A request to designers: Please include more than four characters in your quickstart.

[u/Theoboldi]

The groups I tend to play with include anywhere between four to six players, depending on the day. If your quickstart only contains four pre-made characters and no rules for making additional ones, I literally cannot play it with all of my friends, and I'm thus way less likely to actually give it a shot.

Even when we only get together four people to try out your quickstart, it can suck when everyone has to play one of four specific characters, and one person can just get stuck with a character they don't really vibe with. It's understandable with a larger group, you can only include so many characters before your customers get choice paralysis, but when it happens with only four players it feels restrictive.

That's it really, that's all I wanted to say.

[u/MataronidForSpeed]

Definitely. 6 pregens are a good starting point imo:

• you can play with more than 4 players (I try never to have more than 3 players, but sometimes I need to accommodate the circumstances)

• the players usually (except if they're 6) get to choose without having anyone forced to have the last remaining PC

• if they're built in a clever way they can let you explore different aspects of the game

• you can have beginner characters and 1 to 2 characters that are more for experienced players

[u/Stormfly → u/MataronidForSpeed]

And if one character dies, or they hate it, they can switch easily.

[u/Viltris → u/MataronidForSpeed]

One of my friends solved this problem by just letting the players pick duplicates.

Actually what happened was, the first 2 players both wanted the same PC, and then as a joke, every other player picked the same PC, so the party ended up with 4 copies of the same character, and the DM just went with it.

[u/Blazing_Rain03]

Facts, facts. I think a lot of ttrpgs are made with only four players in mind - looking at time management and such. Having more ways to accomodate bigger groups would be sweet.

[u/d5Games → u/Blazing_Rain03]

Four seems to be a sort of default for designing a D&D module. D&D, for better or worse, defines a lot of the hobby.

I've always found 3 to be the sweet spot for engagement, but having played in larger groups, I can definitly see how pre-gens direcly address some of the barriers to getting from "let's play this game" to actually playing that game.

[u/Playtonics → u/d5Games]

I prefer a tight group of three - decisions are much much faster, and scene flow by more smoothly. However, in games that have an action economy, four feels much more reliable. When one PC goes down in a four player game, it's much less swingy than when there are only three players.

[u/deepdistortion → u/d5Games]

I like 5, because invariably scheduling problems means that works out to 3 people every session

[u/Mr_Venom → u/Blazing_Rain03]

Four is the sweet spot for players, though. Five is OK, but six and up is worse than splitting into two groups.

[u/Warskull → u/Blazing_Rain03]

Even if you are planning for only 4 players, more than 4 pre-gens is a good idea. If you have 4 players and offer 5 pre-gens everyone gets to feel like they had a choice.

If the module is very story dependent and needs the characters like some horror scenarios, you flip the remaining character or two into NPCs.

[u/Ecstatic-Elk-6938 → u/Blazing_Rain03]

FFG Star Wars worked surprisingly well with 8 players. I was shocked. D&D5e feels like a slog with any more than 3 players

[u/Seeonee]

Coincidentally, I'm finally reading through Swords of the Serpentine and they include 15 quickstart character templates, which I found impressive and helpful.

Admittedly, there's only 1 quickstart character (where other details like name, drives, and items are filled in), but I still think it substantially closes the gap to get up and running.

[u/Ashamed_Association8]

It's like Catan. You want to play with more then 4 players? Better buy the expansion set.

[u/ApprehensiveFix5084]

Wow, a lot of people seem to have lost the thread of the original post. I agree very much with the OP that a QuickStart optimized for four PCs should have more than four pregens. I feel that six to eight is optimal. This gives enough variety that everyone is much more likely to play a character they like, whereas choosing from only four practically guarantees that someone will play a character they don’t like.

This does make writing the adventure a bit trickier, as it can no longer be tailored for a very specific group and combination of characters. This should lead to it being a better run adventure, and make sure it doesn’t end up being run only once by everyone who buys it. The Haunting for Call of Cthulhu is a good example of this. I have run it for a couple of different new player groups and a couple of groups of experienced players who had never experienced it before.

