coolAlias
Explorer
Spells definitely slow things down, especially if you aren't very familiar with at least the most common low level ones.I process things very slowly, especially reading over and selecting spells for example.
If you're newer to the game and want to speed up the character generation time, one thing that helps me is getting a stack of 3x5 or 5x7 index cards and transcribing the spells that I end up choosing for my characters.
Not only does it help me remember what they do better next time I'm creating a character, but now I also have a handy spell card to reference during play so I don't have to pull out the old reference book!
