I have long been a massive advocate for iconic adventurers (also known as pregens) as a way to provide a baseline context for worlds and lower the barrier for entry. In the past year, I’ve gone even farther and stopped providing character creation rules for my worlds, replacing them with lists of pregens*. Here’s my reasoning for why:
Implied Worldbuilding: Back before I fully dove into pregens, one of my classic examples for why iconic adventurers were useful was the Halfling Necromancer vs the Halfling Ranger. Both imply things about my world if you take them as representing the most common adventurers in the world. Halfling Rangers might be more like Ewoks, living in treetop villages, while Halfling Necromancers, at least in my world, are common because Halfling are more short-lived than even humans, and seek to escape an early death.
Bespoke Mechanics: If you want to explore a certain mechanic, you can build your pregens to interact with it in special ways that fit the characters. A good example is my Underclock mechanic, where some characters can add rounds to a world timer as an action or speed it up to get some benefit.
Lower Cheese Potential: If you build characters with specific abilities in mind, you can ensure that they can’t gain other abilities that make that ability broken. Another useful trick is giving specific Stat numbers to characters to prevent their abilities from triggering too often or too rarely.
That’s probably enough for my first post. I’d love to field questions, and I’ll probably talk about more practical stuff in the coming days.
*If someone really wanted to play a character of their own design, I would absolutely be willing to cooperate and build one with them, but that hasn’t happened yet.
For the second part of this Guide, I asked for questions across a ton of communities, compiled them into a list, then answered them here.
What are the main benefits of this practice? What problems does it solve? It provides a consistent tone and reduces the amount of custom abilities I have to write for a new world.
How have your players reacted? The vast majority of them have reacted really well to it.
What happens when a player insists on playing a character they already made? I would tell them to find a different game, frankly.
Do you make all the characters and make your players choose, or do you collaborate with players? Depends on the game. I’ve fully done all of the characters, but I’ve also written up a list of archetypes that we’ve collaborated to turn into real characters.
How much backstory and RP advice do you include? Very little. Maybe a sentence or two. I mostly provide rules. I do have some headcanons about the characters, but I try very hard to let my players take over.
How do you make sure characters all feel distinct within a cast? The biggest thing is making sure characters have specific niches that only they fill. If I have two archers, I try to make sure they are two different styles of archer. Someone who makes a ton of attacks vs someone who shoots once super accurately, for example.
How do you handle progression? Is that when players get more control? I typically let players pitch advancement ideas in order to give them some authority over their character as they develop them.