I started playing around with the random generator site perchance.org recently and was taken with the idea of making a generator for starter D&D 5e characters. This turned out to be quite a lot fiddlier than I imagined it would, but I did it!
https://perchance.org/5echaracter
With a click of a button it gives you a character suitable for levels 1-3, complete with (what should be) a correct set of stats, proficiencies, languages, starting gear, and a summary of class and race abilities. All options taken from the official WotC books.
The fiddliest part was making it so that profiencies etc didn't repeat when coming from different areas (background, class, subclass etc). And while the whole point of this is to lean into the randomness, I still wanted things like gear to make sense for the character (for example, if a character has Great Weapon Fighting then they should start with a two-handed weapon).
Some elements of the randomness left me a little unsure. A big one was alignment. As it stands, you have an equal chance of getting any alignment. So you're as likely to roll an evil character as a good one. That doesn't actually feel accurate to me in terms of what most people actually play. At the same time I don't want to put my thumb on the scale. I decided in the end to just keep it equally random, as obviously anyone using the generator could choose to just change the alignment if they wanted anyway.
I tried to stick with "official" names for the various races. For a lot of them that was easy, there's entire name lists in some of the books plus lots of example NPCs to draw from. For others it was trickier, I was forced to look back at products from earlier editions or D&D-adjacent stuff. For example for some of the races who originate in settins based on Magic the Gathering, I used examples taken from MtG cards. Some of the newer races forced to get a bit more... creative. For example with plasmoids, I didn't find many examples of names even in old Spelljammer stuff. But I did find out that plasmoids were based on an alien race called the dralasites from TSR's old scifi game Star Frontiers. So I just yoinked a list of dralasite names instead. Harengon were a problem as they're new, barely appear in any books and aren't given a name list. I ended up using a list of character names from Watership Down!
Anyway if anyone does happen to stumble upon this and use it, I'd love to hear what you think.
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