Last week Mike Mearls posted the following on twitter:
It seemed like a fun challenge, so while it's not in time for GaryCon, we took a stab at it. The original version was rough...
But we got enough interest on twitter that it seemed like it might be a useful tool to people playing quick pick up games or maybe even for DMs who wanted to keep some characters in their back pocket for their own uses, such as when you have a player show up you didn't expect and don't want to get too bogged down in character creation.
So, we've produced a new version for DMsguild that not only has a much more refined look and art to it, but also incorporates alignment and backgrounds!
Note that it isn't completely random, but it does have some nice advantages:
- Every Race and Class combination is possible.
- By fixing the primary stats we make sure that the character is at least viable. A completely random distribution might have an 8 strength barbarian for example, and while that's interesting in a way, we wanted the characters to be more functional. We also tried to distribute the primary stats so multiple archetypes were viable, for example we have a Dex, Int primary stat fighter (Eldritch Knight) and a Str, Con fighter for a more traditional build.
Finally, we also generated 100 characters using this method, so even if you don't have dice, you can still pick one of those at random (or just pick one, whatever works for you).
Hopefully this is useful to you, let us know any feedback!