If this has been discussed, I apologize.

What can you tell me about character creation? Simplistic? Involved? Take too long? Any opinion appreciated.
I've ordered the game and want to run my group through the Tales From Wilderland book. Does the game provide pregen characters?
Thanks.

The game, yes, includes pregen characters fully detailed with very beautiful drawings and a proposed background.

The character creation is quite simple i think. As you ll understand when you ll read the books mostly the character creation is "story" driven than mechanic or power game driven. That means the players will not have to worry about min/maxing their characters but creating an inspiring character. That leads the character creation to be more interesting in comparison with d&d (especially 3rd and 4th editions).

Usually it takes 2-3hours to explain the game mechanics AND to create a character.

It's fairly simple. It's a pick system. The players get to pick their culture, traits, background, calling, virtues/rewards, and spend experience points. Once you are familiar with it, it's pretty fast, and you can get a character together in 10 minutes or less. The slowest part is probably deciding on what virtue or reward to take.


You can try it out for yourself by using the the on-line character generator at
http://azrapse.es/tor/sheet.html

Simple? Yes... If compared to the previous Tolkien-centric games (MERP, Decipher). But as stated above, this game has a greater focus on 'story' and 'atmosphere', at the expense of stat-tracking or stat-minmaxing. I think this simplicity fits the universe perfectly.

The tool provided here (http://azrapse.es/tor/sheet.html) is absolutely brilliant and can assist in generating PCs and NPCs in a few minutes (no joke). Highly recommended.

Are the characters level based?

No, they are skill based.

Skills go from 0 to 6 be it for weapons, or common skills. With dice rolls you roll a number of dice based on the character's skill. You add all the dice together and compare it to a target number. Sometimes you can add an attribute bonus, but not all the time. I find the attributes are a less important than in some games.

an interesting things is that at character creation the biggest thing that effects what your character will be good at is your culture. Not a character class or something equivalent.

Background is probably as important as culture, since the attributes are still the primary factor for Damage, Parry, Endurance and Hoipe. Depending on the character concept, a low value in the wrong attribute can seriously hamper the character.