D&D 5E Late Stage 5e Characters... Do they differ greatly from early 5e characters?

[BookTenTiger]

We are entering the twilight years of original 5e. It's made me reflect on what it was like at the beginning, the excitement of trying out these new classes, finding interesting combinations, recognizing great or poor designs...

Over time more options have been added, and older options have been analyzed to death, undeath, and death again. I'm curious if that has changed character-build choices at your table.

Have you found that characters have changed over the course of 5e? Are the characters being made now at your table much different than the ones made at the beginning of 5e (or whenever you first started playing)? Or are they more or less the same?

 

[Rabbitbait]

Characters have gotten weirder and weirder over time. I have taken to allowing characters an extra feat at first level - just to add something a little unique every time.

That said, we are starting the new Phandelver campaign next week and it sounds like we all want to play classic archetypes. We are going to do our first ever session zero and roll up characters together. That's a first after 40+ years of gaming.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Characters have gotten weirder and weirder over time. I have taken to allowing characters an extra feat at first level - just to add something a little unique every time.

That said, we are starting the new Phandelver campaign next week and it sounds like we all want to play classic archetypes. We are going to do our first ever session zero and roll up characters together. That's a first after 40+ years of gaming.

I remember this happening with our long-running 4e game. The first characters, who were around for a multi-years-long campaign, were pretty classic: a dwarf paladin, a human sword-and-board fighter, a human ranger, a halfling wizard... the only oddity was a genasi (I forget the class).

Then we did a little one-shot in which we were supposed to be playing as members of a guild of city guards, and the characters were a swampy swarm druid, a vampire, a flesh golem, and a psychopathic character who could turn into a dragon. It's like we were all rebelling against the normcore characters we'd been playing for so long!

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Personally, I still tend to stick to the core basics. I made an artificer once, but that's about it. But looking at my tables and the people I've played with at cons, I suspect I'm in the minority there. Lots of people with wild multi-classes, non-core races and subclasses.

 

[Clint_L]

Hmmm...I went back and looked over the party composition for my beginner groups at school from the past four years, and I'm not seeing a ton of changes. Still more humans than anything else, and then elves.

The biggest thing I noticed is that since they've been available, artificers have been surprisingly popular in my campaigns. And paladins weirdly unpopular, especially given their reputation as a very strong class.

 

[aco175]

My group feels about the same. Mostly PHB races and basic classes. I do not recall seeing an warlock, sorcerer, and maybe only one paladin and one ranger from a variant 3pp. One player has played a variant class the last couple campaigns with a witch and something else.

 

[Raith5]

I have not seen much change in races and classes overtime at my table. But I played a Paladin early on and more recently for Dragonlance with the Knight Solamnia subclass. It was a significant increase in power for an already powerful class. But the monsters also seemed much tougher, so I think it has been a good development and better experience than early campaigns.

 

[Blue]

The last few campaigns that I've played in have all been in settings with books, so they had their own rules, player options that weren't available elsewhere and were encouraged both by the DM to match the setting and by the fact that we wouldn't get to play them in a later campaign. So a Ravnica campaign, a Theros campaign, a Strixhaven campaign were all significantly different than "early 5e", but that was because the flip side of encouraging us to use the setting options was disincentive to use the non-setting options, which happens to line up with what was available early 5e.

I'm in one "kitchen sink" game, and with four players we have a mixture. An Giant Foundling (Bigby's) Aasimar (MotM) Barbarian [Totem (PHB)] is an example character. More options available, so more used.

That said, the underlying math still holds up. Characters that were good before are still good now, though there's been a bit of power creep. Some of the poor options have gotten fixes, either indirectly (Warlock's Pact of the Blade works much better with Hexblade Patron) or directly (Ranger's rules updates and then replacements in Tasha's) to make what we played back then and discarded come back into vogue to play.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I've still not had anyone play a Dragonborn.

 

[Ancalagon]

Well, here is some data from my own experience:

gnome ranger
Goblin warlock
Dwarven alchemist
Human barbarian (a wandering holy man)
Human rogue (thief)
Human hexblade/fighter
Human dex melee fighter (battlemaster)
half elf hexblade
Elf Monk kensei (the elfiest elf I could make)
Human dex fighter (first psi warrior, reborn as rune knight but still dex), a scholar
Autognome warlock (fathomless pack of the chain, a space probe)
Goblin Apothercary (3rd party class from drakkenheim, a jekyl and hyde type)
Human abjurer

So... personally... not really? Maybe a little bit?