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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 6780039" data-attributes="member: 6669384">My group is contemplating a switch.  We may run a small adventure.To that end I've been reading through the PHB with an eye towards creating a character.<Tangent>I once wrote a super hero game.  I thought it was complete and well written.  My girlfriend (now my wife) was, among other things, a proofreader, and she offered to give it a read.  I was confident in my work, so I gave her a copy.She looked over the first section and announced, "This is terrible!".  I was in shock and denial, my pride wounded deeply.  Then she told me what was wrong and I was forced to admit she was right. </Tangent>Applying the lesson of my own game design and review to this book, I can honestly say, it's terrible.My work was overly dense, which the D&D Next PHB doesn't suffer from.  Pretty much every other mistake I made, they matched and exceeded.Terms and concepts are introduced without explanation of what they are (Proficiency Bonus being an example).  Their use gets explained a few hundred pages later, if at all.Layout wise, the page numbers are very hard to read.  Why they print pale tan on off white paper is beyond me.The Index is in 6 point type, which is very small.  I brought a magnifying glass to the game table, and it got borrowed a lot.Tables are pages away from the text that references them, and some things are left flatly undefined.As an example:  Skills have general names, but no place in the PHB does it describe what they cover.  Is Forgery a Deception check or Persuasion?  (And why the ability to copy a seal or handwriting would be based on Charisma instead of INT or DEX is hard to fathom.)  There really isn't another Skill that comes close to covering it, and both of those are a bad fit at best.I've used a character generator (found here in ENWORLD as a matter of fact), and that helps me prepare the sheet, but the book itself seems to be written for someone who already knows the system or the concepts.Note that this is not a critique of the rules themselves, just of the way they're presented.  I'm fairly certain there are skill descriptions in the DMG or some similar book, but it's hard for a player to prepare their character if they have to select their skills while blindfolded.Odd observation:  Some parts of common labor, such as sailors hoisting a yard arm aloft or weighing anchor can't possibly be done under the rules.  50 men together are no stronger than the strongest man there, because all they can do is grant that strongest man advantage on the Strength check.  If he can't do the job on a roll of 20, no number of men pulling that same line will make a difference.  Some tools, such as a battering ram or a windlass might give a bonus to the roll, but again, if the strongest person involved can't do it, everyone elses effort is wasted. I haven't tried the Advantage/Disadvantage system since play test, but functionally it skews the results severely in the case of any difficult task.  During play test, Advantage gave you a +2.  Now it gives you a second roll.  Disadvantage, as I recall, gave you a minus 2.  The rules describe Advantage and Disadvantage situations generally, but give no specifics, which again makes it hard for a player, in both a strategic and tactical sense, to plan anything.I played the system once at a convention, during the play-test period, and it sucked.  I'm told that many of the things I found to be a problem have been corrected in the final version.  I'll try to keep an open mind when we actually sit down to play, but at this point there is a frustration factor that's going to make that rather difficult.</blockquote>

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