Pre-generated characters or not?

As I said a couple of posts ago, I’m currently running an Other London investigation for my regular group.

When I ran Other London previously, I used the pregens in the book. These are playbook-ish Fate Accelerated pregens. There are five characters, each with options so players can tailor them. They work well at conventions.

Questions on the pregens help tie everyone together, and using pregens means I haven’t got to worry about someone creating a character unsuitable for Desk 17.

As my players had all played Desk 17 before, I decided to let them create their own without using my pregen templates. The result was, um, interesting.

Letting players have their heads

Thomas created a career detective who had been demoted to Desk 17. They’ve upset someone powerful and suffer from the “evil eye”.

Terry created a talented cat burglar who has been press-ganged into Desk 17 after they were caught killing a werewolf.

At this point, we were in danger of Desk 17 turning into Slow Horses, with none of the PCs actually wanting to be in the department. Worse, the PCs so far had no actual magical abilities, which might be a handicap in Other London.

So I asked Jon (who was still mulling things over) for a character who had something magical about them and was also a willing Desk 17 employee. So he created a “street word wizard” (whatever that is) member of Desk 17.

PCs more interesting than the investigation?

While these were great, their backstories were much more interesting than my investigation. I was initially worried that this would derail the investigation, but so far, this hasn’t been a problem. 

I have had to ask the players to explain their characters. Some things were left deliberately vague so they could find out during play, and other things are simply opaque. For example, it wasn’t until session 4 that I asked Jon what he meant by “street word wizard.”

We are weaving their backstories and links into the game. I’ve asked them to draw on their backstories and contacts rather than just rely on me, and that’s working well: we’ve met lots of contacts and visited places important to the characters. So that’s working as intended.

More fun than pregens

After the last session, I asked the players how they thought it was going. They said they were enjoying the game (phew!), and Jon said that he was enjoying his character more than if he were playing a pregen, because he’s often not sure how to play a pregen.

I found that particularly interesting, as I really like pregens. Pregens tell me the kind of game the GM is interested in running, and they are usually suited to the game. (At least, good pregens do…)

If I’m left to my own devices, I can easily go off-piste.

The freeform influence

I wonder if I embrace pregens so easily because I play (and write) so many freeforms. The biggest difference between freeforms and traditional larps (and most ttrpgs) is that players create their own characters with a traditional larp/ttrpg, while you are given a character in a freeform. It’s a very different experience.

(And as a result, I’ve played a ridiculously wide range of characters in freeforms – see the list here)

There is a darker, reason I prefer pregens: I don’t really enjoy creating characters. At least, I didn’t used to. Back in the old days, I found character creation a chore. I wanted to get to the playing bit as quickly as possible, and creating a new character always got in the way.

These days, session zero is more structured and includes innovations such as actual bonds linking characters together (not something we did much of in the good old days), and I enjoy it much more.

Playbooks – the happy medium

So for me, playbooks (or partly-completed pregens with options for tailoring) are the best of both worlds.

I love them, and Other London comes with five playbook-style pregens that players can tailor. (I’ve used these when running at conventions and it works well.)

One of the reasons I asked my players to create their own characters is so I can use them to create more Other London playbooks, but I think we’d better finish the investigation before I think about that.