The Premade Character

tim-cain character-creation rpg-design fallout arcanum premade-characters autoleveling player-agency

Abstract

Problem: When and why should an RPG offer premade characters, and what makes a good one?

Approach: Tim Cain explains his philosophy on premade characters, drawing on his experience with Fallout and Arcanum, and describes the three criteria he uses to evaluate them.

Findings: Premade characters serve as accessibility tools for new or casual players but represent a trade-off against player agency — a core RPG value. Good premade characters must be legal builds, showcase diverse playstyles, and be proven completable. Arcanum extended the concept with autoleveling schemes that acted as optional class systems in a classless game.

Key insight: Every choice abdicated to the designer is a choice the player doesn't experience the consequences of — which undermines the fundamental RPG loop of choice and consequence.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3aIcFD9LoY

Tim Cain's Terminology

Tim prefers the term "premade character" over "preset character." He notes that most of his RPGs do not offer premade characters because he strongly values player-created characters as a core RPG element. In his RPG continuum model (from his "What is an RPG?" video), a game that forces a premade character on the player moves away from being a full RPG — not disqualifying it entirely, but nudging it along the spectrum.

The Three Criteria for Premade Characters

When Tim does include premade characters, he evaluates them against three requirements:

A premade character must be something the player could have created themselves using the character editor. No special stats, no hidden advantages — just a valid configuration of attributes, skills, and traits that the system allows.

They Must Showcase Different Playstyles

The premade options should be meaningfully different from each other, demonstrating the range of viable character builds. Even players who skip the premades benefit from seeing how wildly different characters can be in the same game.

They Must Be Able to Complete the Game

This is the "extremely important" criterion. Every premade character must be proven completable — not theoretically, but actually played through to the end by someone on the team, typically QA. Tim made this a formal requirement in his weekly QA reports.

Fallout's Premade Characters

Fallout's premade characters were created by lead designer Chris Taylor near the end of production. Before that, players either made their own character or played a bare default. Tim required QA to play each premade character through to completion and report on it weekly.

Tim also shares a memorable QA anecdote: he once walked in on testers playing "the grenade game" — pulling the pin on a grenade or starting a dynamite timer, then reverse-pickpocketing it onto an NPC.

Arcanum's Autoleveling Schemes

Arcanum extended the premade concept with autoleveling schemes — optional archetypes that automatically spent level-up points according to a predefined build path. Available archetypes included:

  • Fire mage
  • Summoner mage
  • Gunslinger (possibly gunslinger-medic)
  • Pure warrior (no magic or tech)
  • Non-magic tech thief
  • Priest (magic-skewed, mostly healing)
  • Druid (magic-skewed, nature and summoning)

These schemes functioned like classes in Arcanum's classless system. They could be toggled on and off freely — when reactivated, the scheme would scan from the beginning of its progression and spend any unallocated points. Players could mix manual and auto spending however they liked.

The Player Agency Trade-Off

Tim acknowledges that premade characters and autoleveling schemes serve a real purpose: they let players dive into a game quickly and make RPGs more accessible to casual players — without removing anything from the hardcore experience, since these features are always optional.

However, he sees them as fundamentally at odds with his design philosophy. His games are built around the loop of player choice leading to experienced consequences. When a player delegates character decisions to the designer, they break that loop: "I'll let the designers make the choice, but I'm still going to experience the consequence." This is why Tim views premade characters as one step along the continuum away from being a true RPG.

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