Hi! I'm curious about the process of creating pre-generated characters, especially ones for newbies. For those of you who keep pre-gens on hand, what do you consider to be a newbie-friendly character? If you make your own, where do you start? Character concepts or "I'm out of wizards" or player request or...? How much information do you include, e.g. does the character come with a name? How often do new players want to change something on their pre-gens?
Context: I'm building a tool to simplify filling out character sheets, which is obviously more useful the more characters you have to fill out. 
I'd like to have an idea how DMs / organizers handle pre-gens for the curious folks who come to AL events. (I'm aware of the WotC ones; this is about those who go further.) At the same time, I'm interested in DMing the Starter Set for people who have never played before and would like a larger selection of pre-gens. So: what makes for a newbie-friendly pre-gen, and how do you go about producing one?
Here, just use this handy resource where over 100 pre-generated characters have been posted, complete with cool artwork and backstories:
Pre-Generated Character Repository
I'm sure other more technical posters will have some thoughts on which ones are best for newbies. Good luck!
I've been down this road myself and written some software to generate pregen character sheets, so perhaps I can offer a few tips.
I've contributed some samples to Iserith's excellent thread, which I recommend.
The first thing you need to decide is: will the software be for your own personal use, or do you intend to publish it? It makes a big difference. I decided to keep my software personal. This means that I can embed the text blocks for class, race and background features and print them out in the sheet (similar to the way they are done in the LMoP pregens). New players, especially, find this helpful. The downside is that I can't publish the software without infringing WotC's copyright, which in turn means that people such as yourself have to write the equivalent software all over again. But at least we can share design ideas.
Next, what will you do about portraits? It's good for players to have a picture of their character but it's also good for the player to be able to choose a picture that appeals to them, albeit from a limited selection. I've gone for pulling portraits from a library of about a thousand or so, that I've collected from computer games over the years, and selecting by race, class, gender and equipment. Another solution would be to leave a blank rectangle on the sheet the same size as a printed sticky label, print out a swatch of portraits onto labels and invite the player to pull off one they like the look of and stick it on their paper sheet. It encourages the player to identify with the character and that's good.
Decide what you will do about feats. It's a lot simpler to omit them, especially for new players, but some people think that diminishes the game. I decided to include them but with a toggle to turn them on or off. It's important to decide that early on, because they represent exceptions and quirks that will wreck your lovingly-crafted code if you don't anticipate them. Weapons-related feats can affect inventory choices, for example.
It may be best if you let the player choose a name for the character and write it in on the sheet themselves but have a pre-printed list of suggestions to hand, of names that suit your campaign. I've gone the other way and incorporated a name generator (that's a program module in itself) because we find that names trigger off ideas about the character and that helps us.
Decide whether or not you are going to work to Adventurers' League rules. It makes a difference to starting gold (you get the maximum according to class) and that affects equipment.
Include an option for randomised class/subclass/race/background choices. Sometimes, it can throw up unexpectedly interesting combinations you might not have thought of, that the player can be invited to elaborate on during characterisation at the start of the game. "Pray tell us, Captain Smallpiece (Gnome, Sailor background), by what happenstance of fate didst thou become a Druid of the Forest? Thou must have some interesting tales to tell, I'll be bound!" "Aar! (best pirate voice) 'Tis the oak, see. A sailor mun unnerstand oak if he's to float well." and so on.
Consider making it double up as an NPC generator for DMs.
Think about how you will format the output. I've gone for HTML, which we can view in a browser and print as PDF or paper as we need it, while simulatanously generating a summary in HTML. I tried using the WotC character sheet blanks as a background image but it's hopeless - the pixels refuse to line up - so I've gone for a completely custom sheet layout, paginated in two columns. That's a lot of work and we're pleased with the results but it was a nightmare to code. If you can think of a way of injecting data into one of the form-fillable pdf character sheets, that would be slick.
Hope that helps, and good luck
Thanks for the replies. I did look through the pregen repository before posting because it is awesome. It will be a great resource when I'm ready to pick up specific builds.
As for the tool itself, the database replicates a lot of the PHB, so yeah, private. Maybe the FLGS could use it for Adventure League GMs, but this was never going to be a public thing. I'm doing AL-legal characters for the moment just because I don't want to deal with rolled characters in play.
Honestly, portaits hadn't occured to me. In my game, maybe Pathfinder pawns would serve a similar purpose? Most of the pre-gen repository entries do come with portraits, but I hadn't planned to incorporate them into the tool.
Completed official character sheets are my final goal, so PDFs are a must. Since I'm doing part of the project in PHP, I'm using the FPDF (http://www.fpdf.org/) and FPDI (http://www.setasign.com/products/fpdi/manual) libraries . It's been pretty smooth. The biggest problems (so far) have been downgrading the official PDFs to version 1.4, and fitting personality traits into WotC's provided space without forcing the player to use a magnifying glass!
jlacus wrote: