Sorry for the Pun in the title, but I really couldn't help myself. I'm continuing on with my work on the D&D Next Playtest and I've come to the next logical step - rolling up characters and running one of the sample dungeons. I like that Wizards gave us several dungeon crawls and even one that seems to be a campaign in itself. This gives a great variety of options to put different parties against to see what they're capable of and where any problems may arise.
Aside from some issues of space on the character sheet, the character creation process is going pretty smoothly. I like the combination of Background traits with Skills if you choose one of the premade selections. I was always a little confused about Backgrounds in 4e. The skill options sometimes were out of place, and it seemed pretty weak to only give skill training or a single +2 bonus to a single skill. It worked out in the end, but it always felt a little off for me.
One thing that came up during character creation confused me a little. Several times throughout the initial rules for D&D Next, a little blurb is mentioned about character ability scores not being allowed to rise above 20. I found this strange since in 3.0e and 3.5e you'd never see a single max level character without at least one ability score in the 40's, and the min-maxers would have some ability scores scratching 50. In 4e you built your character horribly wrong if you didn't have your primary stat to at least 34-36 by the time you hit level 30. So a cap of 20 seems incredibly strange.
Part of me wonders if because of how important ability scores are, and how spread out your character needs to be - Wizards wants to avoid a level 20 character failing an Intelligence Save against a level 2 opponent. Although the other part of me wonders if this is just Wizards's attempt to completely destroy the concept of min-maxing. This primarily came up because I ended up with a Human Cleric who had a starting Wisdom score of 20; which makes it apparently impossible for him to ever get better at spellcasting except for unlocking higher spell levels.
I'm going to look around the forums and see if the question of why a 20 point cap on ability scores has been asked before.
Zach
