There's an apparent paradox in character creation for an unfamiliar game: to effectively and confidently make a character requires knowing the game, but to know the game you have to already have made and played a character. It's not really a paradox, but it can feel like it when you have limited time to play and want to get started as soon as possible in order to get right into the fun of an ongoing campaign.

There's a simple solution that has worked well and consistently for me, but which requires trusting that patience pays off.

Play a demo session first

What has been successful for me across RPGs is to run a one-shot demo session using the new game before we make our real characters in our real campaign. This introduces the players to the moving parts of a character through hands-on playing experience, which gives them a basic understanding of what's important when making characters. This can also effectively introduce the players to the setting and playstyle that they will be making characters for later.

Whether the demo characters are pre-made or made by the players doesn't seem to matter. (If they know these are throw-away characters, they don't suffer nearly as much analysis paralysis in making their own.) What matters most is that the demo session gives them an experience that reflects the realities of play that should be informing their character creation choices.

For example, in a game where understanding the skill system is critical for character creation and evaluating character effectiveness (RuneQuest 6), I have run an "obstacle course" session where they made characters and then played through an in-setting coming-of-age trial that involved a lot of skill use (but no combat or risk of death). By the end, players had a visceral understanding of what was and wasn't a good skill rating — one player initially thought that 35% was a good skill and spread their points around to hit that number in as many skills as possible, and came out of the demo realising that she'd underestimated that by half and that choosing a few core skills to maximise first, before spreading the other points around, was key. They all also profited from the crash course in the cultural context they'd later be playing in.

In another game where the interplay of character creation choices and combat is a big deal (Savage Worlds), I had them make one-off characters and then threw them into a dungeon that I knew well enough to run on-the-fly. They had the freedom to go where they wished and test their characters in a variety of non-combat and combat situations. As a result, they got a good sense of how the game functions overall and in its combat, magic, opposed skill, and healing subsystems in a very short time, and were confident making characters for the longer-scale fantasy campaign we later kicked off. Notably, when we started that campaign we had a new player, who had a much harder time creating her character than the ones who had the demo session initiation.

In both these examples, taking the time to give the group early hands-on experience with characters and the system meant that the players were confident and quick in future character creation for the real game. The difference was like night and day: where before they were lost and stumbling through the options, afterwards they were focused and dove into the chargen process with clear goals in mind.

Go ahead and make the characters for your overwhelmed players

It's been my experience that about a third of players are far more interested in interacting with the setting (often with sword in hand) than building the character. While both are part of the game, some folks really do want to hurry to the former and find the latter boring. Those players are grateful when given the chance to play a competent character with interesting options.

And in a system as vast as Pathfinder only a heartless DM says to such a reluctant character-builder, "Make a level 3 character." So much baggage comes with that sentence! Race and racial traits, class and archetypes and favored class benefits, traits, feats, skills, equipment, spells, pets... that's a huge undertaking, slathered in jargon.

So don't say that.

First, get non-mechanical feedback from the player in the form of expectations for the character: hit things with sword, light things on fire with powers of the mind, sneak around and stab people in the back, whatever. Alternatively or in addition, ask for a fictional character as a reference: Link, Wolverine, Tyrion Lannister, Han Solo, whatever.

Second, build such a character as best you can within the system's limits.

Third, explain in person (if possible) the differences between the player's expectations or the fictional character and the actual character the player's going to play. Also explain that, after playing the character you built for a session or two, the player can make any (legal) changes he wants to make to it or make his own character from scratch.

Fourth, play the game! When you've such players, they really don't want to spend a whole session making characters and chatting about the game. They want to play the game. You owe it to them to at least get the adventure started, or else they'll feel their time was wasted.

It's not bad to make someone else's character, and it's especially not bad to make a new player's character. While a veteran role-playing game gearhead may balk, the player who wants to play now will thank you, especially if the character lives up to his previously expressed expectations.