TwoSix
Everyone's literal second-favorite poster
Now you're just bringing up painful nostalgia. I miss you, CoH!I used to say the same thing about City of Heroes/Villains.
Now you're just bringing up painful nostalgia. I miss you, CoH!I used to say the same thing about City of Heroes/Villains.
The problem with character generation in 5e is that I can make hundreds of slight variations for almost any character concept. Most of those variations are point buy related. Point buy makes character creation crawl to a stand still. Allowing feats and multiclassing forces a player that wants to optimize any to make decisions up front on whether he’s going multiclass and when etc. Feats also factor in here as well.
Eliminate those 3 things and character creation goes “fast”. Using standard array makes it a magnitude of speed even faster as most decision points get removed. Using rolled stats is going to be even faster as virtually all decision points get removed.
Using the standard array and the "default" equipment given for each class and background, you can make a 5e level 1 character in approximately 10 minutes. I can't think of getting any faster while still maintaining a sense of meaningful choice about your character. For some, the existing character options, even including multiclassing and feats, are still too small. Personally, I'd really love to see a good optional skill system that allowed a bit more tweaking of numbers, or even more mechanical options for what you can do with a trained skill.
And what’s with all this “point buy slows character creation to a crawl” nonsense? Point buy is incredibly fast and easy. Put a 14 or 15 in your prime requisite ability (depending on if it gets +2 or +1 from your race), put 12, 13, or 14 in your secondary ability (depending on if it gets +2, +1, or +0 from your race), put an 8 in your least important ability, and put a 12 and a 10 in the other two. Boom, done, point buy over. Hell of a lot better than rolling 4d6, finding the lowest, adding up the other three, writing down that number, repeating the process 5 more times, pottentially repeating the whole process several more times until you get a set of numbers that doesn’t suck, and THEN deciding what abilities to put each of those scores in (or what Race and Class to play, if you do them in order). Standard array is faster than either, if you don’t mind ending up with some odd-numbered ability scores. And all three methods could be sped up significantly by ditching the vestigial score/mod split.
Ok. Here are 3 arrays.Rolling is fast. Decision points are slow.
Removing all decision points from character creation would certainly make character creation faster, but at the cost of sucking all the fun out of it. Decision points are what the game is all about. Imagining yourself as another person and/or in a fictional situation and making decisions as you imagine you or that person would in that situation is the definition of roleplaying. All parts of the game should facilitate roleplaying (which is to say decision making), and character creation is part of the game.
Ok. Here are 3 arrays.
All 10s.
All 12s
All 14s
No decisions.