Builder is on the right track, but it has some rough edges

I like the general workflow for the character builder. Going through the steps as it’s implemented makes sense, and it feels understandable and approachable. There are a few rough edges which could be improved to make what’s there even better, but overall I like where it’s going. I see several threads where people are sharing similar impressions, so I’m sure some of my points have been shared by others already.

  • The box containing the builder is poorly sized and positioned. It takes up a very small portion of the page, and some of the bottom is cut off.
  • A huge amount of screen real estate is taken up by the demiplane menu bar, the pathfinder nexus menu bar, then the character name and ability scores. I would rather have more space dedicated to the character builder.
  • List my ancestry and class alongside the name and ability scores. “Bradam Adford, level 1dwarf fighter”
  • When selecting things, the little while X icon at the upper right corner can be easy to miss since the rest of the buttons are blue or orange. A more obvious button would be helpful.
  • Add an indicator of how much is left to be done on the current selection. When selecting skills, I quickly lost track of how many selections I needed to make. Something like “Select 3 more Trained skills”
  • It’s not obvious that I can remake choices, such as ability boosts from my ancestry. Clicking the option didn’t work the first few times, so I honestly thought I was locked into my initial choice.
  • Consider consolidating the ability boost decisions to a single page, or having a separate page where I can see and reconsider those choices. Example: A table could show a column for ancestry, key ability score, background, and free ability boosts at level 1/5/10/20, and allow me to select/unselect options in each column and show me the final total. This removes the need to click all over the place to fine-tune my ability scores.
  • The performance of the builder got slower and slower as I moved through. The more things I selected, the worse it got.
  • When I return to the “background” step, the title says “Character Creation” instead of the title of my background.
  • There are no fields to track my current gold

Hello, and thanks for posting your thoughts.

Excellent - that impressional feedback is what we are looking for at this stage in the Closed Alpha. It’s good to continue to hear that the overall feel and approach are on track. Now that we’re getting that validation, we can move forward to the next stages of development with confidence that we’re heading in the right direction.

Yes, there are many rough edges right now. I’ve discussed several of those in a couple of key posts here in the forums:

https://forums.demiplane.com/t/the-pathfinder-nexus-character-tools-closed-alpha-has-begun/1014/10
https://forums.demiplane.com/t/update-notes-12-9-2022-one-day-later/1042/8

The TL;DR for those posts is “Many things are not in place, polished, or working properly yet, but you will iteratively see all those gaps be filled in as we progress with Closed Alpha to the big milestone of the public Open Beta.”

Taking a quick glance at your list, I can confirm that we will be addressing all of the concepts you mention there, so those will be coming.

The Open Beta is the major inflection point for us where the character tools will be in a place where they support most any type of character, are polished to our high standard of quality, and ready for the masses to unleash their heroes!

Thanks again!

Fantastic! I’m really excited to see this as it progresses.