In the Open Table Manifesto, one of the pillars I discuss for running a successful open table is fast character creation: When any or every session you run might have a new player sitting down for the first time, it’s essential that they can create a character and start playing as quickly as possible.
Back when open table-style games were far more common – and, arguably, the default mode of play for D&D – you can find all kinds of stories from people whose first experience with a roleplaying game was wandering past a table where people were playing and being invited to sit down and join the game already in progress.
(I don’t think it’s really a coincidence that D&D had its first – and arguably biggest – boom at precisely the time that it was designed for a style of play which was so conducive to being spread virally. But I digress.)
To a modern audience, these stories can sound almost absurd. That would basically never happen with an RPG today – including the 5th Edition of D&D – because there’s no way you could generate a new character for the player and immediately drop them into the action.
But in OD&D, the original 1974 edition of D&D, I can get you a character in five sentences:
- Roll 3d6, total them, and write them down in these six boxes in order.
- Are you a human, an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit?
- Are you a fighting-man, magic-user, or cleric? (If they picked a dwarf or elf you can skip this step. Randomly roll hit points and the magic-user’s spell.)
- What’s your character’s name?
- You have a sword, chain armor, a shield, 8 rations, a small silver mirror, 2 torches, flint and steel, a bedroll, and 16 gold pieces. (Customize equipment list appropriately.)
Let’s play!
It’s an incredibly streamlined system that’s built on a powerfully modular base. (Which is why people have been adding new classes and races to D&D ever.)
Is this the One True Way™ of character creation in roleplaying games? Of course not. There can be a lot of advantages to multiplying the number, complexity, and even opacity of the choices players make during character creation. (Note how all of the decisions in OD&D’s character creation are immediately accessible and comprehensible to a new player who has zero understanding of how the game works. Compare to the mechanical knowledge you need for even something as straightforward as point-buying attributes in newer editions.)
But the speed with which OD&D goes from, “Do you wanna play?” to stabbing orcs in the face can be a huge feature in its own right. And it’s not one that I think should be so casually dismissed.
(Rolling ability scores can, in my experience, also enhance this. See, players new to D&D associate “rolling dice” with “playing the game.” So when the first thing I say to a new player is, “Okay, let’s roll your ability scores,” they feel like they’re already playing the game. It consistently engages them in a way that pure-build systems just… don’t.)
Note: Hey… what about alignment and languages? I find these non-essential for jumping into play, but you can include them and still have character creation wrapped up in just seven sentences.
THE PROBLEM: BUYING EQUIPMENT
The one place where character creation in OD&D can still bog down is in purchasing equipment: The player rolls 3d6 x 10 to determine their starting gold pieces and then they need to spend that budget on individual items.
In practice, there are steps you can take to mitigate and streamline this. (For example, making sure you have enough copies of the equipment list so that everyone can buy their equipment simultaneously without needing to pass the book back and forth.) But in my experience, it still results in equipment buying taking three to five times longer than the rest of character creation put together.
This is why, in my example of fast-paced five sentence character creation, I leverage my own expertise in the system to effectively buy the equipment for them. Players can also get through this step very quickly once they’ve similarly mastered the equipment available and know what they should be buying.
What would be ideal, though, is if we could find a way to systemically mimic this mastery so that new players could buy their own equipment without bogging down here. To do that, we can split buying equipment into its own sub-process and literally package up our expertise.
STARTING EQUIPMENT PACKAGES
Note: These specific packages tacitly assume that you’re using my house rules for OD&D, which you can also find conveniently summarized in the Blackmoor Player’s Reference. But they should be broadly useful for any OD&D game regardless. The general equipment list has also be lightly amended with some items not found in the original 1974 books.
STEP #1: ROLL FOR STARTING GOLD
Roll 3d6 x 10 to determine your starting gold pieces.
STEP #2: BASE ADVENTURER KIT
Spend 15 gp to purchase the base adventurers kit.
- Large sack (2 gp)
- 1 week of standard rations (5 gp)
- Water skin (1 gp)
- 6 torches (1 gp)
- Flint and steel (1 gp)
- Suit of clothes (2 gp)
- Bedroll (3 gp)
STEP #3: ARMOR
Pick one type of armor.
