Barely cracked the game open at the moment, but right off the bat I have a few comments.

Character Greation and Classes
  • Backgrounds and Skills: In 5e Character Creation, your background is specifically noted as the last element you need to fill out to complete Character creation (other than stuff like spells or such). This is because when you select a background any Skill (or Tool) that it would grant you proficiency in that you have already selected (either because it was granted by your race, class or subclass) essentially becomes a free select skill that can be chosen from any skills. This is one of the best elements for character customisation as it allows you to pick up those niche skills that are specific to your perception of your character (maybe your rogue is a runaway wizard's assistant who has been living on the streets, picking up the criminal or urchin background lets you swap stealth (a skill you would have likely picked up from your class) with arcana (to emphasise this element of your background)), at present this isn't possible. I'm not sure if the system would allow it, but shuffling the character creation process to follow that of the source material would greatly increase character variation.
  • Warlock GOO: I'm sure this has been mentioned already by someone, but the Great Old One Warlock (my favourite of the three PHB options) is at present quite inferior to it's Fiendish counterpart. I know that the Awakened Mind telepathy it gets in PnP wouldn't be something that translates into the game, but it does need something to balance against the fiend. Suggestions would include some form of Fearful aura (though that would likely tread on the Fey Pact Warlock's ground), adding 1/2 Charisma to saves vs 'mental effects' (spells targetting Wis,Int and Cha) or (and this would probably take far more work but would thematically match the ability) an out of combat ability to read the 'surface thoughts' of NPCs (basically a 'sense motive'/insight effect).
  • Rogue: Hiding, Disengaging and Dashing have been the rogue's bread and butter since 5e came out. Watering down Cunning Action by allowing everyone to Hide and Disengage as a bonus has made the class very subpar. Additionally, Expertise at 1 & 5 are assumed as a part of the Rogue's balance as a class and with this and the Cunning Action nerf the class as a whole basically falls short of being playable.


Playing the Game
  • Hotbar abilities: Sometimes I have noticed that hotbar abilities don't seem to activate even though they appear to be active, and with the number of new class/race combo's I'm running through to test, it isn't always obvious whether an ability/spell has actually been selected properly or not. Several times I have clicked or double-clicked a spell on the taskbar, noted that it is highlighted and then clicked an enemy, only to have my squishy warlock or wizard dart into melee combat and swipe futiley at the enemy with a dagger. Additionally I have had a small number of abilities seemingly vanish at random from the Hotbar, forcing me to manually add them back in.
  • Jumping: In PnP Jumping is limited by your strength score, you can jump a maximum distance (vertically or horizontally) equal to your strength score, consuming the relevant amount of movement. At present (as far as I can tell) everyone seems to be able to jump the same distance, my Warlock with Str: 8 can jump just as far as Laz'el, which seems weird.
  • Autosaves: Not sure if this is just my system but autosaves (only autosaves not manual saves) seem to slow the game to a crawl, everything stalls out and stutters and on a number of occasions I have assumed it has crashed, only for everything to suddenly 'catch up'. This does not seem to be affected by changing graphic options so I assume it isn't an issue along those lines.


A couple of QOL things I would love to see are:
  • Not a fan of the current dicerolling mechanic, as a number of others have mentioned the Skill Mod + Proficiency should be added to the number rolled, not (as appears to be happening), be deducted from the target number. It's the fundamental D&D 5E mechanic and the current method stops the game feeling like a modern Dungeons and Dragons game, As I understand it (having never played) the "deduct from target number" seems to hark back to AD&D days of THAC0 rather than modern 5E.
  • The ability to see more detail on dice rolls, either as some kind of popup tracker, or appearing in more detail above the target's head.
  • The ability to move the standard location of the various popups i.e. so that looting popups could be dragged to the side of the screen and then from that point on all popup of that type would appear there rather in the middle of the screen, right over the top of the party.


This is what I have at present, but likely add a few more as I get further into playing.