Character Creation

As mentioned in my first post, our gaming group got together yesterday to create some characters for my campaign. I had set up some guidelines for what races and classes I allow in my campaign, which are most of those included in the Player's Handbook.

The races excluded were dragonborn, gnomes, half-orcs and tieflings. Dragonborn and tieflings are a bit too out there for my taste as PC races (I might let players use them at a later point though), half-orcs are hated as much as orcs in my campaign, because of a plague a hundred years ago, that they were blamed for and therefore aren't welcome in most civilized areas of my campaign world (which makes them too problematic as a PC race), and gnomes never have and never will exist in my world.

The only classes I didn't allow were barbarian and monk. Neither of those really fit in the area, where the PCs start, which is based on Western Europe and I wanted the PCs to be relatively local.

The only other restriction I put on characters, were that their alignment had to be non-evil. Again, I might change this at a later date, but for now, I want the group to be fairly well-behaved.

Despite these restrictions the guys came up with some pretty interesting and varied characters. There was a general consensus, that the new background rules where a great help to flesh out characters and while these guys are pretty experienced players and easily manage to make weird and wonderful characters without them, the backgrounds was a great source for new ideas.

As our first gaming session is still a couple of weeks off, I decided that the players are free to change their characters as they see fit before then (as I remember from my own time as a player, 14 days are more than enough to get 50 new ideas for cool characters you want to try out), as long as they do so within the guidelines I've set up in my Character Creation list (which can be found in the menu at the top of the page or here). I will also allow the players to make new characters between sessions, at least for the first couple of levels, if they want to try out something different. The point of the first 3 or 4 sessions will be to learn the rules and figure out what works and what doesn't, so the more stuff we try out, the better our understanding of the rules will be.

As for what characters the guys created yesterday, I believe we ended up with a Human Fighter (Soldier), a Human Paladin (Noble), a Half-Elf Sorcerer (Charlatan), and a Dwarf Fighter (Outlander).