Player Records

I love d20.
I love the "old school revolution".
I love d6.
I love Savage Worlds.

I don't really believe 'system' has anything to do with fun at the table. Well, not as much as some people believe it does anyway.

I've bemoaned the parts of RPGs that I don't like. I hate feats, I hate goofy system mechanics, I hate easily broken mechanics, I hate confusing subsystems. But, I've noticed something about my problems with systems.

The parts that erk me and cause problems at the table come in 2 flavors.
The first is badly designed mechanics. (3.0 grappling is the go-to example) That's usually an easy house-rule fix.

The second is character creation. This is the big one that I find commonly problematic in most systems.

d20 is a particularly bad offender. My belief is that character creation should take a 1st time player no more than say, 15 minutes to be up and ready to go with at least a marginal idea of what they can do well.

if only it was this easy

Now, that's not just me being lazy. I have several good reasons to want (very) easy character creation.

1. Character Creation needs to be fun, but quick because it rarely stays fun very long.

3e character creation is just too complex. If you don't do a few things right, right from the start, and plan things out well, you will not be getting into that prestige class later on. (we'll talk about advancement in a minute).  4e character creation is just...it's just horrid. It's everything 3e was but with more searching through pages and pages of unrelenting crap for that one good power. God forbid having to learn the dozens of powers.

Elf paladin.

2. If character creation is not fun, or takes a long time, the death (or even injury) of the character in-game is hard to swallow.

You ask the player to put time and energy into a character. Then, you kill them.

why did I play a bard!?

I'm not saying a GM should not kill and maim characters. Quite the contrary. The problem is that the investment to make the character is so high that losing the character is a hard pill to swallow and some players have a hard time dealing with that. If the GM decides to not kill characters (or allow them to die) then the player may lose interest in the same way that 'god mode' is only fun for a while.

3. The more complex character creation is, the more complex character advancement is.

This means that every few sessions, you get the joy of redoing the same kind of stuff you did during character creation. While gaining new powers is cool, if you gain too much from too many sources (race, class, level, prestige class, etc.) then it gets to be a lot of bookkeeping.

Thanks to the interaction of my character's race, class, and feat selection, my taxes will rock this year.

I could go on, but my point is that the player's end of the rules (especially character creation) needs to be relatively simple. 4e did a great job of making the GMs job easy, but made the player's side of things a bit nightmarish.

My goal in the future is to make sure whatever system I use requires very little in the way of character creation. I want the bookkeeping and such to me almost invisible and automatic. Not without options, but a careful balance between options and over-complication.