Pre-Gen Characters

 

Paizo puts their iconic characters out as free pregen downloads

Last week I talked about crowdfunding stretch goals seeming diminished these days and one of the items I used to illustrate this was including pre-generated characters as stretch goals. Well, now someone is selling pre-gens as a standalone product. It's probably not the first time but this one caught my attention because it's for Savage Worlds and it's part of a Scarred Lands line for Savage Worlds and I tend to pay attention to both of those things. 

Most companies give pre-gens like this away as a free download, often to accompany some other product like a new game or a new adventure. See Paizo's take on this for Pathfinder here. Not this one though - here they think they're worth five bucks. Weirdly, these same characters are included in the starter adventure for the Savage Scarred Lands product line which is $7.95 for the whole adventure. Why would you sell these separately? They do point this out in the listing on DTRPG to be fair, but why do it at all?

"1" - implying there will be more

To me, pregenerated sample characters have zero value. They are easily created by anyone who has the basic rules for the game system. As multiple people I've known over the years have cried out "pre-gens suck!" and it is inevitably true. They are a nice-to-have on a new game or a published adventure at best. Old AD&D tournament modules included them in the back to give event DM's a standard set of PCs to hand out to players, or as a list of easy drop-in replacement characters during the run. It's become almost a tradition for old school adventures to include some of them as a nostalgia thing. If nothing else it gave a DM some interesting names for the NPC file as who can forget "Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter" or "Fonkin Hoddypeak" and the like? I know I used them for rival adventuring parties a few times back when. But no one was buying Against the Giants or White Plume Mountain for the pregens in the back.

Those are some fun names though

In this case they are specifically Novice level adventurers. That's a starting-out level Savage Worlds character. No advances. So you spend your 5 points in Attribute, your 12 points in Skills, your up to 4 points in hindrances, pick your race and your gear and you're ready to go. It's 30 minutes, maybe an hour to put that together and it's the time when you get to know your character! Who are they? What do they do? What are they good at and what are they not so good at? Reading over a pre-gen you're still going to need time to put the character together in your head and put your own spin on it so I don't get the point of this kind of item as a standalone product, especially when the exact same information is available in another product for a few dollars more. 

Remember Archetypes? Sort of a pre-gen but meant to be modified by a player as desired before starting out. It's a better approach and was also just included in the game.

Ah but it does include "recommended advances" for the characters as they level up. Who is this for? Part of the fun of playing Savage Worlds is picking out what your character might "get" next. Stat bumps? Skill bumps? One of those nifty Edges? Once you've started playing the character why on earth would you need advice on this? It's your character now, playing through whatever adventure you happen to be playing. Unless you're playing solo (see this other post for more on that) then you presumably have friends to ask for advice if you're completely new to the game. It just feels like overdone hand-holding and I don't know why anyone would need this kind of advice or why it would be touted as an extra bullet point feature. 

This one and the FFG Star Wars sets in particular are very linear but they are a starter set, intended as an introduction to the system, not a normal adventure.

I could go off on a rant here about this kind of thing in so many modern games and adventures where the writers expect you to play through something in a very specific way and give no consideration to players stepping off the path either conceptually with the game itself or practically in a particular adventure. It makes me question how much they have actually played or run actual RPGs with a group of other players when there are such glaring holes in what is presented. Many starter sets for RPGs do this with pre-gen characters, pre-selected advancements, and a very linear adventure - but at least those are introductory sets. D&D, yes even modern D&D, is pretty flexible but WOTCs published adventures are linear to the point of ridiculousness. As a counter-example Wrath of the Righteous for Pathfinder had a whole section in one of the books about "what if the players fail in this quest" but that was more than a decade ago at this point. As far as Savage Worlds goes Pinnacle falls into some of the same traps as well with some of their material. Now we have a company trying to sell pre-made characters for a fairly well-known game with a fairly simple character creation system as if that was a thing people wanted or needed. It feels like either nickel & diming your customers or it says something about how you see your player base that I really do not like.

I think WEG Star Wars did it first and maybe the best. Also included in the core game.

To wrap up including some pregens in an adventure is fine, sure. It might help with a party of brand-new players, it might help someone run it at a con with no prep time. Making a few pregens as a standalone product with a price other than "PWYW" or free is just a no - it's not for me and I think it's a bad practice for running an RPG game line and for the hobby in general.