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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kevtar" data-source="post: 5852257" data-attributes="member: 27098">My son and I recently conned my wife and daughter into playing D&D. My son wanted to play 1st edition because he wanted to see D&D from my perspective (someone who's played through all the iterations of D&D since 1981). We all sat down together and started making characters, and at that point, we were all playing D&D. Much of the focus of the polls, discussions, articles and playtests have been on the gaming aspect of playing D&D - the actual game session, but I posit that character creation is also "playing D&D" and that it needs to be equally rewarding and fun.I can honestly say I've enjoyed all editions of D&D. Each edition has pros/cons, and while I may have a preference for one edition over another (and that preference is dynamic), I've never played an edition and said, "I hated that" as a whole. There have been variations in some of the key aspects of D&D that affect my preference, and of those in particular is character creation.Our recent return to 1st edition reminded me of the joy (and pain) of rolling attributes. We used the roll 4d6 drop one method and while I ended up with a cleric with an 15, 9, 18, 11, 10, 12 in the first roll, the other members of my family had to re-roll to get stats above 12 and 13 (and that was ok). I compared this to my experiences playing 3.5 and 4e and using point-buy, and I found that I enjoyed using point buy as well - but I feel like there was a distinctive shift in determining and allocating stats in 4e.From my experience, the combination of point buy and 4e class design made the character building process more bland, while rolling attributes made things a little too "swingy." I'm not instigating an edition war here, because I also felt that rolling attributes in earlier editions was far too "swingy." However, that "swinginess" seemed to be an assumed aspect of the game on behalf of the designers and players, so it didn't seem entirely out of place, and if worse came to worst, you could always petition the DM for a re-roll and hope that your next set had something less "swingy." However, in 4e there is something about the class design that strongly suggests point buy, and by extension, there exists a strong suggestion to "optimize" (oh how I hate using that word) your build. We all optimize, but to varying degrees. For me, optimization is using stats to get the character I want. So if I want to play a dumb rogue and I dump an 8 into his Intelligence, I have optimized my concept of a dumb rogue. However, in the sentence above I'm using optimized as a term describing the best set of stats for that character taking into consideration stats and race - and that seems to be the position the designers for 4e hold.So, what I'm saying is I want 5e to accommodate point buy and rolling methods for character creation because character creation is playing D&D. When we think about playing D&D, let's also think about creating characters. If  you do it in a group, think about the discussions/debates that you have with your friends - its fun! When you do it alone, think about the satisfaction of creating just the right character. Those experiences need to be given room in the next iteration of D&D. While having fun and engaging gameplay at the table is important, let's not forget about the gameplay that must take place in order for the "other" gameplay to take place.That said, I'm wondering, how can designers accommodate multiple approaches to character design? or How can designers ensure good game design and/or balance (assuming balance = good game design) without asserting a particular preference or bias to determining and applying stats?Thoughts?</blockquote>

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