Quote Originally Posted by Stubbazubba View Post
However, when it comes down to it, I disapprove of the breadth and depth of the character creation mini-game in 3.5. It is the single biggest turn-off to new players, it is so much more determinant of how well you do than what you do while playing that it makes in-game decisions relatively meaningless, and fixing it so it maintains its robustness while addressing the former two is nigh impossible.
However, I will not play a game if I don't get to make interesting decisions when creating my character. Heck, as a player who plays mostly in unfortunately unreliable online games, I've probably spent more time making characters than actually playing them. Which is sad, but that's how it is.

With that said, I like the "character creation minigame." Give me stuff to choose, stuff that matters, and stuff that isn't "you get a +1 to a skill of your choice at level 2." To this end, I think there are some goals DnD Next should focus on:

  1. Keep build options light "fighting styles" and "specializations" in the game. These prepackaged options work as shortcuts for players who don't care about the "character creation minigame." Make them the default, even.
  2. However, also include an option for someone to make interesting choices every single level. Nothing turned me off from 3.5 quite so much as dead levels, because in a slow-moving game, it really irritated me that I would finally gain a level and have nothing to show for it other than my numbers increasing a bit. 4th edition did a very good thing by removing dead levels from (almost) all classes. Leveling up should be a major event, in my eyes.
  3. Balance is already being discussed to death so I'll just say in short that there should be a good level of balance, at least on the level of 4th edition. Moving to something else would be a step backwards. Balance does not innately mean homogeneity, unless you have perfect balance which is impossible anyway for a game like DnD (and thus there is no point in discussing it).
  4. Don't restrict the "interesting choices" to a handful of classes. I want my fighter with no dead levels. I don't want to be told "if you want to make interesting choices every level, play a wizard." I won't accept that.


I don't see these things as particularly difficult to do or too much to ask for. As I've seen it, they've already proven they can do it. If they move backwards by not doing it, then I don't see a point in purchasing the game.