Yes, you can take that long to make a character in those systems. But, it certainly doesn't have to.
I agree that it doesn't have to. However, speaking as a long time GM, if we started a session of those games where no one had a premade character I would expect it to take at least 3-4 hours before we were really up and running. It's for this reason I've gotten away from starting any campaign with a kickoff session where we essentially just make characters (or spend most of the time making characters).
It only takes that long in 3e D&D if you start allowing a bunch of material beyond core. Stick to core and a character is built in 30 minutes or so.
Sure. I could make a 3e D&D character in 30 minutes or less. I do so all the time as a DM. However, how fast a character should be built is not the same as how fast they will be built, and this is especially true with groups of mixed experience levels. If I were to get 6 people who'd never played before and started walking them all through character creation together, it would take hours and hours before we were done. Any number I pulled out of the air would just be a number pulled out of the air, but the anticipation I would have is that the answer would be 'most or all of a session' just devoted to character creation. And even with that, the results would probably be pretty unsatisfying.
And, I would say that character creation taking "at least two weeks" is possibly idiosyncratic to your particular table.
Perhaps, but I get the impression more tables could benefit from the approach, especially in this era of easy electronic communication.
Now, I'm not saying that character creation for any one character involves a commitment of more than a couple of hours on the part of any one players time. But I am saying that if I plan to play on day X, then I better start coaching my players through character creation about two weeks before that if I expect that on day X will have character sheets ready to go within a couple minutes of setting down to play.
Each player is going to end up exchanging the following me:
1) Initial concept discussions: At this point, the rules aren't particularly important. It's more important to convey some basic setting information to the players to give them some ideas about what is possible. What I'm focused on here is finding out what the player might enjoy playing, and then seeing what concept might support the idea that attracts the player. The goal is to get something like a one sentence background or summary of the character which is not tied directly to rules.
2) Initial rules discussions: Once we we have a concept in mind, its time to start discussing exactly how the rules might provide for or influence the concept. This is where we start thinking about things like primary skills, powers, profession, race, or class according to how the rules work. The eventual outcome of this is hopefully something like a high level concrete mechanical implementation of the concept above. In D&D, this is usually a class, race, and loosely what the player intends to be good at. In M&M it might be an idea of how the character will spend most of his points.
3) Character creation: At this point, after a couple conversations or emails we are finally at the point were we can bring out a character sheet and start filling it out and paying close attention to the rules. Sometimes, at this point the character concept shifts as something shiny in the rules catches the players attention, and then we are back to step 1 but at least on a fast track. Sometimes the concept shifts again, maybe even back to what it started with, once the player begins to see the tradeoffs. But eventually we end up with a filled in character sheet, including things like equipment owned.
4) Character sheet review: At this point, I can read the character sheet, and check it for errors. I can also determine if the character concept is viable as an adventurer, and advice the player what the character strengths and weaknesses will be and what tradeoffs are available to perhaps increase viability in the short or long term. This may involve various back and forth exchanges, since if I make a change in the character sheet to correct an error the player now needs to review and approve the changes. Hopefully at the end of this we have a character sheet without errors that everyone is happy with, and I can approve.
5) Background creation and approval: As long as we have a character sheet, we can play, but its usually still a good idea to have a least a paragraph of background connecting the character to the world. This involves the player learning abit more about the setting and writing something, me adding to it or ammending it, the player integrating or approving the changes and so forth. Eventually we end up with a simple story about the character's life in the world thus far that I can approve as being relevant to and possible within the setting. And now, and only now, we have a completed character.
Now, that doesn't need to take two weeks. We could probably sit everyone down and get it done in 4-5 hours face to face. But if we did sit everyone down and do that, there is going to be alot of time when the player is just waiting on me to finish discussing something with another player and in that time they are likely to be bored or if not bored then entertaining themselves in some non-game related way. Both are bad, and both create poor environments to start a new game in. So, in my experience its better to get everything out of the way before we get everyone together and that in my experience takes two weeks and even then expect at least one player to be unfinished come game day. Also, if you have a mixture of experienced and inexperienced players and get them together to make characters, there is a tendancy for the experienced player to want to tell the inexperienced players what to do, so that the inexperienced players end up playing the character that the experienced player wants to play (or thinks they should play) instead of the one that they want to play. Also, if you wait until game day until finding out what everyone wants to play, you usually end up with a batch of character concepts that are utterly incompatible with each other or which in total don't constitute a balanced party. This is actually more likely in my experience the better the players are, because IME experienced RPers generally want to create somewhat exotic characters with lots of quirks and internal drives and hooks that would be what we'd call 'issues' in a real person. Sometimes you work through them. And sometimes you don't. I've seen too many promising campaigns die stillborn (one of mine, three or four from other GMs) to problems like this to leave it to chance now.
Besides, by starting prep for the first game day a couple of weeks ahead of time it gives me time to prep the game, send around questionaires to find about what people want in a game, and otherwise make sure I'm planning a game that my players will want to play and enjoy. It also gives me a chance to figure out what sort of table conflicts we are likely to have before we have them and set some expectations about the social contract accordingly.
