Creating Pendragon Characters

I last played Pendragon about 10 years ago, but after I met one of my old gaming friends that I hadn't seen for three or four years, at the local supermarket I was desparate to dig out my old rulebooks and see if I could remember the rules.

I remember from my playing days that we had trouble with character creation. If we used the points method every single character have maximum SIZ and close to maximum STR and CON, so every character also had minimal DEX and APP. If you use the random method the characters were very much underpowered as rolling 14d6 + 6 gives an average of 55 points, compared to the 60 of the points method and quite often resulted in unplayable characters.

I remebered that I once saw a system based on playing cards for creating d20 characters and I had a quick play arround to see if that were adaptable to Pendragon. The following system creates characters that have a stat total of 60. Nobody will have to play a character with a SIZ less than 13 or another stat less than 9 if they don't want to. It should also mean that not every character in the group has exactly the same stats.

Method:

1. Take the following cards from a standard deck of cards... 1 Ace (counts as 1), 3 2s, 4 3s, 3 4s, 2 5s and 3 6s.
2. Set asside 2 of the 2s and this should leave you a deck of 14 cards, one card for each die rolled during a standard character creation.
   
3. Shuffle the 14 cards together.
4. Deal 2 cards to SIZ and three cards to each of the other stats in order.
5. SIZ will equal the total of the two cards plus 6.
   
6. The other stats will be equal to the total of the three cards dealt to them.
   
7. Now the spare 2 2s are assigned to any stat as the player wishes, as long as no stat is increased above 18. they can be assigned to different stats or both to the same stat as desired.
   
8. Cultural modifiers are now applied as normal and can take stats above 18 as usual.