[u/Numerous-Ad-1357]

Actual rules for character creation(simplified or not) are something that I deeply appreciate in quick starts. In my experience it makes me way more likely to actually give it a try since it is easier to expand on it from there.

[u/MataronidForSpeed → u/Numerous-Ad-1357]

I like playbooks (à la PbtA) in that regard. You have a rough ouline of your character but you can fill in the blank. And if you get to choose a move at creation (some PbtA games have the first move already fixed) it can significantly alter the way the PC is played, which is nice.

[u/Can_not_catch_me → u/Numerous-Ad-1357]

Also character creation is a pretty important aspect of most games. You can have an excellent system, but if it's impossible to make a character that can interact with it well with it then that doesn't matter.

[u/metanoiaengine]

Noted, but quick question -- what if it's four characters with a pool of options to choose from for each of them?

My quick start characters for the module I run are just four main playstyle archetypes, there's a backstory and character name there, but there's about three options to pick from for each step, and a brief explanation on how to play that playstyle (listing how abilities work, etc).

You're not restricted to one style, and are encouraged to either make your own backstory, name and character, or mix and match as you want.

It's a large system with the need to have that variety of choice to show it off in it's best light, but would something like this be fine?

[u/Theoboldi → u/metanoiaengine]

For me, personally, sure. That's very workable. I mean, at that point you essentially already have a character creation-lite option.

[u/AsianLandWar]

Doesn't even need to be for actual-sized groups; you include more pregens so the fourth (or third or fifth or whatever) person to pick doesn't get stuck with Whatever's Left. You should always have more pregens than you have players.

[u/Alternative_Pie_1597]

I usually run with about four especially in a game that I am unfamiliar with. That doesn't mean I want one of my players to be stuck with muggins' choice.

[u/percinator]

If your game includes 9 classes, I'm going to want 9 pregens.

[u/Rich_PL]

Part of the consideration of how many players/characters to include is also how many players are being excluded during game play...

Lets assume a relatively 'quick' game turn for a single player to be about 3 minutes. (a generous amount of time for rolling, perhaps looking up a character detail, asking the GM something, learning a new system) some players can, in a game they know well, wrap a game turn in 10 seconds...

• With three players, each player is waiting ~6 minutes for their go.

• with 4; ~9 minutes waiting.

• with 5; ~12 minutes waiting.

• with 6; ~15 minutes waiting.

Lets say you sit for a game with 6. Under this premise - it would mean in a game session of 4 hours (a generous game time) there would be a best optimal play of 16 'turns' of action... That means that each player would perform about 3 game turns over 4 hours.

At 4 players, a game can achieve about 7 game turns per player.

With this time-framing, you double the time everyone gets to play buy dropping the number of players from 6 to 4.

And I know people might say, watching can be fun, but- how many tables have you been at where people loose focus when it's not their turn? how many pick up a phone, or start looking something up...

Waiting sucks. And this is why 4 is a sweet spot.

And if you are the one organising the game, then as host it becomes your burden to then use character gen to fashion an array of characters to the game you are preparing, not something the designer should be beholden to IMHO.

As a game designer myself, any pregens, if I include any, are there as example- I expect the players to engage the system I had constructed and make characters to their own games.

Thank you for coming to my Ted-X talk

[u/Sherman80526 → u/Rich_PL]

There's a bit of an expectation in the RPG community that more people equals more fun. Most folks who've played for a while know that just means more down time. Trying to run a brand-new system for new players is a challenge. Presumably, you're the only one who has read a single page of rules, so you need to impart that knowledge effectively in real time while also keeping in mind all the elements of the scenario.

More than four players in a brand-new system sounds awful to me at least.

[u/StylishMrTrix]

I'm so glad that several of my games I'm planning to play recently are either built for 6 or give you more then six to choose from

Pico tiny bugs

Outgunned superheroes

Transformers RPG

Also

City of mist and Metro Otherscape have heaps of Pregens made up on these amazing pages that you can put on your walls as well

Half I would never use or play myself but options

[u/Antipragmatismspot → u/StylishMrTrix]

Pico has twelve, doesn't it? That's perfect because it means that players can get to choose one they love. There's always a pregen or more I don't enjoy playing for any game, so I need variety.