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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 5070836" data-attributes="member: 18017">I took a swing at quantifying this shift by <a href="http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/how-many-choices-does-it-take-to-make-a-cleric-in-odd-add-and-4e/" target="_blank">counting how many choices you get during character generation in different D&D editions</a>. Check the comments for some critiques of the method I used, but I think it's not just a generalization to say that making a character in 4E requires you to make many more choices and consider many more options before play begins than OD&D does. I didn't look at 2E or 3E, but it seems clear to me that you could demonstrate a trend of increasing focus on character options with each successive edition.As a player I personally like old-school approaches that restrict my ability to choose what my PC is like, such as "roll 3d6 in order". I will often roll randomly for things like my alignment and gender even when the rules don't require it. I find that it's more interesting for me to play a character that has an individuality that came neither from my habits about what kinds of PC I go for (a rut that I like using the dice to help me break out of) nor the game system putting pressure on PCs to have a certain set of optimal stats. I would not enjoy playing a character with all sub-11 scores in 4E, whereas that could be lots of fun in OD&D. What changes is not my attitude towards my lovable loser PC, but how much the system mechanics would punish my bad die rolls and make playing that PC unrewarding. This pressure means that some of the apparent choice in 4E character creation is false. The social obligation folks here have talked about to choose a character that doesn't suck and bring down everyone else's chances of success means that it's a severe over-estimation to count the range of legitimate choices for the Wisdom score of a cleric as 8-18, as I did in that blog post. A game that's tightly restricted to combat and inflexible in its adjucation of the rules, like the highly enjoyable d20-based CRPG <a href="http://www.heroicfantasygames.com/" target="_blank">Knights of the Chalice</a>, leaves me feeling like the real choice is between optimal party configuration A or B; the environment of the game is rigid enough that you can accurately figure out which is the objectively superior character creation choice out of all the options presented (especially after you've played parts of it a couple of times, like I did!).Note that the ability to have a good time playing an OD&D fighter with a 3 Strength comes from the fact that your ability scores are mechanically meaningless, more or less. This may not be to everyone's taste, but I'm fine with a system in which what matters most is how I imagine my PC, then how my DM imagines the interaction of his ability scores with the scene we're all visualizing, with what the rules have to say being the least important aspect.</blockquote>

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