Testing Out Character Creation

One of the main goals of my house rules is to allow for character creation in around 5-10 minutes, so that less time is spent making a character and more can be spent exploring the unknown. I decided to put that to the test. I set up a blank character sheet, with spaces for things to be filled in when determined, opened up the .pdf, and turned on a stopwatch. My results were better than I expected.

4 minutes and 53.82 seconds later, I had a character, all ready for adventuring. Now, granted, I am the one who wrote the rules, so I already knew what I was doing, but even if it takes the average person twice as long, that is still (barely) under 10 minutes!


(Forgive my wretched hand-writing)

So, what did I learn from this test?

1. Having a character sheet set up so one can just fill in blanks speeds things up.
2. The most lengthy part of making a character is buying stuff, equipment packs makes things a lot faster.
3. Making a fighter is probably even faster than making a wizard.
4. The war-mage equipment pack is pretty cool.
5. My home system is very well suited to running one-shot games.
6. I should probably make a similar equipment pack system for my survival horror rules.

I think my character creation system for my house rules is basically done, now I just need to do some more work making things easy for the game master. I already have written out my formula for making what I think constitutes a good dungeon, now I feel that I should probably add:

• Guidelines on making magical items and traps
• Some sample magic items
• A small bestiary of sample monsters
• Some appendixes full of useful d6 tables from my blog. 
• Maybe a sample dungeon level?