Group Character Creation Advice

[Kytross]

Hello all,

I am running a short adventure with my monthly RP group, 10-12 hours total. My GM needs a break and wants to be a player for a short run. I am fairly excited and have developed a decent privateer campaign set a year after Episode 3. Of the other three players none of them are excited about the campaign as they want to keep running the superhero game we're in right now. The GM isn't burnt out yet, but he can feel it coming on. So I'm set to take over in January, March by the latest.

Anyway, I figured a group character creation session would get me some buy in from the team. I've never run a group character creation session before, though I've been in a few, and I was hoping you guys might have some tips, or could share memorable experiences.

My current plan is to go over the scenario I've created for them: One of the Jedi Survivors who specialized in eliminating pirate threats before the Clone War, has become a pirate, striking out at the Empire through a series of daring raids as he steals the supplies needed by General Kota to raise a Rebel force against the Empire.

The Jedi Captain is a GMcharacter who dies heroicly early on in the campaign, probably 4 hours in, enough time to set the tone and review space combat and get themm used to this system. The players are his crew who can either take over his heroic crusade or become pirates out for themselves.

So, once I review the game for them I figured I'd review what little I know about what each player has told me about their characters and just let the discussion take over. I don't know if I should prepare questions for them, or come up with some kind of group activitiy for them to do. I plan to have a copy of Heroes & Rogues, as well as Platt's Smuggler Guide on hand as I think they have the best character creation walk throughs. I also plan to have a copy of Pirates & Privateers with me.

Advice? Suggestions?

[cheshire]

If you've got new characters and players coming in, it might be helpful for the players to look over this:

http://search.4shared.com/postDownload/PKQh3fdD/New_Player_Handout.html

It's just a short document that covers the basics of what skills there are, how to interpret the die codes they give themselves, and how to create a character. If I'm running a new campaign I send this out, and even people who've never played an RPG before show up with good looking character stats.

But so far it sounds like you've got a good direction, that you have the book resources you need, and a fair sense of how to craft the story. It sounds like you have the basic elements unless there are specific questions you have.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Kytross]

I'm not inexperienced as a GM, but I've never run a group character creation session. I wouldn't be anxious if my players were excited about the game. Excited players I'm familiar with. Laconic players are something else.

I looked over the google & there's not much out there.

I guess I'm looking for experiences from the folks here, especially if someone's been in a similar situation.

& I've got that handout printed out, though I've already emailed it to my players.

[cheshire]

What I do for my character creation sessions is to have a white board handy. For example, for some reason, no matter how many times we do it, I always need to show two or three people how skills add up, and why they should list it as:

[garhkal]

It might be benefitial to have 2-3 characters wrote out ahead of time to show them what they look like.
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