Also : http://www.thefantasytrip.org/pieces.php

http://tartex.blogspot.com/2009/04/free-paper-miniatures-flat-figures.html

and of course:  http://www.seven-wonders.co.uk/paperfriendsindex.html

While I have no meaningful experience with convention gaming, here's my two cents. No matter how quick you think a game's character gen is, it will always take an hour or more. My group is made up mostly of experienced gamers, totally at times 8 players. Any time we try a new game, no matter what it is, no matter how simple the game, character gen takes 8 hours. FFG Star Wars took all night and there is basically nothing to do except pick your species and career. Numenera, which looked pretty quick, also took the better part of a day as players had to paw over lists of options. Even Golden Sky Stories, a game with practically no rules and almost no options outside of choosing character type, took hours. HOURS! I have no idea how they did that.

From my understanding, convention games are supposed to be demos, unless you are doing organized play like Shadowrun Missions or Pathfinder Society. You'd probably be best off keeping it simply and handing out pregens. Remember that an hour or introductions and character gen is an hour where you aren't killing snakes.

For your thoughts on in medias res, I've really liked when games do this. I've played in far too many games that stop dead when the GM spends days trying to assemble the group and get the story going. While it doesn't always work for every game or story, starting off in the action gets things going, gets the dice rolling, and gets the blood flowing (in more ways than one). If you can start with a good opening action scene, that should help speed things up, especially in a limited time frame with zero chance of continuation with that particular group. For specifics, this could be a very simple fight or perhaps the end of a fight (where many foes have already been dispatched or softened up already), since rules explanation will drag this out to longer than expected.

Hope that helps.
 

The first time I played BoL was at a samll convention (Albany Game Day)...and it was a fluke.  We were supposed to be playing Savage Worlds (which I also had never played) when the GM came down with some sort of illness that hospitalized him.

So, one of the other players pulled out his BoL and a stack of 12 pre-made characters and we were off.   And I was hooked.   Bought the PDF that night.

But part of why it worked so well is that he had LOTS of pregens.  So, we were able to jump into the game quickly, and there was enough variety so that we could have more than one mage or alchemist or barbarian or sneaky git.

All the pregens were on 3x5 cards, which kept it quick and easy to reference.  I'd recommend pregens all the way.

As a followup to my earlier comment, I sat down with my group last night to make characters. Hours. Literally hours. One player spent almost 2 hours going over boons and flaws, and that was just giving him the ones from his regional origins and one career, not giving him the list to go over.

So yeah. Pregens.

half male and half female seems to be a good mix. Of course, you could leave the genders ambiguous to same yourself some work (let the player decide) and just focus on making a bunch of different characters.

Gruntfuttock wrote:

"Hours. Literally hours." - Wow! Really?
If someone spends almost 2 hours going over a limited list of boons and flaws, that's a player choice. CharGen in BoL is quick and simple. I can't imagine anyone taking that long, but hopefully he or she ended up with a character they liked!
That being said (and that's just my stunned reaction - if that's the way your table rocks and it works for your group, more power to your elbow) I think a selection of pregens if definitely the way to go. If you have a 4 hour slot or something you want to get people playing asap. Nerosfiddle's list seems a good way to go. If you are aiming to 'sell the game' and get people enthused about BoL, then a picture of each pregen would be nice, if you can find enough appropriate pictures. Good luck!

You can always start with the ones from the book!
(And yes, 2 hours is far too long - I designed BoL so that chargen shouldn't take more than 20 minutes, maybe 30 at most).

 

Last edited by Simon W (8/05/2014 8:44 am)