Granted, if it’s a DM I don’t know, I’ll be skeptical and they wouldn’t be my first choice. If I knew they were excellent storytellers, well, I’d look forward to it. It can be liberating to have such a firm placement of the character in the story. That firm placement leads to a lot more confidence when doing ad-libs with details during roleplay. Having such a solid framework, I found, gave me a lot of room to grow the characters and to interact with the other PCs and NPCs.

With my current group of players, as a DM, I wouldn’t dream of pre-gens because they are not actors. They are in it for a game with the side benefit of a good story. Since it’s a game, character creation is viewed as a skill, so creating characters for this group removes part of the game. A table of actors might not view it the same way.

But I do appreciate when the GM provides advice/input to character creation, either to foster effective characters, or to promote RP.

As a GM, I want my players to be invested in the campaign — and if they don’t create their characters, 90% of players won’t be invested. It also creates more work for me for no good reason.

As a player, in a traditional game my character is my vector for communicating what interests me about the game, and connecting myself with the game world. I want fine-grained control over that vector.

(If you are going to play Hamlet, you need to play Hamlet, not a female dwarven magic user who has an addiction to ale.)

The players liked it. Two of them shared one template, but since their other template was different, the characters were plenty different in play. And they were all around the same power level.

I don’t think I’d ever entirely pregen characters, though, and I wouldn’t want a pregenned character for anything longer than a one-shot.

The only exception might be if someone gets added to the game at the last minute and takes control of a well-detailed NPC (obviously pre-generated).

When I GM, I never pre-gen beyond setting the basic premise for the campaign (e.g.: “You’re all rebels fighting against the galactic Empire,” or, “You’re all knights in King Arthur’s Britain.”) If a player doesn’t want to be bothered with character design, I’ll just grill them for a description of who they want to be, then I’ll work the numbers for them, but that leap between campaign-premise and finessing the rules is what makes it their character, not mine.

BTW: I have to disagree with characterizing West-End Star Wars as offering “slightly customizable templates”. Yes, it did offer templates; and, yes, it didn’t take much brain power to finish off those templates and have a ready-to-play character; but it was a streamlined, mechanics-light system to begin with, so that little bit you did do to finish off the template was still half the mechanical work of character design. Plus, unlike the D&D “class” system, it was a trifle to see how to juggle the templates into completely new and unique permutations that wouldn’t break the game.