Where can I get ready-to-play characters for D&D 3.5?

Question

The last time I played D&D was about 10 years ago. Now I've decided to show it to my university friends, who have never played it before but are pretty excited. For that first game, nobody would go deep into learning the game's rules and all the details. So I was thinking of throwing a little demo-game by some fun traditional module I found.

What I need now is four to six ready-to-use character sheets of different races and classes, with all defined stats, skills, etc. so I can give it to them and explain the logic of the game step by step.

Answer 1

I'm kinda surprised you didn't get any more on point answers. There's vast repositories of NPCs online and actually most adventures in 3.5-land come with pregens.

Here's the d20 NPC Wiki, a big ol' source, as is the DM Tools site.

A lot of adventure publishers have one set or another of pregens free on their sites - for example, here's a set from Necromancer Games. There's a bunch of Pathfinder pregens; they had 3.5e pregens in the back of every 3.5 Adventure Path.

Answer 2

If you're planning on running a campaign as a DM, even a short introductory campaign, I'd suggest you take the time to create the characters yourself, complete with background and general personality traits (don't get too specific with the personalities, as you want the players to feel comfortable putting their own spin on it).

Make sure you have more characters than players, so that each player is more likely to find a character that they'll feel they can enjoy playing.

This way you'll be able to not only tailor your characters in such a way that you stand a better chance of making the game appealing to the new players right from the start, but you can also start thinking ahead of adventures and challenges that will be ideally suited to the skills, abilities, and personalities of the pre-generated characters.

The process of creating the characters, and, if applicable, leveling them up and equiping them in preparation for distribution to the players, will have the added benefit of helping you familiarize yourself with the changes to the game mechanics that are part of 3.5.

Answer 3

The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Game is probably your best bet.