Game Master Created Characters



If you are in a real rush and the players are not able or willing to create their own characters, this section will help you to design characters quickly for your players within the one hour goal set by this kit.

The first thing to do, if you have to provide the players with characters is to look in the Game book you are using. A Quick look through the Game Books in the office provides a good cross section to explain what I mean. We play a lot of Palladium Games here, and almost every Palladium book is filled with colorful NPCs that would work perfectly well as PCs if a Game Master were short of time. Most aren't first level, but level doesn't matter that much in Palladium in most cases, and the characters are still highly playable so there really is no problem there. The Alternity Game, a Science Fiction game put out by TSR before Wizards of the Coast swallowed them up, boasts both sample PCs in the Player Handbook, and tons of useful sample NPCs that could easily be used as PCs with almost no conversion in the Game Master's book. The game book for Twilight 2000 boasts only two sample PCs but has eight sample NPCs that could be quickly modified in PCs if the need arose. CyberPunk 2020 features five sample PCs in their adventure “Never Fade Away” and three sample fleshed out NPCs that could be converted into PCs quite easily. In addition they feature two whole pages of NPC thumbnail sketches that could be combined quickly with the games easy Character Generation system to make more characters in a pinch. In Nomine includes six sample starting PCs and two more NPCs that could be used as mentors or converted into Started characters in a minute or so. Hong Kong Action Theatre offers only one Sample Character, but because of the unique character creation system initial character creation is very quick so this shouldn't be a problem. If you are forced to make characters from scratch, go with the broad strokes, and leave the finicky choices to the players when they arrive- these choices can be made during early storytelling stages if necessary. The Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons Game Master's Guide lists sample stats for all character classes at virtually every level. In almost every case, a Game Master can provide fully reasonable and playable characters even if there is no preparation time just by looking at the book that she is using to Game Master from in the first place.

If this is not the case, the the Game Master's best friend is the Internet. A quick search revealed sample characters for the as yet unreleased Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons (although it will almost certainly be out by the time this book is finished). Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons characters and character generators are everywhere at the moment. It is not hard to find fan sites for all sorts of games that include character stats if one spends some time digging around on RPG wikis and looking in most search engines, google is generally the best, but Yahoo seems to have an inordinate amount of fan RPG sites listed as of the time of this writing.

There are some cases, such as the above mentioned Hong Kong Action Theatre, which do not provide enough sample characters and are too obscure to find sample characters online for either. In this case, it is best to insist that players make their own characters. Since this may not always be possible, it is best also to save all NPC character sheets that you create and flesh out in all of your games so that if it becomes necessary to provide a player with a character, you can simply make a few cosmetic changes to a stock NPC you fleshed out and hand it over to the player.