- Leather Armor (15 gp)
- Chain-type Armor (30 gp)
- Plate (50 gp)
Optionally, pay for any or all of the following:
- Shield (10 gp, +1 AC)
- Helmet (10 gp, without helmet suffer -1 AC)
- Gorget (10 gp, +1 AC vs. vampires)
STEP #4: MELEE WEAPONS
Choose a melee technique:
- Sword & Board
- Dual-Wielding
- Two-Handed
(If you select sword & board, but don’t buy a shield, you’re just fighting one-handed.)
Sword & Board: 1d6 damage unless otherwise noted.
- Dagger (3 gp, 2d6 take lowest damage)
- Hand Axe (3 gp, 2d6 take lowest damage)
- Mace (5 gp)
- Sword (10 gp)
- Battle Axe (7 gp)
- Morning Star (6 gp)
- Flail (8 gp)
- Spear (1 gp, provides reach)
Dual-Wielding: Pick any two Sword & Board weapons.
Two-Handed: 2d6 take highest damage.
- Pole Arm (7 gp, provides reach)
- Halberd (7 gp, provides reach)
- Pike (5 gp, provides reach)
- Two-Handed Sword (16 gp)
- Lance (4 gp, must be riding horse)
STEP #5: MISSILE WEAPONS
You can optionally select a ranged weapon in addition to your melee technique:
- Sling (1 gp, 2d6 damage take lowest)
- Light Crossbow (15 gp, 1d6 damage, fire one-handed but requires two hands to reload)
- Heavy Crossbow (25 gp, 2d6 take highest damage, fire one-handed but requires two hands to reload)
- Short Bow (25 gp, 1d6 damage)
- Long Bow (40 gp, roll 2d6 damage take highest)
Ammunition: Sling stones can be gathered from the wilderness at no cost.
- 20 arrows (5 gp) + Quiver (5 gp)
- 30 quarrels (5 gp) + Case (5 gp)
STEP #6: ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT PACKAGES
Optionally select one or more additional equipment packages. You can also roll 1d6 to select one randomly.
| d6 | Package | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1-2 | Delving | 50 gp |
| 3-4 | Prepared Adventurer | 25 gp |
| 5 | Wilderness | 30 gp |
| 6 | Basic Mount | 75 gp |
Delving Package:
- Lockpicks (30 gp)
- 20’ spool of wire (10 gp)
- 6 sticks of chalk (1 gp)
- 12 iron spikes (6 gp)
- 6 wooden stakes (1 gp)
- Mallet (2 gp)
Prepared Adventurer Package:
- 10 sheets of paper (2 gp)
- Silverpoint (5 gp)
- 50’ rope (1 gp)
- Lantern (10 gp)
- 3 flasks of oil (6 gp)
- 10’ pole (1 gp)
Wilderness Package:
- Bedroll (1 gp)
- Small tent (4 gp)
- 1 week iron rations (15 gp)
- Leather Backpack (5 gp)
Basic Mount Package
- Light Horse (40 gp)
- Saddle (25 gp)
- Saddle Bags (10 gp)
Note: A silverpoint is an historically accurate writing instrument. The scribe drags the silver stylus across the surface of the paper. Specially prepared paper can make the lines even clearer, but this “underdrawing” can also later be inked.
ADDITIONAL READING
Reactions to OD&D
Running Castle Blackmoor
On the Importance of Character Creation
Character Creation in 7 Sentences: Magical Kitties Save the Day
Just a note – you don’t actually include a sword in the “Sword and Board” weapon options.
Also, the bedroll in the base adventurer’s kit costs 3 gp; the one in the wilderness package only costs 1 gp.
Heh. That’s a hilarious slip of the eye from “Hand Axe” to “Battle Axe.”
I’m going to blame my preschooler for distracting me with her cool new doll. 😉
Does the cool new doll have a battle axe?
