What Do You Pick First

[Jester David]

You’re making a brand new character: what do you choose first?

Do you pick a class first or choose a race?
Do you go for a classic combo like gnome illusionist or drow ranger?
Or does it vary?

 

[Tormyr]

I go with a concept first and build to the concept. Sometimes the race comes first, other times the class fits first.

 

[guachi]

I don't think of a PC as simply race or class. I take a look at the game world and figure out where I want my PC to be from. Is there a country, region, culture, or city that sounds interesting?

Simply saying, "I'm a human fighter" has no real meaning to me. Like my last AL character I made he had to be from Zakhara. Race and class were irrelevant but he had to be from Zakhara no matter what.

 

[rgoodbb]

I wish character first was an option.

I used to start off with the most powerful class/race combo I could think of when I was younger. Even when 5e started I would baulk at a race that didn't have a class attribute in.

These days it is more about if I'm old and befuddled, quiet but sarcastic, brash and unwise, or charming but deceitful. Next I actually think about gender and then I think about class/race about equally.

 

[ccs]

I go with a concept first and build to the concept. Sometimes the race comes first, other times the class fits first.

Yeah, I guess this best describes my own approach.

Let's use my 1/2ling sisters for ex:

1st we have Bree Burrfoot. 1/2ling warlock, fey patron, chain pact. About 11 years old.
Bree started as an NPC quest giver when I reworked an encounter in an old module & combined it with part of a DC module involving a pseudo-dragon.
The inn where this encounter took place was run by a 1/2ling. So I just built up the details of his family.
His oldest daughter Rose had gotten herself in trouble and had been abducted. Bree was trying to help her - by recruiting some passing adventurers for a side quest - before Dad found out. She offered them an upfront reward. The catch was that they had to shine down to tiny size, venture through a series of vermin tunnels beneath the inn & retrieve said reward from her pseudo-dragon friend Scales. She'd show the the way.
I made her a low lv warlock because I wanted her to be somewhat usefull in the tunnels, but nowhere near the PCS abilities. 1 or two usefull invocations + 2 minor spells seemed just about right. And it provided a good reason for her to be friends with the psuedo-dragon. In truth I only partially built her mechanically. She was 3 mechanics & a personality....
The pcs agreed to help her.
She proved to be an amusing addition to the party. So I had her tag along with them as an added complication when they went to rescue Rose.
And then things took a really amusing turn & both 1/2lings ended up accompanying the players far longer than expected.

Several months later I had the opportunity to play in a CoS campaign. I was vaguely considering playing a warlock. I really like the 5e class & wanted to see how one actually played lv1-?
It just so happened that another player - who knew nothing of Bree, the NPC, made a character that would mesh extremely well backstory wise with where the 1/2ling sisters were in the last arc they were present for.
So I pulled Bree out & made her a full fledged PC.

Next up is Rose Burrfoot. 1/2ling barbarian. About 18 or 19.
Rose began as an NPC personality & a mcguffin. No class at all.
Rose is not an adventurer by choice. She's an adventurer because she has a low wisdom & makes bad choices wich have had horrible consequences.
She's a barbarian because I was looking for a truly bad class/archtype for a PF campaign about a year ago. And I found one! There's a frenzied archtype in PF that's at least as dangerous to self/Allies as to foes. That's PERFECT for representing lack of skill/training!
So Rose has managed to survive her early misadventures by swing a hatchet/etc wildly until monsters either die or leave her alone.
Well, that game fizzled quick. So a few months ago I made a 5e version of her.

Bree - mostly went from race to class. I built a 1/2ling concept & attached a class.
Rose - mostly went from class to race. Especially when I made the 5e version (a modified ancestral guardian path fits her perfectly). I started by making a barbarian & attached it to Rose.

 

[Leatherhead]

This is one of the parts of character creation that annoys the heck out of me.

Because stats should come first, but you can't get stats until you pick your race, and you don't know what stats you want until you pick your class.

It's the biggest bottleneck in the process , and what keeps holding character creation back from being an elegant experience.

 

[Oofta]

It depends on where I get my inspiration. It could be a cool mini I painted and want to come up with a story for. It could be "I haven't played a ___, if I did what would they be like?"

There's no one answer, and even once I've decided on who I want to play, what I actually play from a mechanical perspective can change quite a bit. I had a character a while back that went from human to half-elf because of how my back story developed. He went from fighter to swashbuckler and then back to fighter because of an intro story I wrote (that may never be shown to anyone).

Other times I know I want to play a dragonborn cleric because it's an unusual combination so I come up with a story for them.

 

[ccs]

This is one of the parts of character creation that annoys the heck out of me.

Because stats should come first, but you can't get stats until you pick your race, and you don't know what stats you want until you pick your class.

It's the biggest bottleneck in the process , and what keeps holding character creation back from being an elegant experience.

Not true at all.

Most characters in our games are created by rolling 4d6 (keep 3) x6, take anywhere from 10m - 1 week to consider options/assign #s.
Now true, many times someone has an idea or two they're hoping will work....

And if your one of those people who don't have the stomach for randomnes? Then thanks to standard array or PB you already know exactly what stats you have.

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

I almost always choose class first and then everything else stems from that decision. From there I usually determine what type of personality they should have which will inform race choice. I used to play almost exclusively humans but recently I'm on a kick where any new character I create is a non-human. I find that many see human as the boring base option and will go out of their way to avoid it.

 

[Blue]

When I'm creating a character for an already existing group, I go "Role first". What does this group need (and what would be redundant / step on other's toes). From the available roles in 5e I go concept, class and so forth.

I mention 5e because we always use point buy. In earlier editions where we rolled ability scores, I'd roll first because that will have a big impact on what I could play in terms of MAD vs. SAD. (Even more so back in AD&D 2nd where the group I was with rolled three sets in order so class choice was strongly dictated by the roles.)

Occasional variations happen. For example, for Out of the Abyss I knew I wanted a race with Darkvision before considering anything else, and since my FLGS is heavy on optimization that I'd want a tight class/race combo. But that's not the norm.

Let em give an example from a game I recently joined. The group has seven players (including me) and not all make it every session. They only had a single healer, a life cleric. So someone who can pinch hit as a healer was a good fit. Also they had several melee combatants including a tank and some of them were also good ranged combatants. So weapon-wielders seemed full, and by the same token something like a moon druid would be overlap.

I ended up going with a bard. Some healing, some buffing that would differ from the sorcerer, and various fun bard things. I ended up going halfling because I had a cool picture in mind.