I recently wrote about the experience of simultaneously DMing 3 campaigns for an event at the school where I teach. It was a wild time, and I look forward to doing it again next year. But I faced a challenge in preparing for that event that I didn't mention in my guide to creating a murder mystery--I had 30 players who needed to develop characters as quickly as possible. I wanted my players to have as much time as possible to actually play, so creating characters quickly was vital.
Another related issue was in making characters which I wouldn't need to constantly be double-checking their character sheets. Since many of these players were first time players, the guide for creating characters would need to cover most of the details without my having to help players individually very often. To this end, I wanted to create something which could essentially walk the players through the process with most things explained.
So I ended up with this PowerPoint presentation. I'll walk us through each page below, but you can download the file at that link in order to use the presentation yourself. Read on for the full guide to this presentation, and good luck getting your players to create satisfying characters.