5e playtest - The characters

To satisfy my curiosity I signed up for and downloaded the play test packet. That was a royal mess today as about half the continent was trying to download it all at the same time. Seriously, Wizards did a great job of not executing that well.

I play on doing a full-bore play test on Sunday. That will really tell me more about the system and I look forward to it.

In the mean time I wanted to go over the packet and kinda put my thoughts into written words. If, for no other reason, so I can look back and see what I wrote when the game come out and when I inevitably find something about it that just irritates me to the point of avoiding the game.

The packet includes: "How to Play", DM guidelines, Bestiary, "Caves of Chaos", and 5 pre-gen characters. For now I am going to talk about the character sheets.

The Pre-gens are a dwarven cleric (of Moradin), a human cleric (of Pelor), a halfing rogue, high elf wizard, and a dwarven fighter. All kinda predictable. That's not bad though, I would prefer somewhat predictable pre-gens. None of the goofy classes and races or weird combinations. Simple and easy concepts (for now).

The Race/Class/Background/Theme set up is initially neat. Reminds me of "kits" from AD&D.

The layout of the characters is kinda neat. First, the whole character fits comfortably on one or two pages. For me, that's a big deal. My Iron Heroes game character have characters sheets in the 4-5 page length. The further I can get from that nonsense, the happier I am.

Ability scores are the corner stone of the character. That is something I like quite a bit.

The game talks about skills and even lists bonuses to skills on the sheets. However, there is no skill list anywhere. For my understanding, the "skills" are just things you do with your ability scores. I like that. It harkens to some simplified skill systems I used for 3.x.

What has me thrilled out of my damn mind is that I don't see the word "feat" anywhere in any document. This thrills me so much I can barely stand it. If this turns out to be a modern, coherent, version of D&D without feats...I will buy it just to own it.

However, the word "features" is all over the character sheet. I am kinda scared that these background and themes and so forth are just a thinly disguised cover for feats. If they are...well I'm okay with it as long as we don't go back to the days of searching through endless feats for anything worth taking.

Addendum: Yeah. There are feats. I found them under the "Themes" description and the level 3 stuff. I think the Theme is a feat delivery system. If it simplifies the game, swell, if not then it's just another D&D with feats. I really wish Wizco would let that aspect of the game go.