What Are The Three Most Important Things About Your Character?

One of the things I like most about the Cortex+ system used in Firefly, and probably the thing I like most in the character creation system, is the use of "Distinctions". Basically, a Distinction is a short description of the character, which could be a role the character fills, a relationship with another character, a personality quirk, or something from the character's background.

Each character has three Distinctions, and so character creation becomes a matter of picking the three most important things about the character. For example, Mal Reynolds' three distinctions are "Ship's Captain", "Things Don't Go Smooth", and "Veteran of the Unification War". But it's easy to see how, by simply switching out one or two of these, you can get a very different character - switch out "Things Don't Go Smooth" for, say, "Friends in High Places" and you get a well-connected captain who served on the other side of the war.

I'm inclined to think there are three keys to making this system work well:

1. You should probably try to write down those "three things" as your first step in character creation, and probably without reference even to the master list of Distinctions.
2. Having written down the "three things", you should check if any match with the master list. If there isn't already a good fit, then rather than trying to force a "best fit" you should probably just go ahead and create a custom Distinction. After all, it's not that hard.
3. Conversely, if there does exist a Distinction that seems to match one of your "three things", but it doesn't quite work for you in other ways (because you don't like the Triggers or, more likely, the keyed skills), you shouldn't hesitate to customise the Distinction to fit your character, rather than either go for something that you're not happy with, or changing your character to better fit some other Distinction.

(Incidentally, it's best if at least one, and preferably all, of your Distinctions can be read as both a negative and a positive in at least some situations. Because every Distinction has a Trigger whereby you can use it to add a d4 instead of a d8 to your Dice Pool and thus gain a Plot Point. And since Plot Points are officially nice to have, it's best to have that option. Especially since it is the player who chooses whether to apply that option or not.)