One of the former members of our gaming group moved to Japan a couple years back, which acted as a breakpoint between various RPG campaigns. While he's generally enjoying himself over across the Pacific, there is a lack of polyhedral dice in his life, so when he noted that he'd be in town for a few days next month, I brought up the idea of playing a game and he, naturally, was receptive to the idea.
Since he doesn't have a character in either of the main campaigns we have (the Fenrecz campaign, in which everybody is still stuck in a ghost-dream-time-loop and a Type 3.5 campaign in which I believe we are in some underground caverns having just caused a major cave-in with the hopeful end result of a giant underground flood wave flushing out a yuan-ti hideout), I decided the best thing to be done was to set up the framework for a troupe-based Labyrinth Lord game.
In preparation for this, I had the other available members of the group sit down and create three characters each, using the following criteria: 3D6 in order; after which, the player can decide, if the player meets the requirements, whether they want to play as a demihuman. Should they either not meet any requirements or the player decides to play a human, then the stats can be rearranged. The theory was that this would 1. make humans more desirable and 2. make demihumans rarer.
The final total, was, for 12 characters: 2 fighters, 1 dwarf, 1 magic-user, 2 elves, 2 thieves, 2 halflings, 2 clerics. So, 7 humans and 5 demi-humans, with a number of the humans qualifying for demihuman status and the player deciding that it would fit better with their character idea to move some of the stats around. The clear biases of the group of players came through in the lack of pure magic-users, who are always poorly represented (in Fenrecz, the only "wizard"-y type is the player who's the DM for the Type 3.5 game, where the player who is the sociopathic halfling thief in Fenrecz is a sociopathic necromancer with an unfortunate habit of having missile weapons hit the donkey carrying his mobile laboratory*). Highest stat was 17 (Int for one of the Elves) and the lowest was 5 (Charisma for one of the Clerics, who also has a 6 Intelligence and whose "high" stats are 12 and 10. His name thus far is Father Lump of the Three-Legged Horse).
I wanted multiple characters per person because I'd like to have a campaign where we have a lot of flexibility in terms of who can show up from week to week. If we have only two people, they can run two of their characters. If people are off investigating the Dungeons of the Red Queen and we have to break off at the end of the session and next week we have a different group of players, they can grab some other characters and go somewhere else. And of course with the general durability of 1st level LL characters (I did make the allowance of maximum HP for level 1), it's always nice to have backups.
* - My character in that campaign, Al-Wedjat of the All-Seeing Eye, was intended to be a soothseer-type with the intention of being a Divination specialist. After reading through the PHB and various Type Three splatbooks, it became apparent that if you want to do divining, you're really better off going with a cleric, which makes no sense to me; however, that's pretty much true of all the specialist wizards in Type Three, which is too bad, because it always seems like a good row to hoe.
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