For the Children!
I've been working on some pregenerated characters for an upcoming one shot that I'm running locally as part of an Extra Life gaming marathon. I consider myself a shepherd of the hobby of tabletop gaming. In the past year or so I've had the opportunity to run games for 6 people who have never had the chance to play D&D before- and 2 of the 6 of them actually took a strong liking to the game. I've found that a good pregenerated character can be very helpful in introducing a new player to any game since it reduces the time and effort needed to get the actual game started.
There's been a lot of talk lately about this article that charts the most popular combinations of race and class for the 100,000 characters created on D&D Beyond in the span of a month. It seems like this chart reinforces the popularity of established stereotypes of fantasy that we have come to expect- there are 3 Legolases (Legolai?) for roughly every 1.5 Gimlis and 2 Frodos, but the focus of all the buzz surrounding this study seems to be "How rare is your character?"
If you've been made to feel like an unimaginative hack by all of this discussion- you're not alone, but I think we all know that a cliche (or an ol' classic if you'd prefer) becomes a cliche because it works. All of the most popular race and class combinations highlight an obvious synergy statistically and conceptually. Why would you play a halfling and not be a sneaky little guy or gal? Why would you play a half-orc and not want to hack and slash?
For this game, I went ahead and made 6 characters that range in difficulty to play from human fighter to elven wizard- and each of them is what I hope that a total noob and/or a seasoned veteran would expect for them to be. I want to reduce the DC of overcoming this particular barrier to entry from 15 to 5 by simplifying everything that I can. I could have handed a new player a half-orc wizard or a gnome barbarian, but the race and class combos that I did use to create these pregens were much more standard so as to not confuse anyone at the table- "How should I play a tiefling druid?"
Obviously, it can be a lot of fun to subvert expectations and zag when you're supposed to zig- but I don't think anyone out there should feel less creative than others for sticking with what works. This goes for all the DMs out there that have ever started a game using a variation of "You meet at the inn..."
You can read more about my Extra Life game in the next post here.
If you've been made to feel like an unimaginative hack by all of this discussion- you're not alone, but I think we all know that a cliche (or an ol' classic if you'd prefer) becomes a cliche because it works. All of the most popular race and class combinations highlight an obvious synergy statistically and conceptually. Why would you play a halfling and not be a sneaky little guy or gal? Why would you play a half-orc and not want to hack and slash?
For this game, I went ahead and made 6 characters that range in difficulty to play from human fighter to elven wizard- and each of them is what I hope that a total noob and/or a seasoned veteran would expect for them to be. I want to reduce the DC of overcoming this particular barrier to entry from 15 to 5 by simplifying everything that I can. I could have handed a new player a half-orc wizard or a gnome barbarian, but the race and class combos that I did use to create these pregens were much more standard so as to not confuse anyone at the table- "How should I play a tiefling druid?"
Obviously, it can be a lot of fun to subvert expectations and zag when you're supposed to zig- but I don't think anyone out there should feel less creative than others for sticking with what works. This goes for all the DMs out there that have ever started a game using a variation of "You meet at the inn..."
You can read more about my Extra Life game in the next post here.
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