CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTER
Making characters has expanded from a handful of classes to a myriad of options that can take hours of study before a character is formed.
Dungeons and Dragons has dropped preview vids for every class in their new upcoming 2024 Players Handbook. There are now 48 new classes and subclasses. Ancestries and options for everything from culture to crafting to equipment and all things feats go with them. This explosion of choice seems to have caught the Dungeons and Dragons community by storm. Reviews are popping up left, right, and center. Though there is much hype about how to build the new best subclass, this wave of excitement is not the only response. Not everyone is overjoyed with this new volume of character creation options.
Frustration abounds at how long and grueling a character’s creation will take. Not everyone, it seems, is happy to have to spend hours pouring over the options before they have a character. They are quick to point out that a new player could find this overwhelming as they have not experienced the game enough to have a good understanding on what would be best or even useful to the character they are trying to build. This puts added pressure on the dungeon master to explain all the ins and outs of character creation. Even if the players are experienced, the options are so vast that trying to build a character, even without thinking about how to mesh well into the player group, can turn a session zero from a single session into two.
This is not a new problem.
With each new edition of Dungeons and Dragons, the breadth of player character options has grown, allowing players to create their own truly unique characters. Take 3.5 Edition. In addition to the classes with their features, there were prestige classes that could be taken to add in a sort of sub-class. New feats always abounded. Purchase an adventure module, and there was the occasional new feat or two to go with new spells and items, providing more and more options. But, this plethora of choices is not just an aspect of Dungeons and Dragons.
When Dungeon and Dragons released its fourth edition, Paizo created Pathfinder First Edition, a re-creation and expansion of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition. Pathfinder really worked on the character creation options providing an even deeper pool of options, much to the joy of most. Pathfinder Second Edition Remastered is, in my opinion, now the king in player options with 123 classes and subclasses and ways to combine them in a near-astronomical variety. But, here too, a new player can get lost in the sea of option. There are now online character creation tools, free to use, that guide players through the process of character building for both Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons as well as many other tabletop role-playing games.
Online character-making tools: For DND 5e try DNDBeyond For Pathfinder 2e try Wanderersguide For nearly everything TTRPG try Demiplane
In this world where everyone is offering online goodness for the mere price of a subscription, how long will these remain free? What can we, the gamemasters, do to help our new players? What can we do to help those who only want to grab a character and jump right into a game?
Looking for quick-start rules is one answer. Another one is pre-generated characters. This is a staple for many gamemasters who often run one-shot-style adventures.
I think now, more than ever, pre-generated characters will more and more become a prime task for a gamemaster to provide even when not running a one-shot. What do you all think?
