D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (season 8.) began a few weeks ago. As usual Wizard only provided the standard six pre-gens that we all know backwards and forward by now. Today we’ve added six new PCs to the Dungeon’s Master Pre-Generated Character Library.
These new characters were created by Brad Bound at Hit on Crit. All of the new additions were built using the new Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. Although these are all level 1 characters, Brad has provided character builder files for download. Now you can level them up as you see fit taking them from generic pre-gen to a character that is truly your own.
Download all six of the new Pre-Generated Characters (PDF) from The Elder Elemental Eye. These pre-gens look best when printed in colour. Some of the details are harder to read when printed in black and white.
Don’t forget that all of the pre-gens that Wizards provided for the first four seasons of D&D Encounters, along with the home-made PCs created by the blogging community, can be found in our Pre-Generated Character Library.
D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye – Pre-Generated Characters
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While I commend the effort, I can't exactly recommend these for play. The premades are intended for new players or players too lazy to buy the books and do the work.
Furthermore, there are numerous mechanical problems with the characters:
Every attack is a basic attack now?
Bladesingers are in Heroes of the Elemental Chaos? My book must be missing pages.
Numerous errors in powers, the most egregious being the aforementioned bladesinger's bladespells, which moves the bladesinger from its intended role as a melee-based controller to a really terrible striker.
Spelling and grammar errors everywhere. I'd be embarrassed to give this to a player, lest they think I don't know the difference between "its" and "it's" or how to use a spell check.
@Krissach
Thank you for your feedback.
I agree that pre-gens are most often used by new players who don’t have access to the books or experienced players who don’t have the time to create their own characters. You’re absolutely correct when you say that these are too complicated for new players. For new players I’d be more likely to let them use one of the pre-gens Wizards provided from a previous season (all of which are available in our pre-generated character library). I see these new pre-gens being more for experienced players who want to try some for the new builds from the Heroes of Elemental Chaos before they buy the books.
Obviously these characters weren’t built using Heroes of Elemental Chaos exclusively (as you pointed out with the Bladesinger example). In my experience it’s pretty rare theses days to make any character using only one book, even if it’s the newest one on the market.
Most of the classes in the new books (those in the “Heroes of…” books) follow the Essentials model and do rely heavily on the Basic Attacks in place of other at-wills. Personally I’m not a big fan of this approach but it certainly makes things easier for newer players.
As far as specific grammatical or spelling errors, I’ll pass your feedback along to the folks at Hit on Crit so that they can fix any errors. I suspect that their desire to get these pre-gens built quickly could be the reason for a few oversights. Nobody’s perfect.
Great character cards. I am working on building a template in Apple Pages so I can try my hand at using them as well. I love the simplicity of one card instead of 6-8 pages for a traditional character sheet. Makes the game feel less intimidating.
These characters are poorly built. I don't know if Wizards is intentionally giving people characters that are terrible, so they want to buy products in order to get a character that doesn't suck or what. All the errors aside, these characters are failures from the ground up. The store I run stuff at allows players to build their own versions of these characters for play (have to play essentials stuff or one of these guys) and they are massively more effective. I've spent this whole season either playing poorly as the DM or knocking the monsters down a few notches in order to give players with these worthless PCs a fighting chance. I'm actually looking forward to playing the last encounter of the season as written with no DM screen because it will completely eat the players if they are using this garbage.
@Matyr
Just to be clear, these pre-gens were NOT made by Wizards of the Coast. These are fan made pre-gens care of Brad Bound at Hit on Crit.
Wizard does provide pre-gens, but they have not provided new ones since D&D Encounters season 4. Since a lot of regular players are getting bored with the 6 pre-gens Wizard keeps providing, fans have created their own new-pre-gens using the latest product releases to introduce some variety.
Ideally everyone will create their own character, but for those without the materials (like new players) or those who are just too busy, these are just six more possible characters to choose from.
You can find all of the pre-gens Wizard has provided through D&D Encounters season 1-4 as well as a slew of fan-made pre-gens in our Pre-Generated Character Library.
With a new season of D&D Encounters only a few weeks away we’ll need new pre-gens for season 9. If you’d like to create pre-gens we’d be happy to post them at Dungeon’s Master.