This is a general guideline of how I make my characters personally, they are mostly 3.5/pathfinder guidelines as i'm personally not playing 4.0 however they should give you the general idea at least. 1)Concept of character, in your case half-elf paladin which is a start at least. 2)Roll stats, this will differ from campaign to campaign. Some people go for a buy system, some people only allow rolling depending on difficulty and type of DM. Making a concept on a buy however is generally a good idea so you can just adjust scores if the dm would prefer you to roll. Personally i do this by using the pathfinder table with 20 point buy as most of the time it'd be a temporary buy anyway as i mentioned beforehand, each dm has their own houserules. 3)Fill in the obvious things. This would be HP, basic attack, saves,languages,speeds,action points,proficiancys and the like based on class/race/level(i'd recommend just starting at level 1 and adjusting if needed). 4)Fill in skills and be aware of what every skill would be used for in order to make you decision to avoid taking things that would not be too usefull. What is your characters strength and focus on those more so then trying to be able to do everything. Generally speaking social skills due to their high charisma scores are a good bet where as stealthing & thieving is generally frowned upon due to armor penaltys and such. 5)Choose a feat. There are hundreds of feats in d&d and this is going to be the stepping stone of where you want your character to excel at. Usually keeping in mind future feats in mind for prerequisites is rough for beginning players but make an effort. 6)Look through your spells(and due to 4.0 combat abilitys) if any(diety/alignment aswell in paladins case), decide on which you'd like to use for a first session based on how YOU want to play him and a general guideline would be... How will i make this usefull in a group, the more options you can think of the better.Healing spells such as lay on hands are generally also usefull and sought after in campaigns 7)Equipment; Start with requirements for your class meaning anything you require to cast spells and skill toolkits that you'd require for your chosen skills. Move on to weapons/armor based on your proficiancy and then get things you think will be usefull.(general idea of usefull things are; Anything you'd require to sleep/eat while on adventures is a good start, add a light source and finish off with other things you think are usefull. You can end with things you'd like for roleplaying purposess. A pipe with tobaco or a deck of cards would be a prime examples of something for roleplay purposes as it doesn't offer anything to surviving and adventuring besides something to do while nothing is going on. If you have leftovers, don't forget to add them to your gold. Finish of with making a background. Most people will have an idea in their heads for roleplay elements when making their character iniitally. A general idea in the form of a brief explanation of what you've gone through before joining up with the party is what your looking for,(almost) no dm wants a 10 page essay on everything you could've potentially gone through. Go through everything again, looking if you didn't forget anything or have conflicting problems in your character. (While i wasn't a completely new player with regards to roleplaying)I found my first campaign on roll20 by linking a character i had made in advance that had the full information that would fit her campaign idea to a degree. It showed her that i had an idea ready to go for her campaign and had plenty of creativity for roleplaying purposes due to my background. In the end i had to redo a few things such as starting equipment because it was too basic for her needs and my abilitys were to low(thus adjusting a lot of my characters skills and such) but that was roughly it.
