Hi all,

I will be a GM tomorrow for my first game ever. I think the Beginner Game is a great foundation to teach my participants how to play. However, I am wondering if there is any way to have them create their own characters and then play the Beginner Game with their own creations?

I am sure I can change some of the story points to make it work but wanted to see your thoughts.

Thanks!!

Well it should be relatively simple. Since it's designed to be played by any size party from one with two weak characters to one with all six and a liberal use of lightsabers, simply having your players create starting characters from the rulebook should be an easy way to get started. You might ask them go tie their background in to Hethan Romund (or your own Mentor character) but that takes minimal work.

Good luck!

The only reason I'd suggest using the pregens is because doing character generation can take a lot of time, and it's hard to make decisions about what skills and talents to take before you know how the game works. it gives the players at least one session to get the basic mechanics before they dive into character generation.

If you're just going to do a one-shot and that's it, you're probably just better off having the players use the pre-gens.

That said, if you're thinking of making this a long-running campaign with Mountaintop Rescue as the starting point of your campaign, then you can absolutely make original characters and run them through the BegBox adventure. You might need to tweak one part of the adventure (where the PCs "learn" to use the various powers they have) but overall the difficulty of the combat encounters scales pretty well. If anything, it might scale better since none of the PCs built using the rulebook will have access to basic lightsabers; at best they can get training lightsabers. This means the BBEG at the end won't be quite so much of a pushover as he's got no ranks in Adversary and will go down hard if confronted with Breach 1 lightsabers.

The only issue I would see is that the pre-gens, and thus the adventure designed around them, aren't equivalent to starting XP. They're given more to make the experience feel more cinematic, I think. Just bear that in mind when looking at challenges like minion groups and nemeses.