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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GQuail" data-source="post: 4516272" data-attributes="member: 30709">The Rouse has been saying, however, that the Character Generator will be free for levels 1-3: so it's not exactly a money grab.  If beginners want to dabble in character generation then there's a free option for them before they get their hands on a PHB: however, it's debatable how they'd know to do such a thing without the starter set telling them to.  (And that's ignoring your comments about system requirements, which are a more DDI specific complaint that I'll leave for anotehr thread)Back to the more core topic at hand: Everyone hoping for a product exactly like the old Red Box is perhaps forgetting that the whole reason they dropped the BD&D line was the market fragmentation that occured from having it and AD&D alongside each other - in a similar vein, notice that Wizards also no longer make a dedicated beginner Magic set in Portal, instead packaging up their "real" product in a beginner friendly package.  Furthermore, to the people asking for an "all-heroic tier" product.... well, as someone else said, that's a huge amount of words, since heroic-tier is the one with the most material on it.  The scale people are asking for, especially at a beginner-friendly price point, is just unfeasable.Now, I do agree that some sort of character generation is a pretty key RPG trick, and think the 3.5 black dragon box set is all the better for having it in a limited form.  Then again, I bought a copy of that box for a little cousin for his, um, 14th birthday, and it was a hit with him and his little siblings, and they were keen to play again and happy when I bought him a PHB proper for Christmas, they never made their own characters with the boxed set.A starter set for D&D should certainly have pre-generated characters and possibly a link to a website where there could be more pre-generated characters available to give it a quicker start-up time.  Having some sort of optional rule for character creation in the back would seem a good idea to me, so there's a middle ground between "newbie playing game for first time" and "time to buy my PHB", but I dunno how much of that would really be appreciated by the target 10 to 12 market.At the risk of invoking e-tools, what if the game also came with a CD that contained PDFs to print of all the character sheets, monster stats etc, and a little tool to design your own 1st level characters from a limited palette?  There's still a cost issue in designing that, but if you already have a DDI tool on the way, it's a pretty trivial addition - and even without a character generator, being able to print out rather than have to tear or photocopy the sheets seems a pretty key thing that a modern gamer would expect.</blockquote>

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