This poll is in reaction to another post in the TN systems thread. I'm curious how long it takes people to make a basic character. By "basic" I'm not talking about generating a backstory or penny pinching for every last bit of gear and min-max squeezings. Instead, I'm curious about how long it would take to make a character that filled the role you were looking for.

No, what I mean is a PC that isn't min-maxed to squeeze out every last drop. NPCs take about 5 minutes for me to make, if that long because I don't concern myself with point buy and just put out the stats that should be there.

Backstory is left out because it doesn't reflect the usability of the system, but rather the depth and difficulty the player has in making a history for a character.

For the record, I'm one of the 30 minutes or less folks.

I'm with the couple of hours, but I usually find background to be intrinsically tied in with the stats, so I could be overestimating. I need to justify (at least to myself) why my character has the stats and skills they do. I think that even if I stripped out all of that it'd still take an hour to do all the number crunching (and rechecking all my BP expenditure at least twice). Characters with lots of 'ware probably take longer due to juggling with essence.

NPCs, on the other hand, take very little time as I don't bother with BPs when making them (unless they are to play a pretty big role). Usually I'm forced to come up with NPCs on the fly as, despite generating detailed teams of security guards at the facility the players are meant to be going to, they decide to do something crazy like go to a bar and beat up some gangers. Frankly their explanation that they are trying to generate a distraction for the Star to deal with, so that the Star are less likely to respond to an alarm being raised at the facility doesn't hold much water. /rant

Ok, I see what you mean now, having checked out the last few pages of the TNs thread (and Cain's continuing SW obsession ).

In that case it still usually takes me about 30 minutes. For my newbie players (four of them), it took about an hour, and we're talking people that can barely handle D&D character creation here!

IMO D&D Character creation is actually more intensive, but only if you include multiple sourcebooks. Going striahg core rules is really fast, but trying to add in the Complete and Races books requires a lot of planning in the chargen stage to be able to get your feat trees and prestige classes lined up.

Null voted - don't play SR4

Mr. McMurray - would you care to create a duplicate poll in General Shadowrun and compare the results?

1) This poll has been done before, and not that long ago.
2) Cain is a total moron, and a particularly thick one at that. He'd argue with his last breath that by his reading of Moby Dick that a lump of coal stuck up the ass of water buffalo was of the purest white, and that anyone that argues otherwise is a fool. In my opinion the best thing for you and Synner is to come to that realization and save yourself the fustration and time wasting of repeating the most simplest of things to him over, and over, and over, and over, and over....
3) You have sort of misquoted me in your sig, or at least provided misleading supplementary info. That isn't about just Cain on that topic. It is a general statement about Cain. Try "[Cain] remains a stone in a bucket of water. Taking up space and unable to absorb." No extra explaination required.

It's been done before, but the other version(s?) didn't leave out backstories and minutes point mongering. With those added in almost any system could take weeks to generate a character (especially the backstory part).

Besides, I wanted to know if my group was ahead of or behind the curve.

Point taken about the sig. I'll go change it now. And yeah, it's pointless, but I gotta do something to fill the boring times, and he's so easy.

Can I do a multiple votes ?

Because ... I had to vote 30 minutes or less, and the same time frame still applies for a whole process including a basic background and pretty much complete gear - but I do have some practice ... making up NPCs on the fly, creating one-shots for guest players ... that kind of stuff.

My players on the other hand ... ummm ... Having basic design done can take hours, and a complete character can take a few weeks ...

So I'd basically have to vote
1x 30 mins
2x 1h
2x 2-3h
1x longer.

Just to kill any statistical evidence in this poll before anyone tries to use it for whatever purpose ... go fake your own statistic, but don't ask real people

Unless something crazy happens there will not be anywhere near a large enough smapling to generate anything resembling a valid statistic from this poll. I'm just curious about a) whether my group is faster or slower than normal at 30 minutes to an hour and b) whether Cain's group is faster at multiple hours. I can get a general idea of that from this poll, if not a perfectly clear picture.

Most people on this board are probably SR4 veterans of a year or so. Those folks will be faster than newbies at generating characters.

The speed you generate one at also depends on your overall rules knowledge, not just the simplicity or lack thereof inherent in the character generation rules. If you've got a great GM / group that can answer most questions on the fly (or you can do it yourself) that will save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent looking up info.

And if your group just has one book that you pass around, that will increase the creation time, because you'll have to go back and find your place again, remember what you were lst doing, etc. This is even more pronounced if you're making a character for rules you're not familiar with, such as a guy that's played a street sam for the past 3 editions suddenly deciding to play a mage. Or conversely, a guy that's played a mage for the past 3 editions having to re-educate himself and knock down the preconceived notions about magic that come from a decade of playing a different system.

True, but the level of tweaking is dependent on the game style being played, not the char gen system. I'm trying to get a feel for how easy people find the char gen system to be.

Due to lack of overall knowledge my characters usually take a day or more to make lol and thats minus the background. I have to read rules, and read gear descriptions and i have no idea what necessary skills and gear my people need.

Maybe a better introduction would have been to ask people how long it would take them to get a basic character ready for play if the GM asked everyone to draw up new characters for a new adventure/campaign. These could later be tweaked as needed such as adding gear or shifting a rating point here and there.

But what about the rangers that don't shoot?

Last DnD game I played we took some time to make characters, but I attribute that to the number of supplements we were using. There can be some significant variation in character type in DnD, but it's mostly down to personality and even that is restricted by alignment. I blame paladins mostly.

It doesn't take me much time at all to create a character, but then again, in my games, there aren't any skill caps or 25 BP for maxing out stats, so it's like "okay, 6's in everything. We're done."

For those keeping score the numbers between editions are pretty even, except that the 30 minutes and 1 hour crowds are reversed, with the longer group being larger for SR4. Unfortunately there's no real way to tell if that's due to a rules difference or mastery levels being different. Maybe I'll repost the poll in 4 years.

It took several days. This was compounded by the fact that I hadn't played Shadowrun before.

I put the level of complexity at roughly that of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition.


It can take a long, long time to create a Shadowrun character - especially if you are trying to put a lot of detail in.

I have found the character creation process in D&D much simplier - the only thing complicating the task is the number of supplements being looked through. The creation process from a mechanic standpoint for D&D is really pretty simple.

Shadowrun has a lot more layers. Converting BP to Nuyen and purchasing equipment with it. Cyper/bio ware and keeping track of essence.

The difference in cost between Active and Knowledge skills.

Add to that the fact that the book is really laid out poorly. There is far too much cross referencing and page turning involved. It would have been much easier and user friendly if the book was laid out in the order things were done and not have several different chapters with side discussions and examples separating it.

Oh well, it can't be perfect. It is still a good game - so far.

I posted 30 Minutes here and a couple of hours there as I have only ever made three Shadowrun characters. The SR4 took a lot less time then SR1 or SR3, some of that was due to the prioritizing. I never played in the games that used BP prior to SR4, so if those were similar to SR4 I am sure they would have gone much faster. It is easier imo to trade a few BPs around when you realize things didn't add up the way you wanted then to try and re-prioritize.