I am currently working on a one-shot for CoC that I want to run at some point and was wondering what you all usually do for pregens or more specifically if you have some advice for how to "balance" them somehow (i.e. skills and whatnot). Music is an important part of the scenario so the characters will likely be musicians, composers, related scholars, or other such things...
I primarily roll up pregens for Ross' action games so that requires a lot of maxing out of primary skills: weapon, spot hidden, listen. With a good number of points in: hide, conceal (depending on class), first aid, dodge, etc.
In the Night Mall scenario, I gave each steroid crazed, gun toter a quirk in that I maxed out a "strange" skill: occult, astronomy, etc. And let the players figure out how to use the skill. I basically selected these skills at random.
For the non-combat PCs in the game Ross ran at Fear the Con, I maxed out their occupational skills first and put what few points were left over into more combat oriented skills. For your game, I would do something similar. I would start with their key occupational skills and then add points into investigative skills and, if I had points left over, put them in small firearms skills. Key skills for me would include: music, listen, mathematics, psychology, languages. With key investigative skills being: library use, computer (depending on year), spot hidden, etc.
That's what I would consider doing at least. You'll have to ask Ross how well my characters have worked for his groups in the past.
EDIT: The Night Mall pregens can be found
here. For some reason, the PDFs were deleted from the forums. I'll be using Google Docs from now on to store files anyway.
