Last night I sat down with the PHB and decided to create a character and advance the character to 20th level, just to get a sense of the process. I realize that the advancement is sort of arbitrary given that such would occur over time and the choices made would likely be in response to the campaign -- playstyle, events in game and other players' choices. That said, It was an interesting exercise and I encourage everyone to do it -- in this thread even!
I chose to create a Human Fighter using the standard array of ability scores. Before I got into the meat of creating the character, though, I decided to choose a background first and randomly roll personality traits, ideal, bond and flaw. I really think Background should be the second character generation step after Race and there should be a random table for background, with different races having different probabilities of certain backgrounds. (I'll do this myself for my blog once I get a chance.) Anyway, I decided on Guild Artisan who wants to know how things work and what makes people tick, who puts people above ideals, and who would kill to get a noble title. Interestingly, I had originally decided he would be a carpenter, but after I randomly rolled a bond indicating that I had created something so great the original person who commissioned it was not worthy of it, and then rolled a trinket of a gold colored whistle, I decided to switch it to woodcarving and decided the whistle was in fact the object for whom he was now searching a worthy owner. This is just a small example of why I think random elements in character generation and background are important: they don't supplant creativity, they inspire it.
Anyway, from there I got into the rest of character generation. (In my head I decided that after the character fled with his whistle he eventually hooked up with mercenaries that taught him how to fight and after a time struck out on his own with the war gear he had managed to procure in his short mercenary career). I chose Dueling (sword and board) as my combat style and picked the alternate human traits, grabbing the Durable feat and the survival skill as bonuses. From there was a matter of picking heavy armor , weapon and shield, and so on, applying the effects of the Background and then off to the races. ALl in all, initial character generation took all of 30 minutes, even with spending a bit trying to decide between Backgrounds and thinking about Archetype. I think it would have taken a little longer if I had decided to roll gold and go shopping (a process I have always loathed) or I had chosen to create a caster and had to choose spells.
After that, I leveled the character one level at a time to 20th. The first thing I realized is that the game is designed to basically ask you to make one choice (if any) when you level, rather than the ton of choices in 3.x or Pathfinder. The hardest choices I made were whether to do stat increases or choose feats. I ended up choosing a lot of feats (Resilient for Wisdom saves, Great Weapon Mastery and Heavy Armor Mastery) but I think actual play would inform on those choices a lot -- if stats seemed too low to "keep up" I might have chosen to pump up the character's strength to 20 as soon as possible, for example. The only really big choice was Archetype, and frankly I chose Champion because if I were to actually play the character, I personally prefer fewer mechanical fiddly bits.
One thing that I found really interesting was that (without consideration for magic) my best attack was +10 to hit and 1d8+6 damage (+5/1d8+16 if suing the "power attack" in GWM) and my AC was only 19, which are very low in comparison to 3E and somewhere in the range of what I would expect from 2E, except that hit points were still bordering on 200. I'm not really into worrying about math for such things -- I just find the comparisons to previous editions interesting and wonder how it will turn out at the table.
Overall, it is a pretty painless process. I think I will create a spell caster of some sort next just to see how different the experience is.
I chose to create a Human Fighter using the standard array of ability scores. Before I got into the meat of creating the character, though, I decided to choose a background first and randomly roll personality traits, ideal, bond and flaw. I really think Background should be the second character generation step after Race and there should be a random table for background, with different races having different probabilities of certain backgrounds. (I'll do this myself for my blog once I get a chance.) Anyway, I decided on Guild Artisan who wants to know how things work and what makes people tick, who puts people above ideals, and who would kill to get a noble title. Interestingly, I had originally decided he would be a carpenter, but after I randomly rolled a bond indicating that I had created something so great the original person who commissioned it was not worthy of it, and then rolled a trinket of a gold colored whistle, I decided to switch it to woodcarving and decided the whistle was in fact the object for whom he was now searching a worthy owner. This is just a small example of why I think random elements in character generation and background are important: they don't supplant creativity, they inspire it.
Anyway, from there I got into the rest of character generation. (In my head I decided that after the character fled with his whistle he eventually hooked up with mercenaries that taught him how to fight and after a time struck out on his own with the war gear he had managed to procure in his short mercenary career). I chose Dueling (sword and board) as my combat style and picked the alternate human traits, grabbing the Durable feat and the survival skill as bonuses. From there was a matter of picking heavy armor , weapon and shield, and so on, applying the effects of the Background and then off to the races. ALl in all, initial character generation took all of 30 minutes, even with spending a bit trying to decide between Backgrounds and thinking about Archetype. I think it would have taken a little longer if I had decided to roll gold and go shopping (a process I have always loathed) or I had chosen to create a caster and had to choose spells.
After that, I leveled the character one level at a time to 20th. The first thing I realized is that the game is designed to basically ask you to make one choice (if any) when you level, rather than the ton of choices in 3.x or Pathfinder. The hardest choices I made were whether to do stat increases or choose feats. I ended up choosing a lot of feats (Resilient for Wisdom saves, Great Weapon Mastery and Heavy Armor Mastery) but I think actual play would inform on those choices a lot -- if stats seemed too low to "keep up" I might have chosen to pump up the character's strength to 20 as soon as possible, for example. The only really big choice was Archetype, and frankly I chose Champion because if I were to actually play the character, I personally prefer fewer mechanical fiddly bits.
One thing that I found really interesting was that (without consideration for magic) my best attack was +10 to hit and 1d8+6 damage (+5/1d8+16 if suing the "power attack" in GWM) and my AC was only 19, which are very low in comparison to 3E and somewhere in the range of what I would expect from 2E, except that hit points were still bordering on 200. I'm not really into worrying about math for such things -- I just find the comparisons to previous editions interesting and wonder how it will turn out at the table.
Overall, it is a pretty painless process. I think I will create a spell caster of some sort next just to see how different the experience is.
