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...