It’s great that 5e has the basic rules for character creation available for free. As I understand it, the free PDF will be expanded to include more rules.

I paged through the PDF on my laptop at work and two things struck me:

1. The print over a shaded background was a little hard to read. I think that they should have had input from player’s with “older” eyes, or less than “perfect” eyes give some input.
   I confirmed on my monitor at home that it is better, but still hard on the eyes. I am hoping my tablet is better.
   While it may look “cool” if it is harder to read, it will make it harder to comprehend. Am I the only almost 50 year old (in September) player with this issue?
2. I need more time to read and digest rather than flip through, but the character generation process seems  complex. It give a point buy option for speediest generation. But there are still lots of other options. I think it will be less confusing when I have time to read it.

The experience progression for all classes appears to be the same for all classes. I read on another site that gold doesn’t count for x.p. It still seemed way too easy to level up. It also topped out at level 20, I did not see if beyond level 20 is possible. Ability scores top out at 30.

There are not as many spells as in 1e, and they call a lot of 1st level spells in 1e are now cantrips. Both clerics and wizards have 9 spell levels. There are a few new and some re-named spells. There are a few different things about spell casting and magic, but I did not completely follow with a skim.

There is the taking a level in different classes for multi-classing. I believe I read that that was a 3e thing.

I did see glimpses of a few things that I can at least adapt to my campaign, but I want to read it before I elaborate.

There may be some aspects of this that I can see using as it’s own game, but character generation was not clear to me from the play test materials what I now have in this PDF. I did not keep up with the play test, but have the final bundle and created a character for a D&D Next Roll 20 game. It took forever to figure out how to generate a character, and I missed out on understanding some things.

I was without power from about 2 AM Monday until sometime Wednesday afternoon due to a big storm. I am behind on household chores, so I’m not sure when I will get to read it.