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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7358630" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Of the 15 things you listed, only 4 of them are made after character creation. 5 if you want to count replacing your starting equipment, but that’s not really a choice. You just use the best equipment available that you can afford. Even at character creation, it’s hardly a choice, as it’s almost entirely determined by Class and Background.&nbsp; Alignment, personality, and religious beliefs have absolutely no mechanical impact on gameplay. Skill selection only affect success probabilities and do nothing to impact how a character actually plays. Ability scores primarily affect success probabilities but do have some other game play impact. However, for the most part it’s not really a choice; there are mathematically superior and inferior options, which means most “options” are just traps. Background is just a package of Proficiencies, which again, only affect success probabilities.So what we’re left with in terms of choices that actually affect how your character functions is race and subrace (really one decision made at character creation that ultimately has fairly minor gameplay impact), Class (made once at character creation), Subclass (made once either at character creation or at 2nd or 3rd level), fighting style, some Class-based choices like Maneuvers, and multi-classing. Essentially, the vast majority of character differentiation comes at first level and comes from Class. Once you’ve decided to be a dwarf fighter, and maybe chosen what weapons you want to use, most of your choices have either already been made, or are really just math problems pretending to be choices. If you want to make your character actually functionally different than any other dwarf fighter, you have a very small number of opportunities to make choices that will allow you to do so.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7358630, member: 6779196"] Of the 15 things you listed, only 4 of them are made after character creation. 5 if you want to count replacing your starting equipment, but that’s not really a choice. You just use the best equipment available that you can afford. Even at character creation, it’s hardly a choice, as it’s almost entirely determined by Class and Background. Alignment, personality, and religious beliefs have absolutely no mechanical impact on gameplay. Skill selection only affect success probabilities and do nothing to impact how a character actually plays. Ability scores primarily affect success probabilities but do have some other game play impact. However, for the most part it’s not really a choice; there are mathematically superior and inferior options, which means most “options” are just traps. Background is just a package of Proficiencies, which again, only affect success probabilities. So what we’re left with in terms of choices that actually affect how your character functions is race and subrace (really one decision made at character creation that ultimately has fairly minor gameplay impact), Class (made once at character creation), Subclass (made once either at character creation or at 2nd or 3rd level), fighting style, some Class-based choices like Maneuvers, and multi-classing. Essentially, the vast majority of character differentiation comes at first level and comes from Class. Once you’ve decided to be a dwarf fighter, and maybe chosen what weapons you want to use, most of your choices have either already been made, or are really just math problems pretending to be choices. If you want to make your character actually functionally different than any other dwarf fighter, you have a very small number of opportunities to make choices that will allow you to do so. [/QUOTE]

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