Quote from: One Horse Town;937722Hmm, and of course with FASERIP, you could just take a ready-made hero from the guidebooks and start play in a minute. I miss the d'oh smilie.

You mean TSRs Marvel Superheroes? MSH? There is no "FASERIP" sorry.

ahem... back to topic.

Basic edition MSH was exactly that. No chargen. Just characters. And theres the various D&D and Gamma World modules that provide pre-gen PCs.
Pretty sure DC Heroes was too. Or had both. Ive never seen a review that mentioned making your own. But assume its there. Still on the "to get" list.

5e Starter is kinda that. You have a pregen character that just needs a name and gender.

1e Shadowrun had both. The pregen templates and then actual character generation.

Pops up in some other non-RPG dungeoncrawls too. The whole D&D Board game line is that. You get a named and statted out character. No chargen.

I think the idea is definitely sellable.  It's kind of a cross between a Shadowrun Archetype, a 3e complete build, and a Beyond the Wall Playbook.  I think most people however are going to want to plan their progression.  You'll get more buy-in I think the more you tie it to a setting so it's more like grabbing Wolverine in FASERIP and you know the role you're gonna play going in and how the character is defined and distinctive.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;937721It sounds a little like West End Star Wars.

That is what I was thinking.

WEG Star Wars gives you character templates which you customize, but it also gives you rules on how to create your own templates in the GMs section of the main rulebook.

Quote from: One Horse Town;937675So picture the scene if you will. you've just bought the Players Handbook for a new game that you like the look of. It has a few bits on character generation, but instead of character classes, it has characters.

I would probably be down for this if each character was like a 2nd edition kit. That way, I could go through the usual class chargen stuff, and then pick a character like "Fiesty Barmaid", or "Retired Town Guard", or "Excentric Alchemist".

Could be good marketing. Gives you an excuse to put out infinite "classes" on a subscription model without people saying that they already have all the main archetypes covered. Set up a subscription service and ad a new character a week or something from now until the sun burns out.

Would be a great help to me as a DM since a lot of players want lots of nifty little abilities but take FOREVER crunching the numbers to level up and then are much much worse at CharOp than they think they are and make sucky characters and then want to change stuff later or make new characters and blah blah blah. Having a bunch of canned builds would be helpful. Also lets the designer have a lot more free reign to put in nifty or powerful abilities and not have to worry as much about balance since you only have to roughly balance each character against each other not have to worry about thousands of possible combinations of abilities cooked up in the CharOp boards.

As a player it would annoy be a bit, I like monkeying with my characters. But overall would be good unless the group was willing to go with a stripped down game that'd make this kind of thing pointless or if the group was all experienced enough to level up characters while not forgetting to add their ability bonus to the right things etc. etc.

If you wanted a greater variety of customization, you could add optional "Paths" which are basically how sub-classes work in 5e or like Talent Tree/Feat Chains from Star Wars Saga/d20 Modern. Of course, if this was OSRized and based on BECMI/RC and or AD&D 1e then you probably don't want Feats. Maybe give the player a choice of level abilities. So instead of a big list, you have two or three and pick one? So your Fighty character has a variety of fighty options and maybe some non-fighty options. So, Strongbad the Feral could calm down and be Strongbad the Tracker later on if he wants.

This could work with a PDF based character sheet where you might have drop down options. You can change things, but it should still remain balanced overall, depending on how much you value balance. Going linear can be completely fine as well with named characters.

A possible way to draw people in is to have an adventure that maybe has character specific sidequests in little boxes. So if Kevin the Smith is in the party, he might have a sidequest that let's him repair a lever that opens a new passage somewhere. Or if Judas the Priest was there, there could be an option to cure an NPC of an affliction rather than killing him, and getting some reward out of it. Something heavy and metal.

Back to the secret formula question, is there one?   I have done a couple of homebrew games.  When i do them I talk to the players about their charcter until i get a sense and then I tell them to start writing stuff down and making decisions.  Every charcter is unique.  No player can min max or 'break the game' and they were balanced-ish.  But the balance was in me not the system.  

OP i don't think what you are trying to do can be written down and packaged and sold.  Or maybe I dont understand.

Quote from: One Horse Town;937675Is that something that appeals to people, or is that de-protagonising you in a story-game like way?

Have at it!

If it works just fine in Talislanta and Feng Shui 2, I'd expect it to work in any other game, too;)!

Small note though. These sorts of Chargen-less RPGs tend to get a little, or more often alot of flack from players. MSH sure did when basic came out. But they were under mandate from Marvel. (Who then saw the error and allowed TSR to add in the chargen with the expert set.) Some see it as a cop-out or cash grab. Simmilar to the occasionally hostile reaction some have to any given space game that doesnt have spaceship building rules for example.

Theres also a couple of one-shot mini RPGs that just hand you some pre-gens and thats that.

Its is though standard procedure for like 90% of the convention parlor LARPs that go on. I havent been to any yet that didnt hand you a pregen. Very different from standard RPG LARPs which predominantly are standard chargen based (usually point buy).

Quote from: One Horse Town;937694So, using Selma the Herbalist as an example - nice character picture, the skills she has, any unusual equipment she starts with, and then her character progression. We might find that at 2nd level she gains 1 free herb of 10 gp value each time she has a down-time period. At 5th level she gains the Green-Eyed Monster and Flora Flatulence spells (no-one else in the game ever gets them unless taught by Selma), etc etc

This actually sounds kind of intriguing to me... it's certainly something I'd be willing to play.
Would the characters have pre-gen relationships to each other as well?
I'm tempted to see them as representing mystical archetypes playing out ritualized scenarios... ala Cabin In The Woods or some other Passion Play.

Quote from: Omega;937847Small note though. These sorts of Chargen-less RPGs tend to get a little, or more often alot of flack from players. MSH sure did when basic came out. But they were under mandate from Marvel. (Who then saw the error and allowed TSR to add in the chargen with the expert set.)

FASERIP had chargen rules in the basic set.

I think you may be confusing the story with what happened with MHR. Winters and Grubb specifically fought to have a character creation system as part of the license before the game came out.

Quote from: One Horse Town;937694Point is, would anyone want to play a character whose 'progression' is all laid out in-front of them?

Not myself, personally. But then, I'm antagonistic towards level-based progression in general, so take that for what you will.

A book of pre-gen PCs (or  NPCs) is a good thing for high crunch games.
But I am sure a well done OSR Rogue's Gallery would sell too.

Quote from: Omega;937847Small note though. These sorts of Chargen-less RPGs tend to get a little, or more often alot of flack from players.

Today, though, players mostly seem to be content with customizing the archetype they have chosen, when they get XP.
Or maybe it's a feature of superhero players, because XP advancement is more limited by the genre. MHR also got lots of flak for the same thing, while FS2 and Talislanta players seem happy with their lot.

One Horse- this just wouldn't be a pre-generated character, but also it would show the progression of that character as it gained levels in it's "class".  So, if one wanted, you could quickly whip up a 1st level Selma, a 3rd level Selma, 7th level Selma- ect, as needed- correct?

I could see the value in that.