I know that it’s not really what the article is about, but I take issue with the statement that you can’t generate a 5e character that easily. You absolutely can, as long as you use the Quick Build suggestions in the PHB:
1) Pick race
2) Pick class
3) (Optionally roll and) assign six stats
4) Roll for (or pick) background details
5) Choose starting equipment (3 binary choices)
6) Name your dude
The only thing you have to do to make it happen quickly is to acknowledge that we’re no longer bound to the analog world of 1974 and we all carry around supercomputers in our backpacks, so we can ditch the paper character sheets and use electronic ones that fills in all the details for us instead.
(That may seem like cheating, because now there’s all this stuff associated with the character that the player doesn’t understand, but that’s not really any less true for the OD&D character, it’s just less up-front about it. The new player will still be asking other players what dice to roll, but the answers will now reference the character sheet rather than tables in the books…)
That’s arguably how Quick Builds should work, but oddly they don’t.
For example, the Quick Build for a Bard reads: “You can make a bard quickly by following these suggestions. First, Charisma should be your highest ability score, followed by Dexterity. Second, choose the entertainer background. Third, choose the dancing lights and vicious mockery cantrips, along with the following 1st-level spells: charm person, detect magic, healing word, and thunderwave.”
That gets rid of a lot of sub-choices. But if we read the next three paragraphs, we are told to:
– Choose any three skills
– Choose three musical instruments
If you go with the Entertainer background, you can roll for several details, but still need to pick a fourth instrument. This type of sub-choice isn’t unusual in backgrounds. Quite a few races also have one or more sub-choices that need to be made (although there are races you can choose that don’t).
This is a really cool approach! It’s similar to the three options for starting equipment packages in B3 Palace of the Silver Princess, but I think you’ve definitely improved on the technique.
One editing question: Do your entries which say “1d6 take lowest damage” mean to say “2d6”?
Good catch! Thanks, Jake! (And fixed!)
You’re right, I missed skills, and there may be another choice or two depending on race and class. (E.g., clerics have to pick domain at first level.)
The point remains, though, that it’s only a handful of choices total (most of which are picking something from a list), and the only thing that makes it take significant time and effort is implementing the logical flow by hand. If you make a computer do all the algorithmic stuff for you, it can be nearly as simple as the OD&D approach.
Bards having to pick musical instrument proficiencies seems pointlessly fussy. In what way is your game ever likely to be made better by telling the bard she has never learned to play the bagpipes?
I’m interested to know why different weapons of the same category have varying prices but the same damage. Why is a spear (1d6 damage + reach) worth a tenth the price of a sword?
Is this because the weapons also have narrative mechanical weight? This isn’t mentioned in your house rules, yet maybe it’s just implied?
@Sarainy
No narrative or mechanical weight. It’s not perfectly balanced and it doesn’t matter much really. The characters must gain a lot of treasure to level up. By the time they reach level level 2 (even before) they can pick whatever non magical weapon they want. Besides, the armor costs more and have a bigger impact on initial characters.
I guess the varying prices are directly copied from OD&D? Otherwise it cries out for simplification.
If you don’t have at least three times more pole weapons than you actually need, are you even really playing D&D?
As a suggestion, I’d probably just bring in “advantage” and “disadvantage” terminology from 5e for those damage rolls. It’s super-simple, and presents the same idea better than OD&D wording IMO.
And if your goal is radical simplicity, you can do better. For example, give the following equipment lists (at least, assuming that classes work like they do in later D&D – I never played OD&D).
All characters: One equipment package and 4d6 GP in cash.
Fighting-man: Plate armor, shield, and any three weapons.
Cleric: Chain armor, shield, and any weapon.
Magic-user: Leather armor and any one-handed weapon.
Human: Any second equipment package.
Elf: Shortbow, quiver, and arrows.
Dwarf: Mace and helmet.
Hobbit: Sling and dagger, and double your starting gold.
I’m with you all the way on the benefits of quick character creation as well as equipment kits. (I have my own version of those kits in my home game, too.)
One thing I’d note is that the OD&D rules (book 1, p. 10) say that the *Referee* rolls for PC stats in order “and thus aid [the player] in selecting a role.” Each player notes the scores given by the Referee. If we go by the book, players don’t roll.
I’m not saying that this is how anybody should do it. The point is that you *could* cut it to *4* steps for the player, if the Ref has prepared sets of prerolled stats beforehand.
