Yeah, the coin tosses at character generation are unreasonable. The Outlander can get a fear of everything, if he fails one of his coin tosses.
I'm sorry you've been having difficulties with the saving system, it is the hardest until you get good at the game, then have a really good run, in which case you do get some saves to fall back on in future. The mod I mentioned does include a debugging tool, which less you save freely. At the very least, you could use that to save the game right after creating a Merc, so you can skip the character gen process.