Hot rodder or road tripper?

 There are two basic approaches I've identified to creating tabletop RPG characters, and these approaches inform the entire play style of a game or a group which focuses on either of them. 

The approach that seems most popular these days is the one I call the "hot rodder." Character creation is not just something you do as a prerequisite for playing the game; in many ways, it IS the game. Ability score generation is heavily weighted to produce ideal or near-ideal arrays for your chosen class or type of character. Classes, if they exist at all, are bare-bones templates meant to be heavily customized with subclasses and lists of feats and skills, both at initial creation and at level-ups and between actual game sessions. An inexperienced player could easily wind up with an inferior character by choosing suboptimal skills and skill combinations. The primary challenge for the player is to build the perfect character so he can show off what it can do during the game, much like the hot rod enthusiast spends a lot of time in the garage building the perfect machine to show off on the track or strip. The challenges during the game session itself are geared heavily toward character skill, the player having done most of his or her part before or between adventures. (And perhaps the player would even feel cheated if he were denied the opportunity to roll the dice to use those carefully chosen feats!)

The other approach is more associated with old school-style play, and I think of it as basically analogous to road tripping. Characters are created quickly, maybe even hastily, with randomly generated stats and off-the-rack class options. The player has only a few decisions to make, and customization is mostly limited to equipment selection and the "fluff" of appearance and personality, though even those are sometimes "discovered" in the course of play rather than set in stone at creation. Inexperienced players might take a few minutes longer, but their characters will be as viable as any other. The goal is not to agonize over lists of feats and features, but to hurry up and get out into the game world, to discover and interact with it. The challenge is to take what the dice and the bundle of abilities that came with your character class give you and use them as tools to improvise solutions to problems and/or limitations to work within or to overcome. Decision-making is weighted much more heavily toward actual play, and often ability progression is predetermined by class, so there is no character-building to be done at level-ups either. During the actual adventure, player skill, not character skill, is paramount, in no small part because characters of the same class tend to have the same broad skills, so the difference is all in how you choose to apply them.

So, when you get set to fire up the game engine, are you a hot rodder or a road tripper?