Heck, they could be written in advance on cards, and the Ref (or player) draws a card of stats from a bunch of cards, or they could be on strips of paper to be drawn out of a bag.
Equipment kits can be ready on cards, too, for players to copy over onto their stat cards. This kind of thing really speeds up starting play.
@Lich
Specially about rolling dice, Justin wrote somewhere about the effect that it has on players creating their characters. Rolling dice makes you feel like you’re already playing (specially for new players), and seeing those stats coming up one by one makes you wonder about the kind of character taking form by your own hands and by fate.
@Kaique: I mention it briefly in this post, but discuss it in more detail in Part 2 of the Open Table Manifesto.
As you say, rolling dice is just super-effective at immediately engaging players with the game — they feel like they’re playing. And whether you’re generating stats or making simple choices, that step-by-step process innately involves the player in creating the character — the process itself forces a creative act of closure.
In improv theater terms, the system is mechanically making an offer. It’s providing a creative seed that gets your creative juices flowing by demanding extrapolation and explanation: Why is this guy strong? What forced him to become quick-witted? What sort of person do these stats belong to? Effectively, an offer like this jump-starts the creative process.
Creating that character INVESTS the new player in the experience. They’re far more interested in the thing they’ve created than they would be in some pregenerated option. They’ve got skin in the game.
Pregens can work in a pinch (and, in many systems, are the only viable option for this sort of thing). But, in my experience, they’re usually an inferior option to actual character creation.
(There are exceptions to this, mostly in highly developed one-shots or mini-campaigns. For a good published example of this, check out John Harper’s Lady Blackbird. Or the newly released Bring Me the Head of the Comte Saint de Germaine for Unknown Armies.)
I’m in full agreement that the player’s act of rolling the dice helps players become involved. Personally, I’ve never rolled stats for a player in my games, ever. I was just sayin’, OD&D technically omits that step on the player’s part, and that’s interesting to notice. I have a feeling that this procedure didn’t survive for the very reason that you guys are discussing.
There is, also technically, a *slight* difference between a complete pregen and just prerolled stats (or stats rolled for a player by another). It looks like the OD&D original idea was that the Ref rolled up the six stats and the player chose race/class. There’s a tiny bit of player involvement, I guess, but it must have been less fun than having the player roll.
(Taking it further, when it comes to hit points, the OD&D books say that they “are rolled” but doesn’t say by whom. A case could be made that the Ref was originally supposed to roll those, too.)
But yeah, no argument here against the fact that the player’s rolls are psychologically important. I was just remarking about ways to reduce steps in light of the reference to OD&D at the top.
As it happened, most players seem to have wanted the opposite: more differentiating detail determined by official means: tables, rolls, new classes, etc. One of the first things D&D Referees did right out of the gate was to make character creation more complicated and personalized, like the Swanson Abilities in ’75 and its many subsequent versions.
Anyway, I like your thoughts about equipment.
I agree that equipment is the stumbling block that hinders really rapid PC creation, with that in mind I made a player quickstart for OD&D (and a few other old-school D&D variants) that includes equipment packs similar to yours. You can see it here: https://smolderingwizard.com/2019/07/07/odd-player-quickstart/. I tried hard to make it all fit on one page, so it could be printed and handed out at convention or open-table games (by necessity it assumes my own set of house rules, still I tried to make the equipment choices mostly by the book).
I’m usually very squarely in the camp of class-free, point-buy systems. Not only because those are the rule systems I grew up with (in terms of roleplaying), but also because philosophically, trying to narrow down the infinite variety of human nature into a finite, fixed set of classes rubbed me the wrong way.
But my experience at the table pretty much arrives at the same conclusion you do here: The infinite choices of point-buy are just too much. Not just for new players, but also for some veterans. Character creation, in every adventure I’ve run, has always been a long slog as people agonize over which feats to take. And even after creation, the agony doesn’t stop. I’ve had people on the table who quite literally had never bothered taking half the advances their XP allowed them, because they didn’t want to think about what to buy.
Funnily enough, I rarely have the problem myself, but I just realized this is because I plan the whole advancement in advance. I have a strong character concept and then can immediately rule out a large part of the feat list thanks to system mastery, greatly reducing the decision time. I even have moments of joy as I get to unlock cool things I had already planned to have.
