My son is signed up for Starfinder and Pathfinder this weekend and it says you don't need any experience to play, rules will be taught. Materials not provided. Should he create a character at home and bring it or for those games or do they usually pass out pre-generated characters? Both events are put on by Paizo.
I don't want him showing up at the time to play and find out he needed to bring a character.
I appreciate any insight that can be provided.
Starfinder I cannot speak for as I haven't played. I don't know why it would be a problem showing up with one made, worst case is he has to play a pregen anyway.
But the Pathfinder events, check if they are for ruleset 2.0. That is being released at Gen Con and thus will be impossible to make a character beforehand. If it is still ruleset 1, same as Starfinder above.
~Komori
On both, the event should state what level range it's for in the title. If it's 1-4, he should be able to show up with a 0 xp level 1 character (there are some slightly different rules for building an organized play level 1 than normal level 1 so it might be worth some searching about pathfinder society for that).
Alternatively he has free time well before the events, the company that makes Hero Lab often have a location in the event ballroom for creating level 1 characters. I don't know if they'll just be showing off Starfinder/Pathfinder 2 stuff this year or if they'll still have some first edition available. It can take 20-30 minutes to put a character together that way.
If he doesn't want to make a level 1 or is at an event for a higher level, there should be pregen characters available. A few years ago they were printed out up by the organization table and you'd need to go grab the one you wanted. I think it has changed to the table DM having a laminated pack of all the pregens and you just borrow one while at the table though.
For Pathfinder 1.0, I don't know if this file is current but the pregenerated iconics can be found at https://paizo.com/products/btpy9a64?Community-Use-Package-Pathfinder-Society-Pregenerated-Characters I think you might need to create an account for it to generate the download, but I'm pretty sure it was free. It isn't necessary to do this, but if playing a level 7 event it could be worth familiarizing oneself with the character abilities ahead of time.