Is there a good way to distribute pregenerated characters?

Question

I am preparing for a game with a bunch of new players, with a mix of varying familiarity with the setting/system and RPGs in general. To get them to taste the setting ASAP I decided to play a one-off introductory game with pre-generated characters (pregen'd by me - the GM). For my 5 players I have prepared 8 (IMHO) interesting archetypes (like The Soldier, The Conspiracy Theorist, The Psychic etc.) from which they will be free to choose.

But I am perplexed by the choosing process. Surely I think I am going to describe the characters beforehand openly, as in "This guy is The Socialite archetype, he is a fellow passionate about meeting people and maintaining relationships with various interesting people. He has a lot of contacts and retainers in the general entertainment industry and is very strong on social skills - good liar, observant in conversation, likeable and charismatic. However, he lacks genuine knowledge and "hard" professional skills, and is at best mediocre physically."
Then, after going over each one, they would be able to choose, but what to do for the process to be fair and quick?

I have thought of the following tactics:

1. Simply hand the sheets to a random person for a round robin, but the ones at the end might feel disadvantaged.
2. Distribute them randomly or arbitrarily and let them trade but it feels like it's going to take a lot of time.
3. Make them create a list from most preferred to least preferred and then cross-compare them to come up with the best division possible. This again would be complicated and laborious.
4. Finally, to have a Need Before Greed approach. After each description if a player feels this is the character for them, he/she yells "need" or "greed" - the first player to "need" gets the char, but cannot choose from the rest. If none yell need, then greeders get chars on round-robin basis without removing themselves from calling later. However, this looks complicated and still a hasty "needer" or an unlucky "greeder" might be upset.

Is there a tactic of distributing chars fairly? I ask under an assumption that (as in point 3) a consensus can be reached and upon hearing the char list/description, the players would have an order of preference.

Answer 1

The way I've always seen this done is to simply let everyone look over all the characters, and then let them decide among themselves who plays what.

I guess this could lead to problems if there were two players who absolutely insisted on having the same character, but I've never witnessed that being an issue. More likely, one of them will just say "I really, really want to play the Big Barbarian" and then the other will go "okay you can have her, I liked the Wizened Wizard too so I can just play him instead". This usually happens pretty quickly, and the fact that you have more characters than players helps reduce insolvable conflicts.

In my experience, it's more likely that you'll be delayed by a player who can't decide between two characters that nobody else has laid a claim on. Often people are actually relieved when someone else picks a character they liked, since that spares them the effort of trying to decide between the Big Barbarian and the Wizened Wizard. (You definitely don't want to do the "list all characters from most preferred to least preferred" thing. Trying to decide on just one favorite is hard enough, trying to put them all in order is even worse.)

If two players really both insist on getting the same character, just have them flip a coin or play rock-paper-scissors or whatever to settle the question.

Answer 2

I think maybe you are overthinking it a little. In the past, when I did this, I have assigned each player the character that I thinks he's going to play better, or I think will be more interesting to him. That's because I have very mutual trust with my players. But that way you can assign the simplest characters to the more novice players (e.g: leaving casting spells characters to advanced players who know how magic works).

You can talk with each player about what type of character they want to play, so you can have an idea of which is the best to each one. You can negotiate with them: "There is only one seductive, some of you would like to play something else?" or "I have a character that is not so good in combat, but he is athletic and quick".

Another option is to let the players choose in random order. It's fair because anyone had the same probabilities before the raffle, and if you have 8 characters for 5 people, there are good chances that the last one will still pick someone attractive to him.

Answer 3

The following has worked quite well for me as a GM at game conventions where pre-generated characters are the norm. I have done this many times.

Sit your players around the table with nothing on it. Place the character sheets face down in the middle of the table.

State the following:

"Each of you take a sheet, look it over privately. If you are satisfied with what you picked, keep it. If you don't like it, put it back face-down and pick another sheet. You can only hold one sheet at a time. If we run out of characters you like, better luck next time. And yes, you can trade between each other after everyone has a single character in front of them."

This assumes none of the pre-generated characters are "required" or have secrets from the other players. If certain characters are "required", first put only the required characters out, then when those sheets have been taken, lock those player choices in, then put out the secondary characters.

My favorite pre-generated characters have 3 aspects.

Aspect 1: a well-designed, cleanly-filled primary sheet, with a background that can potentially interlock with other player characters.

Aspect 2: allowance for slight customization of skills or equipment; provide leftover points for allocation from the primary skill point pool, or allowances for 2-3 non-repeating attribute adjustments.

Aspect 3: a "secret sheet"; a separate paper of character-only information handed out to each player only after their characters have been finalized. The "secret sheet" lists character-only knowledge: special skills, extra equipment, underground contacts, background, missions, and vendettas. A "secret sheet" is commonly used for pre-generated Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia characters, but is universally applicable. Make sure if you use secret sheets that every player receives one for their character, even if a given character might not have anything secret to list.

