1) Character gen isn't as quick as I hoped the 5 players around my table with 3 player hand books and 2 DMGs (Also the first time we had so few books) took almost 3 full hours not counting breaks for food.
I think they brought it upon themselves...
- first game in a new edition
- starting at 5th level
- all races, classes, backgrounds, subclasses from PHB presumably allowed
- multiclassing allowed
- feats allowed
Still 3 whole hours sound definitely too much for me! Did they spend a lot of time optimizing or synchronizing choices? (i.e. thinking about "someone else already has this covered, so let me change it for something else" all the time) Did they cherrypick equipment instead of using packages, did the DM grant more starting money and allowed pre-bought magic items?
Even if sharing 3 PHB in 5 people certainly slowed down things, I wouldn't expect it to take 1.5 hours to create 5-level PCs.
I don't have the PHB yet, but I have the feeling that the books (just like the free PDFs) fail at presenting the material for what it really is:
optional for the most part. You don't have to roll or pick from all those tables in the background descriptions for example, but my guess is that the PHB doesn't tell you clearly, so everybody expects to use everything that isn't clearly labelled as optional.
2) We used pre set stats, and no one was happy in the end with them... I don't know if it is just being used to 3e big numbers, but it seemed weird
My guess is just spoiled players
It should be clear that the importance of stats can be different across editions, you don't know if they are 'right' or 'wrong' until you play the game.
3) Casters everywhere. Well 5 players and 5 people with spells, feels like 3e again in that way (my groups steared away from non casters due to preference of complexitiy and capability).
Indeed 5e has a spellcaster (or at least magical) version for every class. I guess it was done because a lot of gamers like high-magic campaigns.
It's not a particularly good thing that magic implies complexity and neither that being magic-less prevents complexity. I think it was stated explicitly by the designers that they want to make complexity independent from class, at least in the most vague sense, i.e. it should not be so that if you want to play a low-complexity character you must be forced to choose a non-magical one and viceversa. Something has been done about it, but IMHO not much, they kind of stopped there at the Battlemaster vs Champion, and did not keep the same design target in mind for other classes (and definitely ended up with a pretty high baseline complexity to all casters).
4) Small skill list, It felt like a short list of skills (one of my complaints about 4e) and I hope it works better in play.
I don't like short skills list as in the previous 2 editions either. I think too short skills list actually goes against the idea of skills in the first place i.e. differentiation through specialization. The only way around it for me is to consider handling the skills list in a more open-ended way.
5) Combat capability, It seems odd that everyone has so much in the way of HD and bonus to hit, one character was trying to do a support character and ended up with 2nd highest hp, 2nd highest AC, and not the lowest + to hit...and a lot of combat damage potential.
Well I suppose that this was what a lot of people wanted. Everything has to be evaluated vs monster capabilities however.
