Fellowship - Playbook Selection

[Powerdork]

I'm looking to start a game of Fellowship during my coming college term, and I'm interested in conserving paper while still offering my group a good selection of playbooks.

When it comes to frameworks, I've had bad experiences with the Empire in previous attempts to play the game, and the Overlord seems a lot more workable than the Horizon, on a "having characters who care about the adventure" front, so I'm going to be pruning the playbooks that require anything besides the Overlord (such as the team playbook the Rebellion, and the destiny the Traitor) for sure.

In terms of basic playbooks, so far I'm thinking that a good selection includes the Dwarf, the Elf, the Halfling, the Heir, the Orc, the Squire, the Construct, the Dragon, the Exile, the Ogre, the Remnant, and the Spy.
I'm iffy on the Beast, the Collector, the Lantern, the Rain, the Tinker, and the Spider (the last for the reason that spiders creep people out, but... Idunno, a Vriska can be fine sometimes?)

In terms of powerful playbooks, it seems like a natural fit to include the Harbinger, the Angel, the Devil, the Nemesis, and I really like the Pair even though it also demands I print out the Mentor destiny early as reference material.

Book 4 has a lot of playbooks that seem neat, but also really advanced and I'm not sure they'd make for a good introductory experience. Things like the Mascot, the Shattered, and the Outlander. They have a lot of weird rules subversions, moving parts, and tonal inconsistency, respectively.

Anyone else put thought into this?

[ShadowSandbag]

I'm currently in a game of Fellowship as a Shattered along with a Halfling and a Remnant turned Lantern, all of which have been pretty good mechanically.

I'm not sure exactly what your plan is, but it might be worth having a session 0 before real character creation with the playbook premises. Maybe print out the starting text that says what they are and to play them if you want X, you should be able to get all of those on 3 or 4 sheets of paper. Probably also have a copy of each rulebook on-hand so they can look in more detail. That way you can have your players choose their playbooks based on that and then only print out the ones you need so you're not wasting any paper.

The other option would be to ask them what they are generally thinking for their character and use that to suggest a playbook to them. That also would give you a bit more control as far as suggesting more basic/complex playbooks based on the player without doing so explicitly.