Graph Paper Games

Since I'm not running my own game, I'm putting around with some other creative mediums.  For example, I thought I would take another crack at my Nazi robot villain Blitzkrieg.

Last night we had the kick-off of the new Mass Effect campaign using a hacked version of the Cortex+ rules.  PC creation was done as a group (ala Fate ), with the GM guiding everyone through each step en masse.  So for example we would all pick our races, then be informed of the impact it has on your PC, and then pick a background, be informed of the impact it would have on your PC, etc.  By the time it was all done we had one gun-berzerker, two snipers, one engineer (me), one medic, one Vanguard (whatever you want to call them--I call him a Jedi), and one diplomat. Now one thing I saw during this process was a couple of players getting frustrated with the fact that they didn't know what would happen as a consequence of picking a certain option.  For example, say you decide your PC has the "Colonist" background.  What skills would you think you would get?  Tech?  Survival?  Medicine?  You don't know.  Some players started asking the G...