Li Shenron
Legend
I will DM a 5e adventure during the Christmas holidays, and it will be essentially a one-shot game which is expected to take from 1 to 3 evenings, so I came here to look for feedback on the setup 
- The adventure will be the classic Keep on the Borderlands, and we expect to have 3-5 players. If they end up being only 3, I can let the most experienced player play 2 PCs at once.
- It's already decided to use pre-generated characters to start playing as quickly as possible, but this time I also decided they will start as 3rd-level PCs. This presumably means some encounters will be pushovers, but it should lower the chance of death, and let the PCs go farther in the adventure for each day.
- I want to completely avoid the need for creating PCs from scratch, so in addition to using pregens, in case of death I will ask the player if she wants the PC to really die (and pick up one of the unused PCs) or stay alive with some condidition/penalty other than death.
About the pregenerated characters
I created 6 pregenerated characters (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, Druid and Ranger) which are fully statted except for racial abilities. Players will choose a pregen and pick a race, then all the fluff is up to them (alignment, gender, name, personality, history...).
- Race benefits are heavily simplified. I wanted to completely avoid the need to recalculate stats, so no racial ability increases. Here is the current list:
[sblock]
Human: one extra skill
Dwarf: darkvision, stonecunning
Elf: darkvision, one fixed cantrip (TBD)
Halfling: lucky
Dragonborn: breath weapon, damage resistance
Gnome: darkvision, gnome cunning
Half-Elf: either same as Human or Elf
Half-Orc: darkvision, relentless endurance
Tiefling: darkvision, fire resistance[/sblock]
- Standard array with a +3/+1 boost to compensate for no racial ability increases: 18 14 14 12 10 8.
- Backgrounds are not used: 2 skills proficiencies are preselected for each pregen, tools/languages and the downtime feature are ignored (they shouldn't come up in the adventure anyway)
- Equipment is simplified and basically just the same as each class' starting equipment (not the background's) with some occasional change. Money just enough for food and lodging at the keep. But the PCs will find treasure very soon!
- All spells and other character choices are premade, I tried to pick stuff that is iconic, but also not too complicated (but not necessarily the MOST simple one). I can post the full details on these choices or even the ready character sheets if someone is interested. I can already mention that the chosen subclasses are Battlemaster, Life, Thief, Transmuter, Moon and Hunter.
Any comment?
- The adventure will be the classic Keep on the Borderlands, and we expect to have 3-5 players. If they end up being only 3, I can let the most experienced player play 2 PCs at once.
- It's already decided to use pre-generated characters to start playing as quickly as possible, but this time I also decided they will start as 3rd-level PCs. This presumably means some encounters will be pushovers, but it should lower the chance of death, and let the PCs go farther in the adventure for each day.
- I want to completely avoid the need for creating PCs from scratch, so in addition to using pregens, in case of death I will ask the player if she wants the PC to really die (and pick up one of the unused PCs) or stay alive with some condidition/penalty other than death.
About the pregenerated characters
I created 6 pregenerated characters (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, Druid and Ranger) which are fully statted except for racial abilities. Players will choose a pregen and pick a race, then all the fluff is up to them (alignment, gender, name, personality, history...).
- Race benefits are heavily simplified. I wanted to completely avoid the need to recalculate stats, so no racial ability increases. Here is the current list:
[sblock]
Human: one extra skill
Dwarf: darkvision, stonecunning
Elf: darkvision, one fixed cantrip (TBD)
Halfling: lucky
Dragonborn: breath weapon, damage resistance
Gnome: darkvision, gnome cunning
Half-Elf: either same as Human or Elf
Half-Orc: darkvision, relentless endurance
Tiefling: darkvision, fire resistance[/sblock]
- Standard array with a +3/+1 boost to compensate for no racial ability increases: 18 14 14 12 10 8.
- Backgrounds are not used: 2 skills proficiencies are preselected for each pregen, tools/languages and the downtime feature are ignored (they shouldn't come up in the adventure anyway)
- Equipment is simplified and basically just the same as each class' starting equipment (not the background's) with some occasional change. Money just enough for food and lodging at the keep. But the PCs will find treasure very soon!
- All spells and other character choices are premade, I tried to pick stuff that is iconic, but also not too complicated (but not necessarily the MOST simple one). I can post the full details on these choices or even the ready character sheets if someone is interested. I can already mention that the chosen subclasses are Battlemaster, Life, Thief, Transmuter, Moon and Hunter.
Any comment?