Answer 4

What everyone else has said: have people choose by consensus or roll dice for first pick, and suggest easier-to-play characters for newer players. I've always done the "whoever gets to the table first gets first choice in pre-gen characters" when I've had these (like conventions). It encourages people to be prompt. The other thing is to make sure you put the blurb on the character sheet. This helps speed up the picking — players don't get overwhelmed by the list of skills and attributes.

The other thing to emphasize is "this is just to get a flavor of the game". These characters aren't set in stone, it sounds like.

Answer 5

Let the players decide among themselves, unless you have a history of them fighting and not getting along? Also, let more than one person choose the same pre-gen. They want two melee fighters or two socialites? Great! Let them!

Also, I tend to split the pregens into two stacks - send one clockwise, send the other counterclockwise.

Generally speaking, I tend to build the pre-gens with two or three 'variants'. For instance, the melee fighter can either take the 'fight lots of weak enemies' build or the 'fight one big boss' build.

My players really have never had a problem with it, for one shots, if their character sheets happen to be identical, and the 'different builds' help them to not have quite the same character.

For instance, one game had exactly the above situation: One took the 'fight lots of weak enemies' and the other had the 'fight one big boss'. They determined that their characters were a standard team in the city guard, who worked well together since they complimented each other.

The other time, two players both took the martial artist with a focus on super-jumping, sticking to walls, and other movement abilities, along with a pair of pistols. They had a great deal of fun competing with each other to see who could get the most kills, or the most imaginative kill.

Answer 6

Choosing/Assigning Pregens

Since you have a mix of players in familiarity and skill, the first thing is to identify which characters are the easiest to run with in terms of mechanics and fictional role - the good "starter" characters. This would be characters who are the least mechanically complex if the game has different rules for different character types (magic, is the usual culprit). Let the newer players know "These 2-3 characters would be really good to start with" and let them pick from that, first.

This avoids a situation I've seen a few times where the completely new player gets the most mechanically complex character, which either ends up in the character being used terribly and the player at a loss for what's going on, or the game grinding to a terribly slow space where another player or two has to constantly explain how to use the mechanics to the newbie.

Once that's done, then let the advanced players pick from what remains. If there's a conflict over who gets what character, just have them flip a coin or roll a die to see who gets it.

Describing your Pregens

When it comes to descriptions for the sake of picking, I like to keep the description really short and easy to parse for people looking at the character sheet:

Kolemi Kinata
A tricky old man 2nd Level Human Rogue

Kolemi works best by using his mobility to get around, teaming up on bad guys to use Sneak Attack, and using tricky stunts to overcome enemies. He has a lot of skills outside of combat which can be useful.

It's a simple layman's term of what the character does, so players who aren't familiar with the system can at least get an idea of the strategy or how to play the character in the most general sense.

Of course, there's also a background paragraph going into more detail about the character's history and motivations, but having a "game friendly' bit early on makes it really easy to get new players into play.

Answer 7

I would go over each character, and then allow choice by "white elephant" style. The first person gets to pick first. The second can choose what has been picked, or one of the other characters. Keep going until everyone has a character.

You can also do it blind, where no one knows what sheet they're picking when they grab from the pile. In this case, the first person to go should be able to choose to keep what they have, or take the character of the last person to choose from the pile.

Answer 8

Just an addition to Kal_Sitala excellent answer...

Get them out of the comfort zone: go against type.

So, if the player is used to playing no-combat characters, I will suggest they play the party muscle. If they never played cross-gender, I'd suggest they play an opposite sex character. Why? Mostly because it is a one off. You can play something well even if you are not familiar with it for one or two sessions. What it will do is force the player to think about how to do things they have not done before: to learn the new role they have been assigned. But they are not stuck with that role for long. They can have fun with it, and then discard it to play something they are more comfortable in the long run.

Answer 9

Game Theory for the win!

If you have really found yourselves at an impasse, you might consider a technical solution to the problem. The New York Times published a tool for dividing rent fairly among roommates. The essence of the tool is that you kick choices back and forth at different prices until a stable state is reached (i.e. when no one is willing to pay more to take a different option).

But I'm not going to charge my players to game!

That's fine! But you might want to order food during the session, or at least bring snacks. Figure out a budget for the session's foodstuffs and throw it into the calculator, along with the players and the characters. Spend a couple minutes, and you'll have figured out a mathematically fair distribution of the character sheets, and settled how to pay for food at the same time!

(Note that the calculator requires the same number of players and rooms, so you'll have to whittle down to that some other way.)

Answer 10

For a one-off, you want to make choosing a character fast and painless.

If it doesn't matter to the game which (or how many) archetypes are used, print out plenty of extras, and let each player pick the top sheet from the pile of whichever archetype he/she wants. Alternately, shuffle all the sheets together and have each player pick two, look at them, then discard the sheet they don't want.

If the game needs a certain number of each type, then let the players choose by calling out the archetypes on a first-come-first-served basis. You can choose who is "first" by any number of means: who shouts "me!" first, who showed up first, where the players sit, or even by rolling dice (gasp!).

Remember, in the end, it's really not going to matter much who gets what. New players won't know any better, and the regulars will know they'll get a new character at the end of the one-shot anyway.