cutthroats. When you can easily make any kind of Character, the GM can’t foresee possibility. They can lay out certain guidelines, but they should be involved in the process, as well. The best Campaigns are flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of Character concepts, and room for Players to add to the setting’s lore.
The hard thing about writing game advice is putting things into words that you’ve known in your bones, from decades of gameplay.