I only include them because they are required. Publishing a book is expensive, and it's time to give these authors a fair shake from us, the customers, who actually play the games. It's funny, inspiring, and charming to players, who start raving about characters and possible scenarios as soon as they grasp the concept.
Character creation requires dice-rolling, accounting for level, and allocating points.
It's quite involved, which is not a problem for making PCs. However, it was quite a lot of work to generate usable NPCs, rolling, adding and subtracting, flipping pages, etc. It reminded me of the old RuneQuest days when every skill had to be figured from its relevant attributes. The resolution system follows the traditional late 80s Fortune method, comparing the results of a roll based on your attribute and skill values to a target number. For such a system, it's extremely painless during play compared to similar systems like Rolemaster or Cyberpunk, because you simply add or subtract dice as modifiers.