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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 7933534" data-attributes="member: 87792">* - 4e allowed people to take the average on a lot of things and avoid rolling, which to me is abhorrent.</blockquote>I wouldn't have said unusual so much as old school. And you're confusing 4e with 3e there. 3e allowed you to take the average. 5e allows you to take the average rounded up which is just weird. And 4e simply doesn't have rolling when you level up.But I wouldn't expect to level up right then and there with any of the WotC editions. In old school D&D the main things that change are your hit points and which line on attack and saving throw matrix you're on. From 3.0 onwards there have been far more choices. Starting with which class to level up in. Then choosing from the dozens to thousand-and-a-half feats depending how long the edition's existed for and which splatbooks you're using. There's skill point allocation in the 3.X family. There's picking spells if you're a caster in 3.X or 5e. There's picking and possibly swapping a power in 4e.To put it simply levelling up has a lot of choices - and when I've expected to level up in a session I've had my levelled up character sheet printed in advance.I'm not assuming you to do that. I'm expecting you to stick to, from memory B/X where you can. And I have a lot of sympathy; the Rules Cyclopaedia is my second favourite edition after 4e.If a game needs more than a d6 it's more complicated than it needs to be. The question isn't "Can it be simpler" - but "is it more fun/[whatever value] with this extra stuff?"There was a reason 4e encouraged people to share licenses. And I have created characters with pen and paper - it's just irritating. I've even created a character using pen and paper on a bus to a game with no reference books handy and got everything spot-on, but I don't expect people to be able to do that no matter which edition. (Most people might have the attack matrices memorised in old school but certainly don't have the saving throws all down perfectly).Print-outs. Oh and tablets are much easier to carry than laptops. For that matter I've used my phone for character sheets.Prerequisites are to me generally a negative if you are playing a level-based system. Even a non-level based system they tend to produce overheads I don't like with very limited gain. Now synergistic trees are something else (where you can have the two parts without each other but they just work well together).Depends on the always-on ones. I've never forgotten e.g. a Weapon Focus because I write that into my default attack block when I'm levelling up the character. The passive abilities should be part of the final calculation. And I've been known to completely rewrite my character sheet and that for my players to make it much more usable. It's helped a lot in 5e for my two newest players.Edit: To clarify 3.0 came with a character builder on a disk with the PHB from memory - that thing was almost useless. In place of a character builder in 3.5, Pathfinder, and 5e I'm used to seeing pre-calculated spreadsheets in Google Sheets at present. I tend to use Google Docs and roll my own, using it on tablet.Also the one time I played a Summoner in Pathfinder because I'm serious about not slowing up the table I put all the spells and all the summons I'd use into the character sheet. The thing ran to over 30 pages before I was done.[/QUOTE]

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