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.

Monday Hot Takes: Solo RPGs

 

I know they exist I just don't see the point. If you have no other players and no GM ... at that point just make up a story. Or read a book. The Choose Your Own Adventure books were a lot of fun back when - and still could be now - but they weren't a game. If your solo RPG is heavier on the "game" then your outcomes are either heavily pre-determined or completely random. You lose the input of the GM and that "guiding hand" of another human mind being involved. You also lose the input of fellow players which we all know can send things off in some very unexpected directions.

Obviously to me there is a huge collaborative element to a tabletop RPG. Anyone who's run a game for a group of people knows there's "how you thought it might go when you read it or wrote it" and there's "how it went once the players got involved" and those are usually two very different things. I've been playing with some of my crew for 10, 20, 30+ years now and they still surprise me! Even a published adventure, even one that I have run multiple times over multiple decades, can be a different experience with every new group of players. I know people who have published adventures (well, and RPGs) get a kick out of seeing accounts of how different groups tackled their various challenges. To me, a solo game is just not going to come close to that experience.

Oh yeah, this one too.

My answer to "I don't have a group" problems is that there are a bunch of solo RPGs that can be a lot of fun to play. I know my friends and I played through a bunch of the early ones even as we were playing D&D or Gamma World or whatever when we could get together. The Ultima games, the Bard's Tale series, Wizardry this, Might & Magic that, the Gold Box games ... there were a ton of them and the stuff you can get nowadays is way more elaborate. From Baldur's Gate 1-2-3 and the other Obsidian Engine games to Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, the  Elder Scrolls games, The Fallouts, and on through the Owlcat games like Kingmaker and Rogue Trader. Then of course there are the online options from World of Warcraft (now in 3 flavors!) to Star Trek Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Final Fantasy Number Whatever Online, City of Heroes ...I mean there's no lack of these either, most of them are free to play, and you can choose whatever level of "solo" you prefer, including "not". 

I am just not a fan of the solo player tabletop pen & paper RPG. It lacks so much of what makes them special to me. That said, I get it on some level because I still occasionally play solo tabletop wargames even when there are perfectly good computer wargames out there and have been for years. The "solo" option, particularly as an add-on capability to a normal 2-player board wargame, has been a growth area for tabletop wargames the last few years. It's hard to find regular in-person opponents and it's even harder to schedule get-together time to play them - especially since we have an ongoing RPG campaign (and I'm not going to upset that schedule) and occasional 40K get-togethers (and I'm not going to break that either) so the board wargame time is limited. There are games made now specifically for solo play. They've been around for a long time but it was fairly quiet for a while and now it seems to be an active area again. This is a different animal than an RPG to me though - it's a specific scenario or situation with set forces so it is possible to have a satisfying game as a single player if the system is built to do that. 

Such a good game - I have great memories of playing this "solo" game as a co-op game with a friend

To wrap up I know there's an ongoing quest to make a good RPG that can be played solo but to me that's missing one of the major points of RPGs in the first place: a game where you can do pretty much anything you want to do. By definition, a solo RPG will be limited to the options that have been built into the solo rules. This applies to computer RPGs as well and is one of their biggest limitations: you can only go where they have made a map, you can only talk to NPCs where that was expected, and you can only encounter monsters that were set up in advance. It's not unplayable, it's just not the same thing as a decent tabletop RPG with a GM and (preferably) a group of friends.

Probably the highest achievement in this field and it's from 1981. Here's a decent take on it with some additional solo game discussion.