Which is of course basically me just pre-designing a class in a classless system. Both the fact that a class just so dramatically prunes the decision tree and that you get things to look forward to in anticipation help a lot with making progression seem fun instead of a chore.
I still think class-based character systems aren’t the answer, but I am warming up to them a lot. Of course, the true elegance, as you point out rightly in this article is the small and fast decision tree, which class-based systems can botch just as badly as point-buy does practically by design.
The ideal would seem to be classes with clear defaults (or a few pick-1-of-3 menus) for newbies and quick-gen, and some clearly optional procedures for breaking out of the mold, for veterans, people with strong idiosyncratic character visions, and those who just really like having lots of choices. Probably most of these options should only become available as part of advancement, not char gen.
Make the common things easy, and the weird things possible.
Yes! Excellent summary…
Last year I went back to my roots running Homes blue box every chance I had. Open table games where I wanted folks to have everything they needed to play on 1 sheet of paper. You can see those results here:
https://onthetabletop.blog/2019/12/03/in-the-beginning/
I’ve found it to be a great way to get started right away.
[…] part of this problem, I would like players rolling their own dice right off the bat. It makes them feel like they’re playing the game as soon as possible, which harkens back to the “barrier to entry” point from […]
Having read and experimented with a lot of very simple games for use with children, the five/seven sentence method looks useful. (I’ve just ordered Magical Kitties.) Though I haven’t had much gaming this year what with Covid stopping all in-house library programming, I’m looking at running games over Zoom in the near future.
My go-to just before the first closures was Play the World from the RPG Tinkerage blog, which seems to be based on the earliest pre-versions of DnD. Character creation in this can be broken down as follows:
1. Pick a character type appropriate to the game genre.
2. Name it.
3. Give it a handful of appropriate skills at +1 or +2.
4. Give it a handful of appropriate gear.
Done.
Other games I’ve tried drop the statistics entirely, in favor of having the GM just pick an appropriate difficulty number.
My grandfather, according to this system:
1. WWII tank crewman
2. “Private Joe”
3. Rifle +1, Cooking +1, Tank Operation +1, Punching Racist Officers +1
4. Pistol, goggles, winter clothing.
https://rpg-tinker.blogspot.com/2019/06/freeform-light-characters.html
Players get this very quickly, especially when I make thematic suggestions for the ones without experience in the game’s genre. (“Oh, you want to be a knight? You have plate armor, a sword and shield. You can ride, fight, and charm princesses.”) I agree that rolling makes it feel more like a game (and am looking forward to trying Magical Kitties), but character creation is SO fast that we’re playing within sixty seconds of sitting at the table.
Character creation in five sentences:
1. Roll stats.
2. Pick one of three races.
3. Pick one of three classes.
4. Make up a name.
5. Here’s a giant list of shit to buy, please spend your 100 gold coins appropriately.
I don’t know why D&D is obsessed with this, it’s awful. Hated it with 5e too. Make approximately three decisions total as you make the character, now here’s a giant bloated equipment list, please pick exactly which kind of sword your character uses. All the dull parts of bloated point buy systems with none of the fun of actually getting any mechanical widgets that hang off of who your character is as a person.
At least when I plunge into the pages and pages of disadvantages in GURPS, what I pick is making a real statement about my character as a person. He’s a bully. He’s gullible. He’s a member of a minority. What does it mean about my character that I bought a hand axe instead of a sword? Nothing. The moment my character stumbles on a sword he’ll throw the hand axe in a garbage disposal because it’s just worse.
This is making a huge change for me as I design my first open table campaign. Thank you!
Question: What are “iron rations” under the Wilderness Package? Is this a typo/conflation of iron spikes and rations? Is the gp value correct? Thanks again 🙂
Iron Rations are basically rations that won’t go bad – dried meats, hard bread etc. Regular rations would perhaps be things such as vegetables, loafs of bread, maybe some cheese. These kinds of food would spoil much faster thus making those of the iron variety much more valuable (hence the higher price).
@Erik thanks for the info! Cheers