We had 10 people turn up for our Saturday “Let’s Create Characters” session, and through a not-the-most-well-thought-out procedure I’ve ever enacted (we didn’t think about it at all), we first got them to name the two roles they’d like to play most; then the role itself; then had the two leaders select people for two “teams” (better yet, “tables”), and so ended up with two balanced – sort of – groups.

All of which will probably be set awry when the game begins next week and not everyone turns up. Oh well!

My table ended up with the following characters being created:

* Human Warpriest – Unseelie Agent – Crystalbrooker (Leader)

* Dragonborn Cavalier – Unseelie Agent – Sybaren (Defender)

* Pixie Hunter – Feybeast Tamer – Sildaine (Controller)

* Eladrin Witch – Sildaine (Controller)

* Half-Orc Berserker – Sybaren (Defender/Striker)

As we’ll probably have Rich joining us as well, another striker would be best…

The most challenging thing about this process was the lack of rulebooks. We had two copies of Heroes of the Feywild between the twelve people, and about three sets of the “Heroes” Essentials books. Character creation sessions work best when people actually have the books. It’s quite frustrating to try and do it without that – and without access to the Character Builder (alas, the store doesn’t offer wireless…)

Because we do have players without the books or character builder, I took home the notes on the characters that three players wanted to play. A large part of time today has been spent writing those up into proper character sheets. I’ve been using Word for that, because I think the Character Builder character sheets are extremely unclear when it comes to power cards: they are moving into microtext these days. So, the Human Warpriest, Dragonborn Cavalier and one from the other table – a Half-Orc Scout – are now in nicely formatted form on my computer. I’ll print them out before the session next week.

The actual Encounters season looks really entertaining, with a lot of role-playing encounters (Hooray!) Callen’s warpriest was designed with a lot of skills – at one point, it had taken the Skill Training feat twice, but I realised as I wrote it up we’d forgotten the extra skill humans get, and reinstated Bludgeon Expertise – it’s my opinion that D&D is at its best when you don’t fail all the time. 🙂 The warpriest still has a lot of skills, though, and should be very entertaining to play. Passive Insight and Perception of 20 at level 1? Yeah, not a lot will get by him.