A couple of other design goals...

Today I made my first 4e character, based on Dirk the Daring from the DragonsLair laserdisc game:

The thing I noticed about 4e is that while the mechanics were a lot smoother, the arrangement of the information was not helping with the process. Making the character and writing it down on a blank piece of notebook paper took an hour and a half. Now that I know the process I will beable to make a character faster.

Thats all to say that while I was doing this I realised two more design goals for Codex:

1. All your character information should fit on an 4.25x5.5 inch piece of paper, front sided.*
2. The only changes that should be made from edition to edition of Codex are text corrections, correction to broken rules logic (ala polymorph in 3.x) and expansions worth adding.

So once we have the rules for Fighters in Codex the method to make a fighter should always be the same, unlike other RPGs where they are significantly different from edition to edition. This is to say that an edition change should not make you have to a) convert your character or b) reimagine your character. The stats with very minor tweaks should just work.

4e does rock on its own merits. One thing I really liked was that if you really wanted, you could have a fighter who is trained in Arcana. Perhaps my next character will be a ranger or fighter or paladin or warlord who hunts necromancers...

*Why such a specific size? Because I have decided that digest format rocks on toast! Everyone remember this:

Yeah, me too! Characters at first level used to fit onto this. On the back of the 1981 Red Box players guide you had one of these there. It was small. You could fold it in half and it contained a whole character. You can fit your character into the first half of this (the second was all money, and gold and equipment and stuff). How cool was that!? More about the digest format later!