@skipdouglas: you did not specify which base model you own. Poser does come with some legacy models. Explore those first before investing money into models which may not suit your needs. DAZ still offer the older generation 4 models like Victoria 4 and Michael 4. Given your lack of expertise, I would stay away from the Genesis models entirely until you've gained some experience with the software and manipulating models. There are other sites that offer different base models, and some for free. Your reference to characters pertain to specific morphs created to change the base model to something else entirely different. But for those to work correctly, you must have the base model and, perhaps, additional morph packages.