D&D 5E Character creation night

[GMforPowergamers]

Random barely-considered thoughts...

Interesting mix of PCs. Multiclass druid aside, they seem like a good fit for an urban swords & sorcery style campaign. Their collective hit points are on the low side for the published adventures we've seen so far. PCs are going to drop frequently if they go the dungeon-delving route.

she wants wild shape and some spells but is going mostly wizard...

 

[Li Shenron]

it was all generating there stats writing there abilities and picking spells...

Ok!

Well one thing I've been thinking about for 5e, is that IMHO it should be possible to at least avoid writing all the stuff on the character sheet at once.

I understand that this is not for everyone, and in fact when I started a thread about "de-cluttering your character sheet" a few months ago, I met a lot of criticism...

Anyway in a nutshell, my idea was to create a very light character sheet that focuses on lists of what you are proficient in and then avoid pre-calc the numbers (rather than the more traditional lists of "everything that your character can even try" with pre-calculated scores), and defer the calculations to only when needed during the game, leveraging on the fact that in 5e there is only ONE number to represent ALL your proficiencies at your current level.

So for example, instead of having a list of 20 skills with numbers ready-to-use, just list on the character sheet the 4 skills you have proficiency with. Then when you use the skill, check the only 2 numbers you need to know: the relevant ability score and the current proficiency bonus. [note that in my case I want to treat skills like they were suggested at some point in the playtest, so that an Athletic check is not always Strength-based but can in fact be based on any ability score, so this means that even a completely pre-calc'ed list isn't always useful since it doesn't cover the other combinations]

You can save a lot of prep time if you go this way of not pre-calculating attacks, skills, saving throws, initiative... It will slow down gameplay, but my idea is that all the time spent preparing something that you don't know it's going to be used, is potentially wasted time. Only when it's used it becomes useful. But then, how about deferring those calculations to the first time you need them? As soon as you need a Wisdom saving throw or an attack with a sling or a Dex(Stealth) check, you can record it down on the character sheet and then it'll be there always available.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Calculating numbers isn't the bottleneck. It's that each player has to copy a list of abilities out of a book, and only one can do it at a time.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Calculating numbers isn't the bottleneck. It's that each player has to copy a list of abilities out of a book, and only one can do it at a time.

yea, pluse chooseing backgrounds, pluse choosieng every thing else, and at most 3 of the 5 of them could be working at a time

 

[Prism]

Something I have found with skills in 5e is that trying something you aren't training in is still well worth doing. We've got fighter sneaking, druids climbing, everyone noticing stuff with perception. The DC's are spot on to allow everyone to have a go whereas in the last couple of editions I felt you would often not try something if untrained as the DC's got a bit high too quickly. We messed up a few 4e skill challenges that way.

The 5e skill list seems just right to me. If you need trained skills more specific I guess you could break each into 2-3 parts quite easily and then triple the skills known

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I got an email back from the fighter player, he didn't realize fighters got a second attack at 5th level...I don't know how he missed it but it does make him on par with the rogue damage... that makes us all feel much better