“Character generation is massively overrated”

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Why don’t campaigns come with pre-generated characters?

Call of Cthulhu’s Masks of Nyarlathotep expects the investigators to drop everything and leave the country to solve the murder of their “good friend” Jackson Elias.

Delta Green’s God’s Teeth requires a very specific set of player characters – a single Delta Green agent (the lone survivor from their cell) and some friendlies.

Traveller’s Secrets of the Ancients requires the Travellers to care about a distant relative they’ve never met.

(And as I’ve discussed before, Traveller’s Legend of the Sky Raiders requires down-on-their-luck Travellers stuck on a remote planet far outside of the Third Imperium.)

I don’t know of anyone who puts their regular groups through these enormous campaigns. Instead, they create characters just for the campaign. With a bit of luck (or good guidance), the players must create characters that care about whatever it is that is driving the campaign. But given the campaigns themselves rarely provide much guidance, that can be luck more than judgement.

(And if you get it wrong, it can feel like the PCs are doing what they are doing because the players are playing the campaign, and not because it’s something the PCs are driven to do. Or you get mismatched PCs, as Neil Gow describes here.)

A better approach: pregens

But wouldn’t it be easier if the campaigns came with pregens? Characters suited to the campaign? With suitable skills and, more critically, the right connections, interests, and drive to follow the leads and see the campaign through?

Even if players would rather create their own, such pregens would provide a template for what would work for the campaign.

The pregens could even have room for the players to tailor them (like PbtA’s playbooks).

But don’t players hate pregens?

Well, that’s the theory. But I’m not sure.

Which is to say, I disagree – for at least four reasons:

• My experience of playing freeforms for over 30 years is that players are very happy to play good pregens that are linked to the game.
• Having run and played many convention games in the past ten+ years, I find that games work so much better with PCs designed for the adventure. I’ve never heard anyone complain.
• As I hinted at above, characters in PbtA games are largely pregens. And PbtA games are very popular.
• Reviews of ALIEN’s Chariot of the Gods and other adventures often praise the conflicting agendas of the scenario’s pregens. Players seem to love them. (And similarly, Greg Stolze’s disturbing Jailbreak.)

So the argument that players hate pregens is, in my experience, tosh. 

How did we get here?

I blame D&D’s concept of “modules” and the idea that pre-written adventures can be dropped in anywhere for any adventuring party. With that model in mind, why would you provide pregens? (I hate the term “module” for adventure or scenario, but let’s not go there.)

But I started with Traveller – and I followed that with Call of Cthulhu. Traveller’s original LBB adventures were scattered across the Third Imperium. There was no way a single adventuring group could do all the adventures, so inevitably, you’d have to create new PCs for the adventures.

And to be fair, Traveller’s adventures came with pregens. But they were just a list of stats and skills – no actual character. If Traveller had been more bold, and made their pregens more compelling so that players actually wanted to play them, things would have been different.)

Legend of the Sky Raiders

Here are the pregens for FASAs Legend of the Sky Raiders.

That’s it. That’s all you get. (Ironically, the key NPCs in Legend of the Sky Raiders would make better pregens.)

Call of Cthulhu

As for Call of Cthulhu, most of their adventures are independent investigations scattered across the globe. They were often deadly – the game doesn’t encourage campaign play. (Maybe that’s changed with the latest edition, which I’ve not seen.) If your investigator survived one investigation, they were hardly motivated to dive into a second. Or third…

So, pregens.

What’s the solution?

Give your adventures pregenerated characters. Write them for your one-shots, write them for your campaigns. Give them meaningful hooks and links to your adventure, and make them compelling.

As for me, I try to practice what I preach. I’ve put pregens in most of my published ttrpg adventures, particularly the more recent ones. And where I haven’t, it’s usually for a mission-based game where the game's characters are already focused on driving the adventure (such as Abaddon’s Puppet for The Dee Sanction).