I’m curious to know that for games which include pregens or half-baked characters in them, what do you think is a good quantity to include in a game book, and why?
Pregen quantities
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At least as many as the max player count for your game, plus one. That way the last player to choose at a con still gets to choose. Not many more than that.
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Depends on what purpose they serve is what I’d say. If they’re just in there for people to run demos of the game, a dozen or so pregens should be ok to give enough choice for the person demoing/the players. If it’s pregens built specifically for a certain scenario, # of players, probably. If (to an extent) pregenerated characters are the way character creation works in general like with Troika (36 backgrounds) or Electric Bastionland (100 failed careers), then you need a lot more.
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I think 3-4 Pre Gens are fine, no one expects to stick with them for a long time, they are a trial or sample.
Pre gens like npcs in the books help concrete the tone, genre and style of the game.
I’m struggling to think of pbta games that have pre gens, but then they often refer to characters from media so you get your tone/genre examples there instead.
If you are running a narrower scope game in a wide genre (eg masquerade ball diplomacy in D&D or Star Trek) then Pre Gens will stop people creating characters not linked to the plot or with useless abilities.
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I almost exclusively use pregens when running games at conventions, so I always appreciate the developers providing them. 6 to 8 is a good number so that if you’re running a game with 4 to 6 players, there’s plenty of choice and nobody gets “stuck” with a character. Alternatively, make sure every major “class” or “archetype” is covered. That said, I think it’s really unnecessary for pregens to take up precious pages in the game book, which I won’t read anyway because I’d rather build my own character, and I can’t be bothered to go near a photocopier. Give me a free, downloadable supplement on the publisher’s website or on DTRPG, and you’ll have my eternal thanks.
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One per genre archetype.
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The inclusion of pregen character templates seems to be not a PbtA games due to the playbooks already filling that need. In many traditional games there are often template or pregen characters such as in the West End Games Star Wars and Shadowrun for a couple examples. For me, they helped me visualize what my character might look like. In many of the Cortex Plus games there are many pregen characters for use, which for me helps to speed up play in those particular settings.
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The other thing that your mention of Cortex reminds me is that it’s particularly important in licensed games or games riffing on licenses to have some pregens of the canon characters so you can get a feel for how the game conceptualizes stuff we’re familiar with. Like, how smart is Spock in game terms? How charismatic is Kirk? How skilled is Scotty? We need to know all these things for comparison if we’re running a Classic Star Trek game.
(I’ve recently been wondering about niche protection and the idea of only allowing one PC in each group to have +3 in a stat. I love the idea that in Star Trek, your PC can have an analysis skill between 0 and Data or something like that. Defining the upper limit of the typical by the best PC.)
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Very true with licensed games in general. That was one of my favorite thing about the WEG Star Wars game templates was that they fit the game, but you could easily make them your own version.
In the Firefly game there are like 24 non-TV show character templates that you can use. They are divided by where in the galaxy the people primarily lived or came from and I find that interesting from a design and story standpoint.
With the Leverage RPG there are roles, but also short examples of what a character might look like with a primary role with different secondary roles. Like alternate subclasses to inspire players.
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